Liz Else, associate editor
Everyone wants to go viral. Just think of the warm waves of online love washing over you and your digital extension. But what happens when you?ve peaked?
Take Technoviking, the ripped street-partygoer immortalised in a 4-minute video shot at a parade in Berlin, Germany, in 2000. Video artist Matthias Fritsch, who posted the original clip (currently offline) on YouTube in 2001, says the point was to get people to question whether the sequence was real or staged. But that question got lost in the stampede when the video inexplicably went viral six years later - peaking at 10 million viewers over six months.
Having spawned spin-offs from remixed videos to Technoviking action dolls, the internet meme has now acquired a new incarnation: a giant inflatable Technoviking head that varies in size in real-time response to the meme?s online popularity.
Meme Junkyard: Technoviking, on view tethered in a garden square in Manchester, UK, as part the Abandon Normal Devices (AND) festival, is artist Wafaa Bilal?s attempt to explore what it means to go viral and what happens to YouTube sensations after the circus leaves town.
Rather like Tinker Bell in Peter Pan, the sculpture?s ?life? - its size dictated by inflating or deflating - depends on people ?clapping? - tweeting #technoviking. The giant inflatable is connected to a laptop and a fan: if there is a tweet, the computer recognises it and gives the fan a 40-second burst to pump air into Technoviking's head. No tweets, and poor old Technoviking?s ego deflates and the whole thing goes flat.
The connectivity of YouTube, Facebook and mobile devices has produced a rather banal fame-seeking aesthetic, says Bilal, shaped by ?hits? and ?likes?. This is Andy Warhol territory: if we can all broadcast, we can all be famous for 15 minutes. The flip side for Bilal, however, is that there will come a time when this oversaturation means everyone will be anonymous and we suffer withdrawal symptoms if we don?t get texts (no one loves us).Welcome to the post-meme world.
?When AND Festival contacted me about the idea of fame, I went to the opposite - to post-fame and post-memes. I asked them if I could build a graveyard for memes,? says Bilal.
Being driven by tweets has another dimension too, he says. Meme Junkyard: Technoviking is dynamic and open-ended, and cannot exist without viewer participation.
The darker side of courting popularity was examined in other parts of the festival. In an unsettling experiment in film-making called Follow by Tim Brunsden, the very real transvestite performer Scottee (@ScotteeScottee) sets out to notch up more Twitter followers than equally real UK astrologer Russell Grant (@THERussellGrant).
At the start of the film Grant is said to have some 33,000 followers, while 26-year-old Scottee is seriously displeased with his mere 3072.
Filmed as four episodes and set in a room in Liverpool, we follow (pun intended) Scottee as he gets stuck into uncovering the secrets of Twitterlebrity and trying to trend. One early idea is to become the dead comedy actress Hattie Jacques - and Carry on Tweeting. And there are many wry moments. ?You can just go ARGFHHHHHH and anyone will follow you!? says Scottee. ?Twitter is like a religion??
But the humour disappears as Scottee gets dumped on camera by his lover because he?s so obsessed with his popularity. Naturally, in the interests of art Scottee promptly asks him to tweet and retweet that he has broken up with him - so his followers will know he is single again (and he may boost the band of Twitter followers).
The dark piles up as Scottee becomes obsessed with the obnoxious US persona of @SoDamnTrue, who has a massive 900,000 and rising band of followers.
SoDamnTrue specialises in motivational-sounding clich?s (?Friends are like your backbone? - they?re always there when you need support?; ?Sunglasses. Allowing you to stare at people without being caught. It?s like Facebook in real life?). It?s all SoDamnTrue?
But lines between online and offline life begin to be blurred. Is SoDamnTrue a bot? And when ?she? starts responding to film footage of Scottee that hasn?t gone out yet, suspicion creeps into the protagonist?s corporeal world. The films ask unsettling questions about what is real and what is fabricated, whether online or not.
See it if you can; meanwhile you can catch unedited episodes here.
At the time of writing Scottee has 3560 followers; Russell Grant has 41,816; and SoDamnTrue has 1,337,687.
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