Jason Eppink

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Jason Eppink
Jason Eppink.jpg
Born1983 (age 4041)
Nationality American
Known for Pranks, Performance, and Participatory art

Jason Eppink (born 1983) is an American curator, designer, and prankster. His projects emphasize participation, mischief, surprise, wonder, generosity, transgression, free culture, and anti-consumerism, and they are staged in public spaces and online as street art, urban interventions, and playful online services and hoaxes, frequently for non-consenting audiences.

Contents

Eppink served as Curator of Digital Media at Museum of the Moving Image in New York City from 2006-2018. His work at the museum revolved around participation in a variety of fields, including video games, interactive art, remix, animated GIFs, and online communities. [1] Additionally, Jason Eppink is a senior agent with prank group Improv Everywhere, a member of art collective Flux Factory, and a recurring character (40-Year-Old Goosey) on The Chris Gethard Show.[ citation needed ]

Notable Design/Prank Projects

Pixelator

In 2007, Jason Eppink created a series of boxes from foam core and diffusion gel that he placed over video billboards at the entrances to New York City subway stations, turning advertisements into abstract geometric art. Eppink published a video and diagrams to encourage others to continue and improve on the project. [2] [3]

Astoria Scum River Bridge

In late 2009, frustrated with a sidewalk perpetually covered by residue from a leaking drainage pipe, Jason Eppink and frequent collaborator Posterchild constructed a footbridge from recycled wood and installed it at the site of the leak. The bridge and the press it attracted embarrassed authorities into fixing the decades-old problem. [4]

Kickbackstarter

In 2011, to poke fun at the increasing popularity of crowdfunding, Jason Eppink created a parody Kickstarter campaign to raise money so he could fund his friends’ Kickstarter campaigns. [5] [6]

Notable Curatorial Projects

We Tripped El Hadji Diouf

In 2012, Jason Eppink curated an installation of animated GIFs by members of Something Awful in response to a Photoshop challenge, “What tripped El Hadji Diouf?” Participants modified an animated GIF of the unpopular soccer player so he appeared to be tripped by a variety of sight gags and pop culture references. The 35 selected GIFs were displayed in a 50-foot-wide projection in the lobby of Museum of the Moving Image. [7] [8] In 2015, the project appeared for the first time in the United Kingdom at the National Museum of Football, as part of the exhibition Out of Play - Technology & Football. [9]

Cut Up

In 2013, Jason Eppink curated an exhibition of short form video remixes that primarily use popular media as source material. The show examined genres and techniques that emerged online over the last ten years along with their historical precedents, proposing that remix is an increasingly common way of participating in shared cultural conversations. Exhibition sections included supercuts, recut trailers, and vidding. [10] [11]

The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture

In 2014, Jason Eppink engaged members of Reddit [12] to identify frequently used reaction GIFs: animated GIFs posted in response to text in online forums and comment threads. Thirty-seven GIFs and their translations, provided by Redditors, were selected for the exhibition, which examined the increasingly popular use of the animated GIF as a form of non-verbal communication. [13] [14]

How Cats Took Over the Internet

In 2015, Jason Eppink curated an exhibition that addressed the phenomenon of internet cats as vernacular culture. The exhibition included a 20-year timeline of cats online; a quantified look at the popularity of cats and dogs on significant leisure websites; sociological, anthropological, and evolutionary explanations for the phenomenon; and an investigation into animals that perform similar roles on other national internets. [15] [16]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GIF</span> Bitmap image file format family

The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on June 15, 1987.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual museum</span> Museum in a digital format

A virtual museum is a digital entity that draws on the characteristics of a museum, in order to complement, enhance, or augment the museum experience through personalization, interactivity, and richness of content. Virtual museums can perform as the digital footprint of a physical museum, or can act independently, while maintaining the authoritative status as bestowed by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in its definition of a museum. In tandem with the ICOM mission of a physical museum, the virtual museum is also committed to public access; to both the knowledge systems embedded in the collections and the systematic, and coherent organization of their display, as well as to their long-term preservation. As with a traditional museum, a virtual museum can be designed around specific objects, or can consist of online exhibitions created from primary or secondary resources. Moreover, a virtual museum can refer to the mobile or World Wide Web offerings of traditional museums ; or can be born digital content such as, 3D environments, net art, virtual reality and digital art. Often, discussed in conjunction with other cultural institutions, a museum by definition, is essentially separate from its sister institutions such as a library or an archive. Virtual museums are usually, but not exclusively delivered electronically when they are denoted as online museums, hypermuseum, digital museum, cybermuseums or web museums.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Olia Lialina</span>

Olia Lialina is an Internet artist and theorist, an experimental film and video critic and curator.

Sonia Khurana is an Indian artist. She works with lens-based media: photo, video, and the moving image, as well as performance, text, drawing, sound, music, voice, and installation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imgur</span> American online image hosting service

Imgur is an American online image sharing and image hosting service with a focus on social gossip that was founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009. The service has hosted viral images and memes, particularly those posted on Reddit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Petra Cortright</span> American artist

Petra Cortright is an American artist working in video, painting, and digital media.

<i>This is a magazine</i>

This is a magazine is an experimental art publication founded in 2002 by Karen ann Donnachie, Andy Simionato & Sons. "One of the best known" flip-book style online magazines it has also published in a variety of formats including a PowerPoint edition, Animated GIF collections as well as video peep-shows and sound-objects. Alongside the internet specific episodes a series of hard-cover printed books or compendia and multi-media projects such as the Everything Will Be OK have been published.

Dryden Goodwin based in London, is a British artist known for his intricate drawings, often in combination with photography and live action video; he creates films, gallery installations, projects in public space, etchings, works on-line and soundtracks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Penelope Umbrico</span> American artist (born 1957)

Penelope Umbrico is an American artist best known for her work that appropriates images found using search engines and picture sharing websites.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nyan Cat</span> 2011 Internet meme

Nyan Cat is a YouTube video uploaded in April 2011, which became an Internet meme. The video merged a Japanese pop song with an animated cartoon cat with a Pop-Tart for a torso flying through space and leaving a rainbow trail behind. The video ranked at number five on the list of most viewed YouTube videos in 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Systaime</span>

Systaime is a French contemporary visual artist. His given name is Michael Borras.

Angela Washko is an American new media artist and facilitator based in New York. After nine years as a professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, she is currently the Catherine B. Heller Collegiate Professor of Art at University of Michigan. Washko mobilizes communities and creates new forums for discussions of feminism where they do not exist.

Lorna Mills is a Canadian net.art and new media artist who is known for her digital animations, videos, and GIFs. Mills has done work in other mediums such as installations. Her work explores how "the notion of public decency is anachronistic" Her use of GIFs are gathered through the dark net which includes 4chan, pornfails, and Russian domains. She currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lindsay Howard</span> American curator

Lindsay Howard is an American curator, writer, and new media scholar based in New York City whose work explores how the internet is shaping art and culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GIF art</span> Animated digital art using GIF format

GIF art is a form of digital art that first emerged in 1987. The technology for the animated GIF has become increasingly advanced through the years. After 2010, a new generation of artists focused on experimenting with its potential for presenting creativity on the World Wide Web. Mass access to the Internet allowed their GIFs to travel rapidly and virally online, through social platforms such as Tumblr and Giphy, and to be recognized as a new form of art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cats and the Internet</span> Popular part of Internet culture

Images and videos of domestic cats make up some of the most viewed content on the World Wide Web. ThoughtCatalog has described cats as the "unofficial mascot of the Internet".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pusheen</span> Fictional cat and accompanying universe

Pusheen is a cartoon cat who is the subject of comic strips, plush toys, vinyl figures, sticker sets, and more, on Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, iMessage, YouTube, and other social media platforms. Pusheen was created in 2010 by Claire Belton and Andrew Duff for a comic strip on their website, Everyday Cute. More recently, the Pusheen character has been used in social media posts, and on the Pusheen blog.

Kathy Rae Huffman is an American curator, writer, producer, researcher, lecturer and expert for video and media art. Since the early 1980s, Huffman is said to have helped establish video and new media art, online and interactive art, installation and performance art in the visual arts world. She has curated, written about, and coordinated events for numerous international art institutes, consulted and juried for festivals and alternative arts organisations. Huffman not only introduced video and digital computer art to museum exhibitions, she also pioneered tirelessly to bring television channels and video artists together, in order to show video artworks on TV. From the early 1990s until 2014, Huffman was based in Europe, and embraced early net art and interactive online environments, a curatorial practice that continues. In 1997, she co-founded the Faces mailing list and online community for women working with art, gender and technology. Till today, Huffman is working in the US, in Canada and in Europe.

NewHive was both a social network and a creation engine for Web 2.0 content. It was a web platform that encouraged users to develop their own creative content that had been coined by NewHive as, expressions. Many members of the NewHive community were productive artists with established practices, creating, “A critical framework around post-internet art practices by engaging with the art world and contemporary society".

RaFia Santana is a non-binary American artist, musician, and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work ranges from animated gifs to self-portraiture, videos, and performance to editioned clothing and electronic music exploring gentrification, the millennial mindset, mental health, and the lived black experience. They use the internet as a medium to share their artwork, empower black and brown communities, and challenge ideas of solidarity and alliance. She had exhibitions and/or performances at the Eyebeam, AdVerse Fest, SleepCenter, Times Square Arts, International Center of Photography, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Babycastles, Museum of the Moving Image and Museum of Contemporary African Disaporan Arts, Roots & Culture amongst many notable venues. Her work has been featured in publications such as Huffington Post, HyperAllergic, Rhizome, ArtFCity, Vogue, Teen Vogue and Salon. They have participated in panels, performances and discussions such as Cultured Magazine, "Late at Tate Britain", Creative Tech Week NYC, Afrotectopia at Google NYC, NYU, "Black Portraitures IV: The Color of Silence" at Harvard University and International Center for Photography. Their music is released through Never Normal Records.

References

  1. Gat, Orit (2012-01-17). "Artist Profile: Jason Eppink". Rhizome. Retrieved 2013-08-20.
  2. Pixelator
  3. Zjawinski, Sonia. "Artist Pixelates Public Video Billboards". Wired . Retrieved 21 September 2013.
  4. Astoria Scum River Bridge
  5. Kickbackstarter
  6. Vartanian, Hrag (24 August 2011). "The Kickstarter Art Project Goes Meta". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 20 August 2013.
  7. We Tripped el Hadji Diouf, Museum of the Moving Image
  8. Miller, Paul (14 May 2012). "When GIFs become art". The Verge. Retrieved 20 August 2013.
  9. "Out Of Play - Technology & Football :: What's on :: National Football Museum". www.nationalfootballmuseum.com. Archived from the original on 2015-07-05.
  10. Cut Up Archived 2015-05-18 at the Wayback Machine , Museum of the Moving Image
  11. Halperin, Moze (16 July 2013). "The Mother Of All Supercuts: "Cut Up" Brings The Best of YouTube To The Museum". Creators Project. Retrieved 20 August 2013.
  12. Hey Reddit, want to help curate a museum exhibition about reaction gifs? (details in comments), Reddit
  13. The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture, Museum of the Moving Image
  14. Ulaby, Neda (9 May 2014). "Hard 'G' Or Soft, The GIF Takes Its Place As A Modern Art Form". NPR. Retrieved 22 August 2014.
  15. How Cats Took Over the Internet, Museum of the Moving Image
  16. Kingson, Jennifer A. (6 August 2015). "'How Cats Took Over the Internet' at the Museum of the Moving Image". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 January 2016.

Additional References