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