Month: November 2020

Day 24. They still don’t know I’m an artist…

I’ve been working on TikTok for the whole month of November, and just recently have I landed on something that I feel could expand into an interesting form of cultural production. After two weeks of creating random videos across genre divides (see: my last post) I decided to create a new account under the persona of Meatboy67.

I struggled a bit with using own voice as a chariot of social critique on the app. It felt I had too much personal interest at stake to be poking fun at the fame-starved culture I love to highlight. Enter Meat Boy. Cast beneath a neon hypnosis, he’s a caricature of both my privilege and desires for fame, fortune, and art world success. He’s a monster.

Meat Boy is only a half step removed from me. Yet, the persona has allowed me to create much more of a unified, “branded” viewing experience. I’ve established a unique atmosphere surrounding the character through aesthetic filmmaking choices and a monotone performance. My overall aesthetic direction is a kind of mockery of a personally reified film school student’s heavy hand. I do the filming and editing processes in character, making the choices I think Meat Boy would make. Meat Boy is what an artist looks like under the outside gaze.

My filmmaking process centres viewer retention — the main statistic used by the TikTok algorithm. The longer users watch a video, the more it gets shown to new users. I intend to seduce my viewers into the cinematic world of Meat Boy; the form is mesmerizing and the content is comedic yet kind of uncanny. This is a useful method of production to boost my viewership, but I also think it’s a mirroring of the seductive nature of social media that draws into an endless void of content.

There’s much to be explored about the audience of this performance work. TikTok makes viewing videos a constant chance or surprise encounter through the For You Page algorithm. That means that every video I make exists for most viewers as part of an endless stream of other video fragments. I wager that most viewers will only ever see one of my videos. I wonder how I could push the found form of my videos to their fullest extent. Do I want to jar viewers by creating content that opposes its surroundings, or use guerrilla tactics to make a more cutting commentary?

Meat Boy has been a modest success in my eyes, but after about a week of making videos under this persona I’m seeing it as more of a framework than a completely realized project. I’m thinking about creating a few alternate accounts each with their own persona, subject matter, and cinematic style. My different personas could mimic the content houses that are a growing centre of cultural and economic production in the entertainment world. I would be my own content house, filled with dramatic interactions between my multiple personas.

This would give me a lot more leeway to expand into cultural critique and comedy beyond this specific art world character I’ve been doing. The project would also become vastly more generative without me having to put in all the heavy lifting I’ve been doing for Meat Boy — I could capitalize more on the popular culture of repetition on TikTok. Perhaps that mimics the TikTok universe even more closely.

Don’t forget to like and subscribe.

https://www.tiktok.com/@meatboy67

After making the music video for STR8 MAN I felt really inspired to continue creating work as a new age performance artist. I’ve been seeing myself turn more and more towards comedy performance during my time here — it feels like the same work I’ve been doing but cutting out the middle art object and making myself the art object. “Art object” feels like a great word to describe what I’m doing, because I’m turning myself and my personality into an object for the looking pleasure of the Internet in the same way that any social media content creator does.

I’ve started a TikTok account and I’ve been considering it my main form of artistry over the past few days. It’s radical but I wager that the white cube has been almost entirely replaced by social media as the artist’s platform. 99% of my viewership as an artist was already happening over Instagram when I wanted it to be in a gallery setting. So why not create work that’s designed for the online realm? The idea of it being low craft is obviously not a deterrent for me. I want to make work that’s for the people — something the world can see without the pretentious overtones of traditional art spaces.

I wish it weren’t, but TikTok is the culture of today. My work has always been concerned with identifying what’s young and cool and commenting on that. I want to work within the system to awaken people to their own lives. It’s the kind of observational humour I’ve been channeling in my gallery work tailored for a different medium.

This is a super fresh project for me, and I’m still wrestling with the idea of performing for an online audience and how my desire for celebrity might be hindering the work.

So far I’ve found myself watching viral TikToks and categorizing them into particular genres. I then use this insight to parody these viral genres. In a world of user-produced content one might assume there’s an absolute freedom in what users can deliver to the masses; in a sense there is, but there’s this narrow pattern of repetition that get democratically selected as “funny”, “useful”, or “worthwhile” in some way or another.

Maybe the work is about awakening people to the silliness of their TikTok consumption, suggesting that they’re watching the same things over and over. Maybe it’s about uncovering the secret recipe that makes a viral video. Maybe it’s just about having fun and shouting weird jokes into the void. I’m still figuring it out.

If you want to figure it out with me follow me on the Tok 🙂

https://www.tiktok.com/@mattyflader

I made a music video for my hit single “STR8 MAN”! Check it out.

I chose to invent the persona of Soy Boy to make evident that this is an over-the-top satire. I also think it’s kind of a fun reclamation of a misogynist pejorative popular with the far right. Soy Boy is both a hyper masculine rapper type and a downright slutty video whore, both of whom are proud to be gay! He wears two different hats, but they’re both him and they’re both examples of gay-positive masculinity performances.

Oh hey, didn’t see you there. I’ve been interested in taking my work off the walls, creating an exhibition that really takes up the exhibition space. I want these three dimensional works to have my same witty, metacritical sensibility; I’ve been exploring the readymade as a hyper low craft art object that questions the divide between good and bad art.