The audience is worldwide

"Free Horrible Valentines" by Kelly Turnbull. An example of the types of work that have spread throughout the internet.

“I actually have a book on underground ‘zine making…and the amount of effort it takes to get comics and magazines, to get people to see them back in the 90s when it was on a Xerox machine in someone’s basement, it was insane.” Now I’m speaking to Kelly Turnbull, an animator and comic artist from Toronto.  We’re voice chatting through Skype and while we talk, I look at her online gallery.  It’s a shrine to things awesome, like action stars and zombies and superheroes and video games.  Much like Lisa’s paintings, the gallery is a wild mix of different fabrics – animation loops, comics, sketches, digital paintings, anatomy tutorials.  One of the featured pieces is a three minute animated short about two Conanesque barbarians sharing an apartment in a modern city.  It was animated almost entirely by hand.  Her gallery has over 350,000 views.  She’s one of those artists where, in her own words, “people have seen my work but don’t know that I’m the one who did it.”[1]

“You’d sneak into airports and you’d put your magazine beneath the stacks of stuff they have there.  You could drop them all over the place. Maybe see if you can strike a deal with the person from the post office to stuff flyers in people’s boxes.  It was kind of like viral marketing, trying to get it out there,” she continues.  “But when it’s on the internet, you just need to make some friends, drop some links… get some notoriety that way.  There’s a huge potential for audience worldwide you wouldn’t get if you weren’t trying to do this offline.”[2]

Turnbull currently works as one of an army of in-between animator for the upcoming Comedy Central animated series Ugly Americans.  The show takes

A screenshot of Devin Clark's "5 On" web series (left) and the television series it inspired, Ugly Americans (right).

place is an alternate version of New York where every type of fictional monster lives alongside people, which is perfectly suited to her sensibilities.  The show is an interesting case study unto itself.  The concept originally appeared as 5 On, a web series by Devin Clark.  It was commissioned by Atom Films (Comedy Central’s web branch) where a reporter asks “anything about everything”[3] – five aliens on the end of the Sopranos, for example, or five zombies on the 2008 presidential election, or five demons on the environment.  A year ago the network ordered a full half-hour series.  This is the same track as some of their recent shows like Michael and Michael Have Issues and Secret Girlfriend – starting out as a web short before moving to primetime.  The show is set to premiere in March 2010.[4]

Although Ugly Americans is more of a backdoor pilot than a true jump from the internet to other media, it is actually only one of the latest examples of this trend.  In 2007, comedy troupes The Whitest Kids U’Know and Human Giant were both picked up from their Internet skits to major cable networks (Fuse and MTV, respectively).[5] Both credit the internet to their popularity, especially with the younger generation that is unable or unwilling to pay.  “People our age, they don’t have money, and you feel kind of guilty if they’re paying to get in,” Trevor Moore of the Whitest Kids U’Know said in a profile in the New York Times. “We’re the Colt 45 and ramen generation.”[6]

The cover of the Harper Collins edition of John Dies at the End by David Wong (aka Jason Pargrin).

In the literary realm, dozens of books have started out as online writing projects before jumping onto actual paper.  A prominent, recent example is John Dies at the End by David Wong (pseudonym of Cracked.com editor Jason Pargrin)[7], the horror-comedy novel that was posted entirely online before being picked up by indie press Thomas Dunn Books and later by the more prestigious St. Martin’s Press.[8] [9] Within the last month or so, Justin Halpern turned his incredibly popular Twitter account Shit My Dad Says into both a book deal with Harper Collins and a sitcom pitch for CBS.[10] The two men are painfully aware of how lucky they are.  Halpern, true to the style of his tweets, claims to be the “luckiest motherfucker in the world.”[11] Wong emphasizes the book’s roots and warns his audience to “buy a copy of the book so I can take the cash and run to Mexico before the world catches on.”[12]

Those examples, though, could be minimized – they’re commercial developments, not what some would call ‘true art’ – but the same principles are applied to artistic pieces.  For example, Shepard Fairey is a master of viral street art.  He started his career in graphic design in the late 80s and quickly distinguished himself with his André the Giant has a Posse sticker campaign (later reworked as OBEY) which spread before the Internet turned viral trends from a spark to an inferno practically overnight.[13] [14] Today, he’s mostly known for the famous (or infamous) Obama Hope poster.  It’s a print in red, white, and blue of Obama’s face looking towards the heavens, the words PROGRESS or HOPE printed in block letters below.[15] Fairey’s image “rendered Obama iconic.”[16]

Fairey originally made 350 posters to sell on his website with 4000 more that would be handed out during rallies.   The website posters sold out quickly; copies were being resold on eBay for thousands.  His web traffic spiked up.  People began taking the image and finding their own uses for it: “[it] became their Facebook image or email signature or something they use on their MySpace page.  Or they printed out the image and made their own little sign that they taped up in their office.”[17] The HOPE poster became the unofficial image of the Obama campaign.  Fairey was commissioned by Time magazine to make a new portrait of the president when they named him Person of the Year.  Today, the original painting is in the National Portrait Gallery.[18]

On the opposite side of the political fence sits Firas Alkhateeb, a Palestinian-American history student.  Alkhateeb stumbled into his political fame unwittingly.  Last winter, he came across a tutorial online on how to “Jokerize” an image (in other words, make a person look like Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in the 2008 film The Dark Knight).  Excited, he tested the technique on a previous Time cover of Obama and uploaded it to his Flickr account.  An anonymous browser downloaded the image and superimposed the word socialism below, where it became infamous.[19] [20] The Obama Joker poster has become a major symbol of the Tea Party Movement and even attracted attention from his compatriot Fairey, who despite disagreeing with the politics said the image “gets the point across really quickly.  The Joker is a sinister, evil character that can’t be trusted.  And if they want to make that parallel with Obama – bam.”[21]

The Two Obamas - the "Obama HOPE" poster by Shepard Fairey and the "Obama Joker" poster originally done by Firas Alkhateeb.

The two Obama posters found their own audiences and proved that pieces of art can find widespread appeal on the internet.  Perhaps both are enhanced by their subject matter, a president who came into the White House on the backs of social networks and the youth vote.  In any case, though, the two pieces of art found widespread popularity without being attached to a commercial interest.  Both are pieces of politically inspired art that eventually got picked up by the greater audience.  It’s not only that – both are inspired by the fair use, the everything-belongs-to-everybody type of art that Futiman and Darren Solomon embrace.  The two Obamas are prime examples of the spirit of the internet.

“What do you know now in your time posting art on the internet?” I ask Kelly Turnbull during our interview.  She pauses for a second, then answers: “Now I know that if you put something online, you’ll find an audience… if you post it, they will come.”[22]

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[1] (Turnbull, 2009)

 

[2] (Turnbull, 2009)

[3] (Clark, 2007)

[4] (Hustvedt, 2009)

[5] (Itzkoff, 2007)

[6] (Itzkoff, 2007)

[7] (Wong, David Wong, 2008)

[8] (Publishers’ Weekly, 2008)

[9] (Wong, The Book, 2008)

[10] (Riemer, 2009)

[11] (Riemer, 2009)

[12] (Wong, The Book, 2008)

[13] (Bearman, 2008, p. 69)

[14] (Arnon, 2008)

[15] (Fairey)

[16] (Bearman, 2008, p. 70)

[17] (Arnon, 2008)

[18] (National Portrait Gallery Smithsonian Institution, 2009)

[19] (Milan, Obama Joker artist unmasked: a fellow Chicagoan, 2009)

[20] (Booth, 2009)

[21] (Milan, Shepard Fairey has ‘doubts’ about intelligence of Obama Joker artist, 2009)

[22] (Turnbull, 2009)

~ by bechter on November 29, 2009.