Introduction

When I first saw dump.fms homepage, it looked like a video game to me, a bright and flashing amalgam of big pixel-art animations and pop-culture references. Constantl trolling !oogle images and "umblr gave me this concept or idea of digital trash# thousands and thousands of nonsensical, stupid, and beautiful images floating on the internet,$ Carlos %&e', a cofounder of the internet art pro(ect Cloa)ue, told *en +alentine in an interview ,-./01. What if these images were being lobbed at each other in a kind of digital food fight2 "hat was close to what I found made an account on dump.fm in 3ugust -.//, guided b a friend of a friend who said Id like it. "hen, as I entered the inner sanctum of the chat room, I witnessed a much more exciting interchange than the sadl stable front page revealed. 3 continual game of the surrealist endeavor of 4ex)uisite corpse4 was raging. In a feeble attempt at a greeting, I posted a .gif file from m "umblr that I had fashioned from a Chuck 5ones cartoon, but it )uickl disappeared in the stream of repetition and chaos. In essence, the content of the ex)uisite corpse$ game involved appropriation and a stream-of-consciousness riffing on meaning. %omeone would post an image, animation or ob(ect from some onder corner of the internet, and then someone else would take it into their text box and (uxtapose it with another image or a phrase incongruousl rendered in glitter letters ,46uck all 6oucault4, 4riddled with herpes41. "he internet has a strong image-appropriation culture, but dumps design took this tendenc to a new extreme. Clicking on a post to fave$ it put its components into a palette so that I could reuse it in the future. "his palette sloughed and regenerated itself ever time it was opened, however, and it onl displa ed the 78 most recentl faved

component images. * the first hour, I had figured out how to create some (uxtapositions that amused other users, and the notifications of 49this user9 faved ou:4 that popped up in the lowerright corner of the page were keeping me going. I was gaining, through the example of the people in the room at the time, 4dump.fm literac 4# understanding the humor and forms of communication on the site that came almost simultaneousl with mastering the process of creation. 3s I returned to the site in the months to come, I found that the individual usernames to the left of each image were both prominent ; the amount of exposure a user got was a direct function of how often the posted ; and meant refreshingl little to me. ,Who were these people21 "he textual banter that t picall occurs between the images was also switched off b default, and it took me at least a few da s to discover it. %o, there was something about m culture, m upbringing, and m use of the internet that allowed me to en(o and participate in the exchange occurring on this site intuitivel , without an verbal explanations.

<ethods 3s the reader might guess, I did not initiall approach dump.fm as an ethnographer. I wont attempt to efface m entanglements with the communit , man members of which I see as friends, teachers and creative collaborators. < methods in assembling this ethnograph were as varied and engaged with multiple media as the site itself. =sers were excited about the pro(ect, perhaps eager to narrativi'e their time on the site and make some sense of all their time spent on it and

wh the found it so en(o able. 3s I was alread embedded in the communit as a contributing member, I needed onl to orient m time spent on the site toward the productive end-purpose of producing a narrative. >articipant-observation. 3 simple task, right2 ?ot )uite. "hough the site oriented itself toward the ,illusion of1 productivit , with the constant flow of visual schematics, the text chats that ran in between the images were often conflicted and at cross-purposes, occurring between groups of members about vastl divergent topics. %ometimes I was able to embrace the cacophon of this medium, but at other moments I switched to 6acebook chat, which was better suited to talking to individual members. *ecause of the )uantit of work each user produces, it was often easier to speak to users in generalities about their interests instead of referring back to specific moments. @umps archiving s stem, which is partiall indexed b !oogle, was helpful for exactl the opposite reasons. It kept a complete log of posts with images in them for each user, but it did not save the text that user had producedA instead, text was onl preserved if it had been faved b other users, and then onl in those users logs of ,user1s favs.$ "hus the structure of the sites archiving alienated images and text from their original contexts, but in distinct wa s. "his method was not ideal, but it was sometimes necessar for finding evidence of interesting moments that occurred before the time of m fieldwork. I ended up performing a kind of death work$ ,Bose -..C1, but in a setting where it could coexist with life work$ as well. @eborah *ird Bose used the term to speak of the inhumanit involved with not acting in morall obligated manner when carr ing out traditional ethnograph that must rel on the spoken testimon of people in the present tense#

It values the living precisel to the extent that the can offer up information concerning a past that the anthroplogists seemed to have assumed in advance would be discontinuous with their future. "he Dsalvage in these practices is directed toward information, not people$ ,7E1. 6ortunatel , information on dump salvaged$ itself, but not at the expense of present activit . "he online, post-textual format of dump allowed me to go through logs of peoples past activit while simultaneousl communicating with them in the present. "he fact that dump was so fast-paced and took place on the internet made it challenging to document because it was constantl changing, but it also allowed be to transcend some of the t pical latenc of academia# "hus, I felt I was describing a phenomenon that was still in its infanc , and I hoped I have not constricted its future b proscribing a certain range of possibilities. With the transgressive spirit of the communit , however, this seems unlikel .

What @oes It 3ll <ean2 < interest in explaining the communit to others comes in part from m stake in the future of the creative class$ in 3merica, particularl its visual contingent. "hough that group onl had its catch name bestowed b Bichard 6lorida in -../, I would argue that it has deep roots, and in fact it is now in deep decline, at least as a distinct entit . "he creative class,$ in the wa I term it, was once a once small, prestigious group of individuals that included illustrators, photo(ournalists, designers, and photo researchers, their skills once re)uired speciali'ed, intensive schooling and a persistent, applied desire to learn a craft and make ones living at it.

@igital technolog has disrupted the borders and, potentiall , the goals of this class considerabl . Fas -to-use creative software has led to the deskilling of various professions like film editing and photo retouching. "he proliferation of increasingl high)ualit cellphone cameras among the general population means that ordinar people with a desire to share local news can do the (ob, if not in the most aestheticall pleasing manner, then man times faster than a photo(ournalist who is t picall sent to the scene on assignment. 6or fine artists, the end of material scarcit for t pical art merchandise, such as books and prints, because of the infinite copies of images that digital technolog proliferates practicall b accident, means that it is difficult to make a living from the actions of ordinar fans. *u ing a print, for example, is seen as an increasingl privileged gesture when an individual can revisit a work of art an time on the Internet. "he music industr , and the flagging livelihoods of musicians, has received perhaps the most ink in this struggle over the idea of intellectual propert , perhaps because music is such a popular entertainment and the rightsholders of popular music tend to be large corporations with law ers to match. 3s a result of the dr ing up of revenues for creative individuals, one might think that being invested in the creative industr is now seen as a increasingl privileged affair, re)uiring residenc in the cities with ga s and rock bands$ that Bichard 6lorida champions ,6lorida -..-1 and something akin to a trust fund. Whats happening on the side of the people benefiting from these shifts, however2 3 vibrant and vernacular culture that has emerged around casual creativit on the Internet that is an thing but privileged. @ump.fm is a particularl interesting example of a

communit formed around this culture because man of its members, like m self, are creative outside the realm of the siteA some are even working artists whose educations and careers revolve around the visual. "hus the too have a vested interest in the separation and elevation of creative work from other industries, though man will be loathe to admit it. "he site sometimes reacts to the economici'ed past of art in ver pointed wa s. It practicall makes a mocker ,an idle-i'ation21 out of the idoli'ation of work that rose in the nineteenth centur , as well as the labor theor of value, which 5ohn Gocke derived from the notion of intellectual propert as the combination of someones labor with something natural or held in common ,Boss -..71. Its t pical vernacular ; though there are man sophistications of it, as we will see in chapter 0 ; is a hori'ontall arranged row of images. "his seems to appl reductionism of <arcel @uchamps read mades, which reduces the art-making process to its bare bones ,Hicks -..C1 to the contemporar creative landscape of the internet, which is largel made up of remixing and appropriation. 3 textual meme that has circulated on the site facetiousl reads# art is eas .$/ What benefits do these casual creators, including dump.fm users, receive in return for their work2 6ew if an , and if one subscribes to Gockes theor of value, then perhaps this is fair, as the substrate of much of these creative endeavors is derivative. "he derivative material is often popular culture, or photos or artwork produced b nowunknown individuals, not material legall held in common ,as much as some themes ma seem to be public domain b now1. However, with the simplicit and ease that comes with (uxtaposing different visuals and concepts, the en(o ment users feel is so significant

that, in some environments, the will even pa for an opportunit for self-expression. "he remainder of this introduction and part of chapter / tracks the facilitation of visual creativit in a variet of online environments that has in turn enabled dump.fms pol morphous perversit . I will also explore the politics of decontextuali'ing, reusing, and reframing such representations.

Creationist Capitalism In Coming of Age in Second Life, "om *oellstorff explores a virtual world in which ph sical scarcit of resources is non-existent. "he 3ge of "echne,$ he argues, is the age of homo faber, the human as maker ,*oellstorff -..I#8E1. He uses the term in a tongue-in-cheek$ manner, he writes, in order to flag a moment in which the idea of making$ has become recursive# now, instead of (ust crafting the tools that make virtual worlds possible, as when we manufacture computers, we can now craft within those worlds. 3s the internet has become increasingl central to commerce, social media sites and especiall social gaming entities have catered to users desire for individual expression, some of which stems from the California ideolog $ that combined libertarian ethics with the legac of hippiedom. <arket mechanisms and personal responsibilit are the main principles of government in this ideolog , and this is reflected in the urge for most online industries of a certain si'e to moneti'e their operations, as well as the relative freedom of self-expression. 3 result of the capitali'ation on this freedom is that the primar labor is creative, resulting in what Henr 5enkins has called a participator culture$ ,5enkins -..7#0, cited

in *oellstorff -..I#-.E1 that allows creativit in ver limited, prescribed, and et welcoming wa s. It is standard practice in man massivel multipla er online role pla ing game ,<<JB>!1 environments for a user to be able to change their characters appearance or abilities, and real mone is often charged for this privilege. 6or example, *li''ard Fntertainment, Inc. charges a K/8 flat fee for character appearance changes ,*li''ard %upport -./-1. *oellstorff reminds us here of the shared root word of custom$ ; as in social tradition ; and costume,$ which seemingl come together in the word customi'ation,$ in which users, in an environment predicated b what he calls creationist capitalism, stake out their visible identities online on compan territor . "his form of cooperation between the individual and the corporation, prophesi'ed 5ean *audrillad, leads to a dialogic binarism that would become a cornerstone of what he termed simulation, or liLfMe in the mode of the referendumN precisel because there are no more referentials$# "he most concrete form ou see it in is that of the test, of the )uestionOanswer, of the stimulus and the responseN 9 ,*audrillard /PI0#/C-, )uoted in @arle #7/1. "he digital technologies that were emerging in the time of his writing, he argued, influenced ever area of life with their binar scansion$ ,/C01. 3ll computer programming, at the lowest level, consists of a binar code that moves between .s and /sA at higher orders of programming, such as the graphical interfaces with which most computer and smartphone users now interface, this takes the form of the )uestion-andanswer, a formation that appears dialogic but is in fact the highest stage of monopol .$ >art of the logic of creationist capitalism, in contrast with dumps socialit , is also the solitude of such creative acts, to the point of becoming a Bobinson Crusoe-like

fantas of the individual working outside social relations.$ >la and labor, blurred together, are essential to the individuals ultimate goal of self-fulfillment.$ It ma make us feel good, and *audrillard suggests that in a h perreal universe, owning simulated commodities becomes a stand-in for actual-world achievement. In addition, life and the art it inspires become woefull predictable# the can be organi'ed as an unstable pla of variation, or in pol valent or tautological modes, without endangering this central principle of bipolarit # digitalit is, indeed, the divine form of simulation$ ,/C01. In such a world, with ever one contented and pacified with pretending at creativit and uni)ueness, who continues to strive to succeed above others2 3rtists, of course, who have taken to heart <arshall <acGuhans maxim that the media is the message.$ Within the limits of the internet, in the case of net artists, the can show people that there are alternatives to these rule-based discursive patterns. * contrast, dump.fm seems to have divested itself from notions of propert , even intellectual propert A because users mainl share what has alread been made freel available to them in other areas and modalities, dump, aside from being a post-internet$/ environment, also seems to be post-intellectual propert .$ @ump.fm doesnt claim to avoid the creative pitfalls of h perrealit . In fact, as we will see later, dumps aesthetic tends to bask in some aspects of h perrealit , especiall when its members, deni'ens of the digital world whose friends probabl (ust think the spend wa too much time on the internet, create representations of their existence within the world of simulation. @ump.fm did, however, train the mind against becoming wrapped up in Gene McHugh defines post-internet art as art responding to [a condition] descri ed as !"ost #nternet!$ %hen the #nternet is &ess a no'e&t( and )ore a ana&it(* +,uoted in -er.ant 2/1/01
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simulation in the best wa a digital form can, through awareness of what is false. "he iconoclastic nature of its visual culture means that members are constantl creating sendups of the images the post, as well as the idea of representation itself. "he re(ect simulation b exposing it as simulation. "heir deconstructions particularl tended to involve the desire for consumer ob(ects that have simulated value. 3s capitalism has adapted to the information age, one of advertisers man strategies for be viewed as relevant and conversant with consumers is with the )uestionOanswer ethic of prosumption ,"offler /PI.1, which turns production into a form of consumption and vice-versa. %ome prosumptive environments can be sneak about their intentions# the photo-editing and sharing app Instagram, for example, caused an uproar and lost nearl half its dail users in @ecember -./- when it released a new terms of service allowing it to sell users data and giving it a non-exclusive license to use users photos in advertisements. Instagram is owned b 6acebook, which had been engaging in such practices for ears. 3s Will %hanklin wrote in !i'mag, oure the product$ ,-./-1# such corporations that offer free services no longer feel the need to create their own content >rosumption is not a phenomenon exclusive to the digital media landscapeA %eio ?aka(ima traces it back to >eking <an, a specimen of Homo erectus, who consumed ,i.e., used1 the fire and simple tools that he produced. <ore concretel related to our discussion are various art movements of the -.th centur that appropriated manufactured ob(ects and reused them in an art-world context. "hese include <arcel @uchamps read mades, such as the controversial Fountain, which he created in /P/E b turning a urinal upside-down and inscribing it B. <utt.$ "he transformation made here was from

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the elevation of the artist as the privileged, ordained creator to someone who encounters these manufactured ob(ects (ust like an one else, albeit with an artists curating instinct. %hared b both of these movements is the ethic of reductionism,$ a kind of minimalism for process instead of product. @uchamp decided that the most important aspect of making art was selecting ob(ects and labeling them as such, so he stripped down his process to that basic action. What differs between dump.fm ; and these other prosumptive online ventures ; and all these art movements is the context in which the are approached. While dump.fm has provided a space for people with little previous visual or artistic experience to do visual work for the first time, making them bottom-up$ movements, these -.th centur predecessors were top-down.$ While @uchamps read mades didnt exactl create a read making trend in World War I-era 6rance. "he relational aesthetics movement of the /PP.s is perhaps the most important movement in terms of maturing and complicating the works relationship to the viewer. ?aka(ima describes for moderni'ing the relationship between viewer and audience, as it creates a concatenating set of relationships that themselves form around a work# In sum, relational art aims to make the process of prosumption itself an art in the sense that what artists produce are relations between artists ,i.e., producers1 and viewers or audiences ,i.e., consumers1, as well as relations and discussions among the viewers or audiences, with the art ob(ect being a kind of catal st$ ,88P1. "his pla with me$ ethic is not invulnerable to the practice of populist parod known as culture (amming.$ It was expertl mocked, for example, b !reenpeace and the Qes <en in 5une -./- when the pretended to make a "witter page for %hell Jil, as well as a website called 3rctic Bead $ that supposedl educated users about the arctic.

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In addition to snark unveilings about %hells drilling in the 3rctic ; all written in the cheerful tone of corporate >B ; the site pretended to offer viewers an opportunit to make their own %hell 3d. "heir examples, which included catchphrases like Hone , turn the lights on: Gets melt some ice:$. "he site swiftl went viral$ via social media, creating a >B crisis for %hell regardless of whether it was real. * representing the alread euphemistic world of shell ; a representation of a representation ; !reenpeace and the Qes <en offered a takedown of the corporation that smiles and eagerl awaits communications and free advertising. *ut the criti)ue lacked subtlet # b answering an advertisement with another advertisement in the same form, it still presumed a separation between creators and audience, and thus formed sub(ects that answered the )uestion of whether the would continue to consume gasoline from %hell, even if the answer was no.$ * contrast, b refusing to communicate using the same methods of discourse as its Jthers, dump.fm was far more subversive, even if it never started an social media crises. "hough few multiple-image posts saw the light of da outside of the site, the simple proceduralit and onslaught of (uxtapositions found therein helped users read images in a new wa . %eeing the workings of other users associations between ob(ects gave users a new set creative practices both online and IBG. @ump users know how to predict the )uestions of the simulation and, instead of answering, turn them on their heads. What *audrillard didnt foresee with his pessimism about the proliferation of simulacra is that the would one da be available for to a much wider range of creators, and that dump.fm users would be able to see the simulations as simulations. Jne visual

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convention of the communit that displa s particularl well its interest in manipulated simulations is 0@ animation. It is perhaps the ultimate simulated visual genre, and it was used as a mere backdrop for simulated ob(ects that would have no reason to exist or be desired in realit , such as a pool of viscous li)uid that constantl displa ed *ritne %pearss face or a dead s)uirrel that was bi'arrel brought back to life b being made to ripple like a flag. While dump.fm has its binaristic moments, the are social in nature, largel those of other humans. Fver image posted to the site has a stor attached to it, an original perceiving sub(ect who is remembered as its propagator. "his is sometimes helped b the various usernames attached to images that get uploaded to the site. <ore conservative, in light of creationist capitalism, is dumps relationship to labor and pla . >art of the logic of creationist capitalism is that labor is treated as pla , and pla as labor. Compensation for such pla Olabor is often of an abstract, affective kind, often amounting to free but mutuall beneficial >B# a users creation using a certain tool or in a certain virtual world, for example, might be used to advertise that product or service. >art of dumps beaut is in its lack of moneti'ation. <uch of the creativit that is enacted on dump re)uires little labor an wa , aside from a few mouse clicks, but it is rich in referential ideas. "here is little or no sense of institutional rewarding or approvalA instead, faves and social interaction are enough to keep users going. If users do benefit monetaril or professionall from dump, it is onl because it brings together a certain group of creative people who occasionall offer one another internships. 3ee http455du)p1f)5p5&o&u)ad571/77/76 the for)at of printed te7t unfortunate&( does not a&&o% )e to inc&ude ani)ations1
2

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@espite attempts b man members to reach prominence and success, whether through technical proficienc or an outrR personalit , the main person that has benefited from its earl flurr of creativit in this laisse'-faire environment is B der Bipps. "hough *oellstorffs religious analog of gathering in the name of the creator of a virtual modalit would definitel be going too far to describe Bipps, who spent little or no time on the site during the window of m fieldwork and claimed to have been c berbullied the last time he logged on, there is something fundamentall new$ and et creationist about interacting and creating within a world that is entirel someone elses brainchild. 3n thing created on the site seemed fundamentall mediated b the much more intense labor of Bipps and his creative partners, %cott Jstler and "im *aker.

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Chapter 1 The Life of a Meme

I remember the da dump.fm was taken over b the cult of the Chihuahua. 3rriving on the landing page, which served to document dump.fms 'eitgeist, I discovered it had been taken over b images of a Chihuahua dog whose head was poking out of a strange magenta hood or co' . Jne iteration, the most popular, showed the Chihuahua bobbing its head, its neck extended like a serpentsA another version had crudel attached a ,human1 tongue that was flicking obscenel A a few versions had added a bindi to the center of the chihuahuas forehead, perhaps as a recognition of its serene, meditative expression. Barel did the front page cohere into such a strong narrative of a communit gathering around a single image. ?ormall the front page reflected the interests of man different users or groups of users. However, certain images like this Chihuahua were of particular interest to the communit , recurring periodicall as the were brought back into the fold of the sites limited short-term memor . What led users to choose these images2 What events in the

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short histor of the internet informed this t pe of practice, which occurred on man different sites but found a particularl lucid manifestation on dump2 "hese are )uestions I will explore in this chapter.

@istinguishing @ump# @ump.fm and Garger Internet Culture ?o website is an islandA particularl in the traffic of images, there has been a constant and ongoing debate as to the best medium for sharing and displa ing images on the internet. 5Srg Colberg has even remarked that the internet seems made for photograph because of the rapid-fire, instantaneous intake of information that the internet fosters. "his debate has gotten considerabl more complex, however, with the advent of images and art that seem to dwell in the semiotic soup of the internet. While photographers have arguabl entered the age of the internet wanting to be able to aspire to whatever the did before ; art-world success, shows in tangible galleries, mone if the re commercial ; the internet has also ushered in a new era of creative pla with images that speaks to collective as well as individual achievement. %eeing as it is a modalit that appropriates work from other sites, the prehistor of dump is almost as important as its histor . In this chapter, I will attempt to detail some of the developments in visual culture that predated dump. Belative to these, dump can be seen as an intervention or merel a further development in the same direction. "his discussion will naturall blur into that of dump.fms source materials, which consist of an outer realit $ on the web, both past and present, which it refashions.

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@emographics @ump.fm boasted members from all over the world, but most were concentrated in the =nited %tates, and man of those were on the Fast and West coasts. "he geographical concentration of dump users meant that the had a thriving actual-world culture. "here were highl anticipated events such as ?ew Wprld, a ?ew Qork dump meetup in 5une -./- ,named for a well-known t po made b <i(in awa, a ?igerian teenager with whom man users had interacted and whom I will discuss in more detail in chapter three1. %ome users flew across the countr for this event.

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"he generation of users active in -./---./0, when I carried out m fieldwork, were less likel to identif as a group of artists, but 4chatting with images4 continuedA dump users were perhaps an ideal version of the semionauts, Lwho inventM tra(ectories between signs$ that ?icolas *ourriard described in his book >ost->roduction. "he did this through the common understanding the brought to the site from the outside, as well as the meaning that certain images and concepts accumulated through their use on the site. "heir tinkering with images was more likel to concern the images surface )ualities, and more often than not the simpl left images alone. However, their culture of use was, if an thing, more entangled with socialit than it was in the 3fter Fffects era, due to the real-life connections among them and the public nature of their creative process. <an of these users didnt call themselves artists ; some were uncomfortable with the term because of critical attitudes expressed toward it b certain other members, while others simpl hadnt seen themselves as artists, dump.fm being their first fora into visual pla . <aking images and gifs has also been deskilled somewhat b online tools that mimicked the effects of more expensive, difficult-to-learn programs. such as >hotoblaster, some of which were created b dump members1. 3t the time of m fieldwork, about -.-8. dump.fm users dwelled in the main chat room at an one time, and because it was the main chat room in which the were usuall active, it was possible to be aware of all the interactions going on within the site at once. %ince so man users were from the =nited %tates, the site had a kind of collective circadian rh thm, sleeping$ until around noon and and slowl becoming more active throughout the da . "he height of its activit was around midnight, when users on the Fast Coast were still awake but West Coast users were (ust getting their evening started.

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"hus dump la outside capitalisms model of a successful website, eschewing growth for an occasionall utopian intimac that might have come with an intentional communit . %ome people discovered dump through actual-world friends, but man in m surve mentioned finding it through "umblr, the specter of which seemingl haunts the communit . @ump.fm didnt purport to be for ever one, and thus regular users were somewhat demographicall homogeneous. 5udging from the webcam photos that members took of themselves, the vast ma(orit of dump users were white, and a ma(orit were also college-educated, though surprisingl few were art students or art-school graduates. "here were, however, a couple of prominent members of the communit who were not white, and a good number who were not college-educated, including several site moderators and the site creator himself, B der Bipps, who took some courses but did not get a degree. Jne of the few black dump users, @auragon, told me he felt included in the communit because he spent most of his life being a lone black person on the internet$ who was weird and Dnerd $ and alwa s drowning in white people,$ even in his actual life. His outsider status in his inborn communit seemed exemplar of man other dump users relationships with theirs, regardless of their race. <embers of the site seemed to share a certain feeling of elevation above mainstream 3merican culture. "his common bond was reinforced b how the site grew, which was chiefl b word of mouthA new members, referred b existing users, in turn produced work that attracted more of their kind. =sers who didnt understand the sites humor and aesthetic didnt last long, but there also seem to be a number who left because

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the understood the site but couldnt stand its pace, giving me reasons like its bad for m attention span$ or it gave me 3@@.$ "here were also man points of casual, even unexpected contact, as when dump users dated, lived as roommates, and found themselves working in the same office or attending the same universit . "he sub(ects discussed in the text component of the room, too, often concerned local, actual-life sub(ects, such as the merits of different neighborhoods in *rookl n or plans for meeting up on a %aturda night. In the words of one user from <iami who had flown into ?ew Qork for ?ew Wprld, however, this reallife intimac ma have hampered the sites artistic seriousness# Fver one began meeting each other in person and the natural d namic of the site was irrevocabl ruined.$

CChan for Hipsters2 @ump.fms wr perspective on the world is partiall informed b the internets facilitation of meme culture. "he term meme,$ a shortening of the word mimeme ,evoking the Gatin root word for imitation$, and, via shortening, becoming more like the 6rench word for memor $1 was originall invented b biologist Bichard @awkins in /PE7 in his book The Selfish Gene. "here it had a broad definition, referring to an cultural unit or cluster of cultural units that spread among a large population at a much faster rate than genetic change. Beligion, for example, is a cluster of cultural memes, including belief, houses of worship, pra er or incantation, etc. In the past 0. ears, the word meme$ has come to mean a cultural replicator, often humorous, that reappears in numerous contexts as a mark of its success. 3s it turns out, digital technolog , with its potential for instantaneous communication and the abilit

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to cop information perfectl and rapidl , is the perfect incubator for humorous memes and macros. "he macro$ is often what pops into peoples heads when the think of a memeA often machine-generated, it inseparabl combines images and text that captions or comments upon them. "he unification of both into a single image makes the whole affair less indexicalA an indexical image gets charged with new significance as its context changes. In a note added to the /PIP edition of the text, after an enthusiasm for the stud of mimetics had swept several fields, @awkins commented that his published ambitions for the meme were modest compared to what he trul believed would happen# a kind of nonhuman agenc . I want to claim almost limitless power for slightl inaccurate selfreplicating entities, once the arise an where in the universe,$ he wrote. Cchan, an anon mous image board, is one of the most well-known and influential propagators of meme culture on the internet. It was originall founded in -..0 b Christopher >oole as an anime-oriented **% modeled after the 5apanese 6utaba Channel -ch$ image site. However, the popularit of Cchans ObO, or random,$ board )uickl outgrew that of its more topical counterparts. "he format of the imageboard had existed long before Cchan, but ObO seems to be the birthplace of man genres of image that have spread memeticall and have been interpreted as popular forms of expression that are uni)ue to the internet, such as GJGcats, visual conventions like macros, and certain t pes of pranks, ranging from linking unsuspecting web users to videos of Bick 3stle to the raids$ of the 3non mous hacker group on the websites of large corporations.

<eme-Images and the Bise of Web -..

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3round the mid--...s, a kind of capitali'ed industr ,$ in the words of %tr ker, began to arise around the scattered humorous creations of Cchan and %omething 3wful. "hese images were diverse and often uncertain in provenance, but man had in common a certain wholeness# the were able to tell a complete stor within the confines of a single image, an important goal in a world where images had become so highl mobile. *en Huhs "he Chee'burger ?etwork looms large in this industr .$ It was founded in -..E and receives over ten million hits a da , mainl trafficking in macro$ images and user-submitted photos that might follow the theme of an of its sub-blogs. "he macro images include the tradition of lolcats# images of animals captioned with endearingl and humorousl misspelled text. "hough this tradition of humor got its start on Cchan in -..8, it reall took off when a blogger named Fric ?akagawa hotlinked a lolcat created b Huh on %omething 3wful ,%tr ker -.//# /7I1. While Huh has attempted to annex man t pes of memetic humor into his Chee'burger empire, fate never would have struck$ for him, as %tr ker would have it, if someone hadnt hotlinked his image and rang up a huge bandwidth bill for him. "hus, though these macro images have endured through their self-contained )ualities and the Chee'burger ?etwork has risen to prominence b providing a massive archive for them, the sites histor is nonetheless shot through with the idea of interdependenc . "he Chee'burger ?etworks subordinate blogs have annexed such diverse topics as funn animal pictures, rage comics, (okes made at the expense of celebrities, and fails.$ "he ?etwork contains and categori'es them, providing opportunities for the creation of images within the same tradition.

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"he language used on sites of prosumption on the internet such as Chee'burger tend to alienate users from the source of work that is uploaded, who will see the work, and what the site is allowed to do with their contributions. 3side from the explicit relationship laid out in the "erms of %ervice, which few users bother to read and which can change at an time without notice, there are also more implicit, affective aspects of the relationship that are left unexplained. 6or example, b telling potential Chee'burger %ite creators that making a site will LletM ever one know LtheirM sense of humor is the best,$ the Chee'burger webmasters put users in the exact same role as the sites editors, thus creating an illusor sense of e)ualit between the site and the user. In fact, Chee'burger will profit from the curatorial skills and appropriated content of users through ads placed on their subdomain sites. "he admin-created sites benefit from anon mous labor, even profiting monetaril from page views, if not from individual images themselves. In the logic of prosumerism, the images individual creators are glad to displa their work in exchange for little more than a mention of their name. "heir achievements are subordinate to the perpetuation of a larger visual tradition.

"he enormous ,and highl capitalist1 expansion of the Chee'burger network, its commitment to taxonom , and, in the view of some dump users, its lack of visual innovation stand in stark contrast to dump.fm. "here is still an important link, however# the humor on both sites is amplified through repetition. "oda s memetic images are both intertwined with their web-based contexts and easil alienable from specific webpages the ma appear on. 6or example, some curated arrangements of memetic images, such as themed blogs, are highl repetitive,

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emphasi'ing the comic possibilities of a single image or theme. Jne memorable t pe of themed blog is the 6uck eah:$ blog, which peaked in popularit in 3pril -.//, when about 8.,... were created ,Collier -./-1. "he humor on these sites caters to viewers looking for increasingl specific sub(ects# 6arhad <an(oo ,-..P1 noted that G3"6H, for instance, is reall (ust a kind of fashion version of 6ail *log, while 6uck Qeah %harks, is (ust Golcats b the sea.$ Jther websites such as Pgag collect heterogeneous funn images$ that pla off of numerous memetic themes. @espite their lack of categori'ation, most belong to traditions that are eas to identif . "he serialit of these sub(ects, variations on single, evocative topic or template, make creativit accessible to man both in terms of production and consumption.

@ump.fm *reaks 3wa 6rom an earl stage, perhaps as a result of such a high-culture and dramatic introduction, dump.fm was urged to have a uni)ue identit , one that swept awa these influences, which had in time become commonplace and self-conscious, in favor of higher-concept aspirations. B ' likened Cchans popular and influential memes to a person hitting the same ke over and over again.$ "here is also a common element of broken Fnglish$, apparent in the endearing pidgin of GJGkitties and humorous t pographical errors like I accidentall the whole thing,$ that he re(ects# 3fter using @ump a lot, I reall feel that memes of this t pe are outdated. I remember the explosion of 3ll Qour *ase 3re *elong "o =s, which was more than a decade ago, and it feels like the Dmeme culture is (ust recapitulating that over and over without development.$ He also went on to deride

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present meme cultures <ore repetition, encouraged b the fonts used b numerous macro generators# %o much text in impact LfontM it loses all meaning.$ B ' also critici'ed the large amount of background needed to understand those memes# Worse, these memes end up being more about the backstor -- there was a picture of some gu in a hat, and people invented a m th about him, and used impact text to imagine the gu sa ing stuff.. so what24 @ump, of course, had plent of inside (okes of its own, man in that ver backstoried st le. It even subverted that backstoried meme culture in the practice of making memes out of images for which it was unclear wh the were memes in the first place. 6or example, user maxlabor drew a single black scribble on a blank document in an image-editing program, titled it bsh.png,$ whereupon it became an embodiment of the non-communicativeness of all internet memes that creates their insider$ appeal. It starred in such minimalist masterpieces as two bsh.$ "he (oke, onl intelligible to dump members, was that this scribble became somehow more important because it was drawn b a member of the dump.fm site. <ore often, however, the backstor $ is less interesting than the participator pleasure of imagining the future possibilities created b reframing an image through text or (uxtaposition. "he humor of other memes is more self-evidentA man memetic images on dump are crudel drawn cartoon images from the earl da s of the web ,funn , perhaps, in the context of dump.fms high-art pretensions1. Jthers bear similarities to internet memes on a wider scale ; photos of animals to which anthropomorphic meanings can be attributed, for example. "he diversit of dump.fms explorations and exploitations will continue to

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be explored in later chapters. "he separation of ob(ects from their original context is central to dumps aesthetic. @ump user kalan, a travelling performance artist who is well-read in critical theor , noted that dump.fm presented an environment of 4@eleu'ean deterritoriali'ation.4 Bobert *rinkle e)uated the term deterritoriali'ation with codification and noted that, in @eleu'e and !uattaris stud of Tafka, the desire to de-code or to deterritoriali'e seems particularl crucial for minorities who want to remain minorities and affirm perspectives that are not those of the culture the inhabit$ ,*rinkle /PI0# /01. @eleu'e and !uattaris original term continued to be relevant on more than one level because all of the images used on the site were radicall decontextuali'ed from a mainstream internet culture. It was a rare occurrence when the were used with an thing approaching their original intent. Cultural codes were made and unmade as dump users created a sense of elevation from the outside world. In their reuse, images were reterritoriali'ed, given a new meaning in the name of art and socialit . 3s these reterritoriali'ations accumulated, the also became less legible to outsiders who were not steeped in dumps cultural histor . "he notion of backstor $ becomes tired when one is not personall experiencing it. While the meme culture of more influential sites like Cchan must start with an unusual ground, usuall delighting in the pre-internet tradition of the freak show, the outlier in societ ,Cole %tr ker L-.//M calls this t pe of humor a look at this random ever da weirdo4 element1, dump.fm celebrated the banalit of ordinar imager b demonstrating its ease of deterritoriali'ation.

Fxploitative 6laneurs

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"he attitude of dump users toward their materials was often exploitative, having little regard for the response the images were meant to engender in their original context. Individual 4raw4 images most likel to be reposted on the site from an outside source had a certain kind of vulnerabilit . "he were marked b their incompleteness, both visual and semiotic. Fven if the images were the work of a professional, the had in some wa failed to account for their potential reuse in contexts like @ump. While @ump delighted in technicall flawed and ideologicall failed art, it made use of less ideologicall ambitious images as well, and explored the exploitabilit that their surface simplicit presented. I once spent a late night with plams digging through a used-medical e)uipment website that used animated !I6s to demonstrate the features of its products. >lams looked past the apparent lack of human presence in these pictures, which for me would have severel limited their expressive possibilities, and instead took pleasure in simpl reusing images that seemed to have such a narrow designated use. 3nother hallmark of dumps aesthetic is its refusal to talk back$ to the original uses of images. *audrillard would have called the limitation of their original uses a s mptom of the )uestionOanswer$ of h perrealit . "hese images then got put to instrumental purposes that their original creators probabl never would have dreamed of. Jne might ob(ect that the )uestion of dump is this banalit and the answer is decontextuali'ation. @ump.fm users, however, went be ond waiting for invitations to appropriateA the created blank space$ and exploitabilit where other communities did not find it. %ome of this blank space existed below the surface, on the level of communication. Images culled from elsewhere on the internet that seemed humorous and inexplicable on dump were once tr ing to communicate something in their original

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contexts, but were rendered impotent. 6or example, %occer reposted an image originating in a single step of a tutorial0 for drawing a cute, clo ing image of a koala bear, and was met with dump users enthusiasm in the form of favesC. In context, it made sense that the image was unfinished, but taken out of context, it was an amusing m ster wh someone would use expensive imaging software like >hotoshop to draw a koala bear without ears. Hence, the message to which this fragment once contributed was erased, priming it for future exploitation. "he notion of the exploitable$ was also prevalent in other visual-oriented areas of the internet, to the extent that TnowQour<eme, a popular documenter of memetic images and ideas, has a page titled Fxploitables$ that focuses specificall on images inviting such modification with a template ,either a blank space or a slight draft1.$ 3s at dump, the connotation of the exploitable is mischievous or perverse. 3hh, exploitables. "he internets wa of sa ing DHere, fUck this up for me,$ wrote one commenter. *roader meme cultures operations on images, however, sometimes have more dialogic or ordinar results.

%hock, *analit and @esensiti'ation <ischievousness and perversit , of course, alwa s toes the line of bad taste. 3 rule ; or non-rule ; of dump.fm onl spoken of b outside observers like >add 5ohnson was an thing goes.$ It thus follows that some of the content that gets posted is indeed raunch ,$ as she has written. !I6s extracted from pornograph ,usuall bad pornograph 1, images from the blog of a man who stuffs ob(ects into his foreskin, and
3 4

8he tutoria& ca)e fro) http455heartcreators1net5&ad(o95.oa&atute1ht)& 3ee http455du)p1f)5p53occer52/86633 28

drawings of tentacle rape were all fair game. "he onl time I heard complaints from members about the unacceptable content of an image involved a user who was spamming,$ or rapidl and repeatedl posting, the same picture of child pornograph . With his abrasive, repeated posting, he clearl sought to offend, and succeeded ; he was swiftl banned. "he dump users vanilla$ reaction to his actions, however, sa s something about how rarel the are collectivel offended. 6or the less desensiti'ed, however, the preponderance of shocking imager on the site might lead a new visitor to compare it to Cchan. "he culture that gave rise to 5apanese **% cultures like -ch was, according to Cole %tr ker, an emotionall repressed one. "he idea of a free space,$ one where all discussion topics ; and eventuall , as image boards developed, t pes of images; could find a home ; stood in refreshing opposition to 5apanese culture, where straight talk and audacit areN interpreted as rudeness or disrespect$ ,%tr ker -.//# /0/1. -chs imageless predecessor used its technical limitations to great creative advantage, leading to intricate 3%CII art and complex smilies such as kaomo(i ,/001. In 3merica, however, perhaps due to the existing lack of repression in communication, images and communications that are transgressive push the border of what is alread one of the most liberal and flexible codes of good taste in the world. "he ver same images that grew out of this culture of straight talk,$ are the ones critici'ed b Curt Cloninger, an earl adopter of dump.fm, as banal.$ %traight talk$ and images with a visceral or sexual appeal arent necessaril appreciated on a site consciousl and specificall focused on fostering the creation of new cultural codes and methods of

22

communicating, but as the are an unavoidable part of the landscape of the internet, the sometimes make their wa into dump.fms stream in surprising wa s. =nlike their predecessors, such as Cchan and Botten.com, dump users arent specificall seeking to share shocking material, and in order for such material to be integrated into the aesthetic of the site, an strong reactions must be somehow subdued, or the audience must be anestheti'ed to it through fre)uent exposure. <an dump users see pornograph , for example, as (ust another t pe of image to be deconstructed and examined for its formal )ualities. 6or example, user pecco made an abstracted pastiche of pornographic gifs that fre)uentl appear on the site ; specificall , the actors contorted faces. "he post was well-received because it isolated an aspect of those gifs that is ,arguabl 1 rarel the center of attention, and indifferentl made mincemeat out of material that is made to stop viewers in their tracks with arousal. Commenting on a Bhi'ome page introducing the site for the first time, Cloninger saw the sites semiotic pla as a wa of warding off banal visual language.$ He seemed anxious to exclude certain t pes of images from the visual vocabular of the fledgling communit rather than allowing individuals to recast and reread them. His list of banal$ material unworth of artistic examination about Cchan amid the litan # >ornograph , gore, scatolog , racism, rehashed Cchan memes, blingee-modified nuptial-script t pograph .$ Cchan is known for holding all of the above, and %tr ker repeatedl shows how the images from Cchan ; as well as specificall designated gross-out sites such as Botten.com ; desensiti'e users with their shock imager . "he desire to bring about disgust in oneself and others gives wa to an explorator instinct that he categori'es as

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adolescent and masculine. Its popularit was built b bored, Internet-savv teenage bo s. "hese kids are generall smart, living in suburban wastelands, and writhing with hormonal energ . What else are the supposed to do2 ObO is the new 4railroad tracks down b the river.4 "he new 4out behind the E-//.4 It9s where bored kids craving cheap thrills go to experience something, an thing that might surprise them or subvert their expectations$ ,7E1. %tr kers use of the word thrill$ belies the embodied sensations that continue to accompan such images. "raditionall , the appreciation of art is estranged from the bod , and perhaps Cloningers value (udgment stems from a desire for dump to be a site for disembodied, intellectuali'ed appreciation, rather than the grotes)ue (olts that the site still occasionall con(ures toda . "he grotes)ue onl becomes banal through overexposure. Wh not, however, involve the bod more in such a disembodied medium2 "he particular connotations of blandness around the word banal$ also dont describe the wa dump.fm users make use of the imager , which has an element of criti)ue and deconstruction that is absent from collections of such imager that exist onl for their own sake. It seems necessar for dump.fms ecolog of images to include influences from all corners of the web, even the sordid ones. "he culture must appropriate, and respond to, all its Jthers. "hese web-savv images both made dump possible and resist use b members of dump. It is rare to see traditional macros being posted on the site. +isual tropes repeat themselves, but as comic elements are rarel united on the site into single images ; a more common arrangement is to la out disparate elements hori'ontall ; the are more conscious of their role as co-dependent elements that onl work alongside others.

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"he < thical Content of the Farl Web It took a significant amount of time for the web to establish its own forms of visual communication and reflexivit ; hence the term post-internet.$ "his mediums acceptance of the internet as a banalit ,$ in the words of !ene <cHugh ,-./.1, also brings about a separation between high and low art that wasnt previousl formali'ed. <arshall <acGuhan has written that the content of one medium is alwa s the previous mediumA this was most true in the earl da s of the Internet. When original images appeared on webpages, the were often photos and traditional$ artwork done b hand and scanned into the computer. "he were not formall integrated with their immediate context ,i.e., the web page on which the were being displa ed1. "hus the were were accompanied with a certain ostentation, warning users of long loading times. With the limitations of the !I6 and 5>F! file formats, the were also often heavil compressed, creating artifacts and color dithering that interfered with their clarit and message. <an earl websites were littered with images that were decorative in purpose, small in both resolution and file si'e, and often animated. "heir provenance is uncertain, with man supposedl belonging to the public domain,$ according to pioneering net artist Jlia Gialina. "hough the were derided as an indicator of bad web design for much of their existence, at the time of dump.fms creation the had recentl resurfaced as a topic of aesthetic and academic interest. 3side from (ust representing a b gone era, the were also elements of a vernacular web$ rich with potential folklore,$ as Camille >alo)ue-*erges sees it ,>alo)ue-*erges -.//1. "he repetitive content of these sites, she argues, was part of the cultural logic of bricolage, their limitations brought about b the

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unspoken laws of a creative commons. 3nother reason for the renewed interest in this primitive aesthetic was when its persistence was threatened, particularl in -./., when !eocities, a popular webhosting service operated b Qahoo:, shut down, leading to the deletion of all its content. Farl sites, having been left without maintenance, disappeared on their own easil enough, but this isolated crisis led to more concerted archival efforts. <an interventions sprang up on the web to preserve the content of these forgotten sites. With the help of pro(ects such as the appreciations of Jlia Gialina in %till "here$ ,Gialina -./-1, a torrent of the entire contents of !eocities created b a group known as the 3rchive "eam, and Internet 3rchaeolog , a pro(ect for the preservation of widel used images founded b B der Bipps, the images found and reproduced on these sites, in particular, found a new life that was sometimes divorced from their original context. 6inding distinctive material from peripheral sources on the web continued to be valued as a springboard for creativit and a significant pro(ect among dump.fm users. "he archival instinct of dump.fm, however, often ended with these acts of browsing and discover . Images were often hotlinked, or linked directl using their original =BGs. Hotlinking is an unstable and frowned-upon method for posting images in most web design contexts, as it uses up the original image hosts bandwidth, which is often paid for b an individual out of pocket in the case of personal webpages. "he persistence of a hotlinked image on the web is also entirel dependent on the persistence of the original host. Barel were images moved to dumps or another sites more stable servers, unless an image was of particular long-term significance. 6or example, user (eronimo pioneered the use of an image known as the leanback gu ,$ a cartoon character

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from an obscure and inactive, but still functional, site on the web. Beali'ing how much he had been reusing it, he uploaded the original image to a >hotobucket account, keeping it in a place that was beholden neither to dump nor to the site he took it from. 3s on the rest of the web, the persistence of these images within individual dump posts were entirel dependent on the persistence of the websites from the came. *roken images were not an uncommon sight in the deep reaches of users9 archives. In these cases, the onl surviving cop of the image, unless someone took a special effort to preserve it, might have been a modified version or one that was embedded in a >hotoblaster assemblage. "hus art literall came to augment both human and machine memor . "hese survival

@eep-Web Fxploitation @ump.fms snark reuse of imager from the earl da s of the web clashes with the sincerit of those earl sites and their graphics. *ecause of these images uncertain provenance, the are difficult to categori'e, and the politics of modif ing and recontextuali'ing them can onl reall be discerned from the perspective of dump users, rather than their original creators. We do know this# while the were sometimes used in deepl personal, @IQ contexts, the were also agents of homogeni'ation. "hough these images had the anon mous origins that mass cultural icons often do, and often appeared at least as ubi)uitousl in the earl da s of the web, the also had associations with the mess , homegrown, @IQ, and often narcissistic phenomenon of the personal home page. 6or all the power relations inherent in these subversive acts, did an innocent aesthetic evoking the homepage of a /0- ear-old budding web designer in /PP7 reall need to be

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subverted2 <ust the 4elites4 of dump.fm mock the past as we hurtle into a world where self-expression is constrained b various social media platforms2 3nd did the world of dump.fm, with its atavism and exclusivit , even present an thing different, or apart from, these earl da s of the internet2 Camille >alo)ue*erges connected these aesthetic hallmarks to a vernacular web$ that was based around a @IQ ethos ,free web hosting, personal, lowbrow topics1 that idios ncraticall also built on the work of others through its bricolage$ that involved picking up and rearranging Web elements from the same toolbox rather than innovating$ ,>alo)ue-*erges -.//# /-.1. @ump perpetuated this bricolage logic through the proceduralit involved in using the site, which involved rescrambling various semiotic elements, but the minor and effortless nature of creating a single post, and the sheer abundance of content that has resulted from this, meant that it was difficult for members to develop much of an attachment to what the had created. When asked about specific posts from more than a couple of months back, users often couldnt remember making them. "his iron is reminiscent of >alo)ue-*erges definition of ?et 3rt as also participating in the cultural material it takes as an ob(ect of stud $A as the studied webpages that hapha'ardl threw images together, the sometimes seemed caught up in the ver forgetfulness and ephemeralit of the culture the criti)ued. * contrast, the idea of place-making or place-staking was a central tenet of the internets frontier culture. %mall, animated images created a sense of domesticit and comfort, evinced in the fre)uent use of houseOroom metaphors in the naming of pages, and the variet of mailbox icons used on email me:$ buttons. "here were also some

35

earlier attempts at the t pe of decontextuali'ation dump.fm afforded# >alo)ue-*erges compared earlier attempts at collecting such material to Curiosit Cabinets,$ the creation of which involved learning from these items, in an enc clopaedic spirit$ ,/-/1. Individual posts on dump.fm ma not have made homes$ in the same wa as the original frontier homepages. However, the fact that a communit existed where the could coexist with other, newer t pes of images in a kind of collective, deadpan indifference attested to a different kind of world-making. >erhaps users relationship to websites, particularl highl interactive ones like dump.fm, was more companionable than domestic# I think a good website fulfills all social needs, as a good friend does,$ B der Bipps told me.

%urfing Clubs# @umps @irect 3ncestors "his distanced, exploitative form of appreciation was a carr over from surfing clubs, dump.fms slower-moving, more blog or forumlike predecessors. <arcin Bamocki ,-..I1 placed the birth of surfing clubs at around -..- or -..0, shortl before a shift to Web -...$ "his was a time during which suddenl practicall an kind of knowledge, image or code could be instantaneousl found and used.$ 6rom their comfortable place on the web, with a consistent habitus of posting against which to contrast wide-ranging and spontaneous research, these data dandies$ could sit outside the fra and observe the strange and newl created world of c berspace. 3 surviving example of a surfing club is ?ast ?ets, a site resembling a forum or Give(ournal that was most active around -..E where members, some of whom are now well known net artists, posted the fruits of their expeditions through the @eep Web. %ome

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of the meaning-making on that site seems to come from the interpla between posted images ; especiall screenshots ; and the titles of posts, in a trope of titling or responding in text is referred to b Bamocki as boon and wake$ ,81. Jne poster, for example, posted a screenshot of a tack -looking ad in)uiring Would ou like to know the date of our death2,$ using the title of the post to respond to the )uestion with I dont care$ ,E1. "his particular example works in an opposite direction from the aforementioned examples from dump.fm involving pornograph and other hidden, seam elements. Instead it salvages a scrap that appears unnoticed in so man contexts across the web ; a bait-and-switch banner ad with fake answer bubbles ; and draws users attention to it in a chilling wa . "he ethic of exploration found on that site that Bamocki details is ver much like that of dump.fm# 3 singular post is an act of exhibitionOexposition, pointing to a specific statement and claiming its importance, effectivel making a case for extracting it from the formless matrix of information$ ,-1. In other words, a post, b virtue of having been selected from the Internets mass of information, had to somehow self-evince the reason for its existence, without the aid of accompan ing, non-diegetic ,con1text. In actualit , however, man posts on ?ast ?ets did in fact (ustif their existence. <embers added their own recontextuali'ation, often in the form of the aforementioned snide refusal to talk back$ in a particular images vernacular. "hese could come in the form of either through boob-and-wake non-se)uitirs ,a bab l ing prostrate on the floor of some public space accompanied onl b the word penis$1 or more conventional explanator notes ,some good-looking sound filesN Ive alwa s loved theseN Can ou guess which ones are for modems222 $1.

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3n endorsement b ?ast ?ets did not necessaril mean something positive for the content creator. 6or example, a 6ebruar -..E post b petra described FnchantedGearning.com in h perbolic terms# insaaanneeee site with incredible bitmaps. the )uantit of content is impressive and ever thing is available larger for printing.$ "he final phrase ever thing is available larger for printing$ seemed to give awa petras sarcasm# net artists are so called in part because the are rarel interested in printing. "he sarcastic attitude was continued in a comment b olia# what a page: google ads on it look like a poor echo from the future.$ Here olia ,probabl Jlia Gialina1 inverted the usual ideolog of privileging the future on the internet. "he exchange seemed caught between snideness and romantici'ation as olia seemed to be writing from the perspective of someone who literall lived in the past. Gike the members of surf clubs, @ump users occasionall engaged in acts of group looking in which the scavenged through sites together. 6or example, (esusfever, a couple of other users, and I once discovered the graphicall chaotic site of an 4Imperial %hih "'u *reeder,4 decided it was a goldmine of sorts, and began taking screenshots of the breeders photos of puppies in absurd costumes and reposting them. However, dump users tended to take credit for their individual finds, and the feeling of satisfaction that came from discovering a new meme in this wa was intense. "he spirit of these moments, however, was noncompetitive, and I was even hesitant to share ever thing I found on an 4interesting4 website right awa in order to leave room for other users to claim their discoveries. "he assumption was often that there would be some kind of consensus on which images were the most valuable, and that it was in the spirit of collaboration to distribute the credit for finds between multiple individuals.

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@ump.fm %pinoffs 3side from taking in so man influences from the internets past, man dump users also had visions of how creativit on the web would look in the future. In the present tense,$ @ump.fm was also a porous communit with a significant metagame$ ; to borrow a term from %tr ker ; that was alwa s interested in how people were interacting elsewhere on the web. "he site, in spite of its limitations, attracted both experienced net artists and people who dont call themselves artists at all, but the t pe of creative and explorator work it did was hardl limited to the site alone. Bather, dump was a particular manifestation of a certain t pe of practice that had reappeared in several places. It had brought a creativel fertile group of people together, but those people were also not dependent on its particular platform to bring their particular wr perspective to the world. In fact, some members saw the limitations of the site and sought to create offshoots that would bring members of the dump.fm communit back together in contexts with different constraints and goals. "he earlier generation of net artists that >alo)ue-*erges observed, such as Gialina, often satiri'ed the art worlds selection processes, but dump users, existing outside of the art world b default, instead created alternatives to it. Vdumphaus, created b dump user kintrala, sought to provide an avenue of outreach for dump users, ensuring that their work was seen b people outside the communit . It hosted its first show on 5anuar -8th, -./0, in an abandoned storefront in >hiladelphia, >3 "hough Vdumphaus was maligned b some trolls, most dump users

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<ar rachels website "ight 3rtists ?et !ang, meanwhile, preferred to appropriate the language and discourses of the oppressed ; specificall , poor urban 3frican3mericans. Instead of using the formal and academic language of the art world, she incorporated elements of hip-hop culture into the site. =sers who liked another users work could literall throw mone at it, and the sites pla -mone onl came in denominations of millions of dollars. Fven the term ?et !ang$ was oppositionalA a gang can onl form in opposition to another gang.

Chapter 2 Dumps Visual Conventions

6or all m talk of its interdependenc in the previous chapter, the user experience

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on dump.fm was unusuall immersive, at its best beckoning users to close their other tabs. @ump9s chat was a 4flat4 setup, with ever one, whether a new or experienced user, beloved, neglected or hated, using the same room. <ultiple rooms with names such as 4xxx4 4irl4 or 4bo s4 were set aside b Bipps when the site was created, but the were rarel used except as sandboxes, out-of-the-wa spaces for solitar experimentation. "his setup meant that m attempts at using dump got users9 attention immediatel , without the need for me, with m nascent literac , to 4follow4 or 4subscribe to4 others9 accounts and wait for them to reciprocate. In fact, such mechanisms didn9t exist at all on dumpA the onl wa one user could permanentl show appreciation for another on that user9s profile page was to 4Gike4 their page on 6acebook. =nlike 6acebook or "umblr, where friendships and subscriptions are often predicated on relationships in the actual world or on other social media, dump.fm made it eas to be exposed to new people in a non-superficial wa . "he environment was strikingl meritocratic. >osts appeared to receive attention ; in the form of 4faves$ ; because of their content, not because of the account that created them. unless, of course, the content somehow refers to the users relationship to other users, a point I9ll come back to in chapter 0. "his could put a talented new user on e)ual footing with old timers. "he contrast between the intimac of being thrown into one room with such an active group of users meant that the social order can be upended ver )uickl . =sers also had individualistic rituals around using the site that varied according to their browser or the ends to which the used the site. 6or example, depending on whether one is using Chrome, 6irefox or %afari, dragging an image in the chat room into the text

41

box might have loaded its =BG into the box right awa so that it could be 4dumped,4 or the user might have had to right-click on images to get the =BGs. "he relative clumsiness of the latter maneuver might have led a user to instead (ust fave the combination from which he or she wanted to get the image. Images also appear onl as =BGs in the box and there is also no wa to preview$ ones posts before sending them, so users short-term memor of what the put in the box, or in what order, sometimes fails them, leading to mistake dumps.$

6aving and Critical Beception =nintentionalit also pla s a large part in how dumps are interpreted. I encountered some methodological difficulties in determining which posts could be considered representative of dump.fms culture and which were more marginal, or even negligible. =nless one is in the chat room at the particular moment that a meme takes off, it is difficult to pick memes out of the mass of images, discover how ,and with whom1 the originated. Fven when a post has made the leaderboard for the da and rakes in do'ens of faves, 6aving seems to have as intuitive and difficult-to-elicit affective dimensions as dumping itself. "here do seem to be two t pes of faves# ones that have more to do with the favers immediate reaction to the post, and a kind that has more of an ulterior motive, having to do with getting a certain image into the favers palette for later reuse. "hese two t pes, however, are not mutuall exclusive.

:u)p in :ec&ine;

42

3 general narrative of decline was generall pervading the website at the time of m most intense fieldwork, and it seems to have been brought on b ?ew Wprld and the subse)uent actual-life meetings between users. %ometimes the image chat part of the site would appear to be stagnating, onl to reveal a large block of text conversations between users when text was turned on. "hese conversations often ran a parallel course to the images, however, preferring sub(ects such as drugs, (ocular trash-talking ,especiall between the ounger, teenaged users1 and actual-life mutual ac)uaintances. "hese topics often infuriated outsiders, and several long-time users remarked that the kept the text option off in order to sta focused on the images. @ue to its piecemeal archiving s stem, it was difficult to trul know what it had been like to be on dump in the past, and whatever memories longtime users had were to be taken with a grain of salt, as nostalgia can distort. >art of the reason for this narrative was perhaps the long shadow cast b dumps inaugural users. 3ccording to long-time dump user and webmaster r ', known in the actual world as 5ules Ga>lace, the original wave of influential dump users arrived through an invite code in a post from <arch -./. on the ?ew <useum-run website Bhi'ome.org entitled Introducing# dump.fm.$ 3s the came from that art world-influenced environment, the were 4capital-3 3rtists and were self-motivated to define themselves to societ in that wa .4 "he were also, however, characteri'ed b their flightiness, perhaps because of their commitment to other, more real life pro(ects, such as 4LdoingM the visuals for Lthe music groupM <!<".4 "hough this group cast a long shadow, their influence was limited b their lack of rough-and-read contact with the more permanent communit , and Ga>lace thus characteri'ed their era as the 43fter Fffects era4 ,due to the 3dobe post-production

43

program the seemed to favor1. 4"he passed b the site and left a mark,4 he said. 4*ut most of them left: "he L<!<" gu M posted one glitched-out <icke <ouse gif, dumped it, and got on the hall of fame, and never dumped again.4 "hese transient users saw dump.fm as a space for a certain aesthetic and simpl posted work that fit this aesthetic rather than using it for trul new forms of interaction. *ecause of the large number of faves$ it got, however, their work ended up on the hall of fame$ page and eventuall was integrated into a permanent leader board that appeared on the front page of the site for users who werent logged in. "hus this work came to represent dump.fms aesthetic and sense of humor, for better or worse.

How 3re Images %elected2 >articular problems emerge with stud ing such a culture through the images it selects. Jne was that the source of the images, or cultural materials, on dump.fm cannot be taken as the products of a formall bounded whole with a consistent power relationship to members of the site. "he were heterogeneous ; Fric !elber ,-.//1 called dump a Dshow and tell for the pol morphousl perverse.$ Jne approach is to see ever act of reposting as a re-affirmation of feelings of superiorit . @ump.fm has alwa s to ed with the presumptions of elitism and privilegeA for a long time, the front page described it as an elite image chat communit ,$ and discourses of competitiveness have pervaded spinoffs created b dump members such as "ight 3rtists. Indeed, 3merican elite culture toda has been defined b its omnivorousness ; consumption of both lowbrow and highbrow content ,>eterson and Tern# /PP71, and

44

3merica has dominated the world of cinema, that hallmark of -.th-centur images, for much of its histor . "he internet has consolidated power over this bount b providing unprecedented access to it through widel used tools like !oogle Image %earch. "he members of dump.fm, however, are (ust as vulnerable to man of these developments as the are empowered b them, as we will see in the next chapter in m discussion of the man transgressions of privac that have occurred among members of the site. <an discussions on the site, too, center around the disempowerment of image creators in this new environment of free exchange.

IBG Habits In a less ostentatious wa , being a user of dump.fm encouraged a constant aesthetic awareness of one9s own Internet use. "hough their habits ma have been superficiall similar to those of an other Internet user, the wa a dump user was re)uired to inhabit their dail routine was different. 3s I became more involved in the site, I found m self taking hundreds of tin screengrabs of the more absurd fragments from m ever da activities, with the intention of posting them to dump or using them in dumpinfluenced collages. "his habit of looking for found art and materials for collage might bleed over into the actual world for dump users as well. When I went to a screening of 5urassic >ark 0@ with decrvnk, who is an art student doing a residenc in ?ew Qork, he snickered during the ostentatious opening graphics of the 0@ presentation. I (ust want to make a !I6 out of this whole thing,$ he said. 3bout /. da s later, I was walking in m neighborhood with Fli'abeth,$ 3T3

45

grIpevine. %he has a vastl different dail occupation from decrvnk, working in >B marketing for investors at an oil compan , that has ver different dail demands. %he suddenl became fascinated with an 3"< that was shielded with sheets of scratched-up Gucite through which bright blue lights seared. Gook at that:$ she exclaimed. %omething about the old 3"<s failure to maintain a clean, h perreal look ; in capitalist logic, creating feelings of trustworthiness and predictabilit ; seemed connected to dump.fms aesthetics of failure, though she was unable to articulate what exactl she liked so much about it. Gater that evening, she facetiousl remarked that the diner on Houston %treet where we had been eating looked like, and pla ed mu'ak like, a %ims diner$ ,as in "he %ims, the popular video game that in several incarnations allows users to simulate a virtual home, famil and life1. It finall hit me# what was so pi)uant about this form of humor was that it drew upon something in the real world that resembled a virtual world, in the reverse of the t pical relationship of representation one would expect. 3re these connections (ust (okes2 !rIpevine has said as much, but as I have been repeatedl driving home throughout this text, humor often has a virtual world hidden within it. "he virtual world this particular moment of shared understanding engendered was one in which aesthetics resulting from the gap between the virtual and the actual ; the diner, in its time awa from its actual-world manifestation, would have returned from the virtual world of the %ims in a somewhat different form. "his is precisel what *audrillard prophesi'ed in %imulations$ when he wrote that henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territor $ ,/PI0#/1. "hough pla in virtual worlds is probabl not widespread enough to make such

46

anal sis true of the present, the facetious %t le articles of the online publication @I% maga'ine is similar in challenging highl internet-savv readers to imagine products such as la ered shoes$ in an actual world and evaluate whether such cultural changes are an where near what the would want to see.

@ump.fms Creative Conventions @ump.fm was a new t pe of creative communit , one that gathered around collaboration ,and ma be some mild one-upmanship1 rather than the competition fostered b most art worlds. "he site worked on the presumption of derivativeness ; nothing posted was assumed to be the user9s own work, and even the genealog of self-contained composite images could be difficult to trace back to different members. =sers, in addition, derived parts of their posts from other members9 posts, making unoriginalit part of the premise for ever creative act. @ump took this development a step further b refusing to passivel consumeA instead users narrativi'ed, altered and propagated images. "hus one never knew what would come next in dump9s volatile arrangements of ob(ects, but the most successfull propagated ones seemed to come from a place of either banal familiarit or extreme 4otherness4 ,4wh does this exist2 wh did someone put the time into making it241. "he funniest, most innovative, and most multifaceted ideas persisted. 4"he best thing about dump is when ou see someone else use an image ou made in their own dump,4 said 5ules Ga>lace, the webmaster, in m surve . 4It9s like ou9ve made a new word and added it to the communal lexicon. WordsOimages can be resurrected and remembered hours, da s, weeks, months after the 9re first used, given new context and new meaning.4

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@ump.fm users did indeed communicate using images, then, but their usage was a little more complicated than (ust 4talk4# it was a language being created en media res. "here were no set rules for what an image could signif . 3nd an image that was reused often enough to be remembered as a linguistic unit was often also associated with the person who brought it to the table. >osts, or 4dumps,4 on the site ma have come as single images, a hori'ontall arranged set that puts them in (uxtaposition with each other, or as images accompanied with a short string of text, often caption-like ,sometimes captured in screenshot form in hopes of creating a lasting memeA more on this later1. It was indeed possible, if one was simpl bursting with ideas, to persist in dumping one9s own images and ideas with no elements from others9 dumps. "he website boasted of hosting over a million images, and ou could upload an thing under four megab tes or so from our computer b clicking a button near the text field. =pon successfull being uploaded, an image appeared in a post b itselfA this could be frustrating if ou were moved to upload it specificall b the activities transpiring in the room and envision it among the images that inspired it. 6or a moment, the fragmented text scrap had a moment where it was presented b itself, as if sitting on a pedestal. "his )uirk was, however, useful for figuring out when images first appeared on the site, as the most successful memes rarel appeared alone otherwise. However, the urge to collaborate more often than not would catch up with ou.

@eterritoriali'ation and 6loating %ignifiers 3s images were moved around and reused, the were renamed and

48

reconceptuali'ed, often accumulating meaning (ust like the people and nations often used in examples describing deOreterritoriali'ationA for example, the 4leanback gu ,4 a cartoon character whose altered image has appeared in hundreds of iterations on the site, was originall created with a name, 4Fric *rad %inger,4 that is rarel invoked. 8 <ost of the memetic images on @ump.fm accumulated explanations and meanings over time, but one particular reversed this process, exposing the arbitrariness of meanings that can be applied to floating signifiers. 3n image of the name 4>egg ,4 a signature written in ornate script and evoking a person of a b gone era, and a similar specimen of the name 4%teve4 were floating signifiers for months, their signified becoming repeatedl anchored in disparate imags. 4>egg 4 was in particular the target of emotional text collages and biting (okes. Jftentimes the name 4>egg 4 was (uxtaposed with incongruous images. Jther posts con(ectured at who >egg is, matching her up with an official portrait of a mous woman with short, overl straightened hair, but the amorphous identit of this character was what keeps the meme so persistent. %ome dumps concerning >egg served the purpose of commentar , drawing attention to the arbitrar associations foisted upon this name. 4Web artists are furious atO>egg Ofuck pegg Obut thenOi dont hate pegg now,4 read one assemblage b pummp. 4I live to hit >egg ,4 declared plams, his misog n sounding unthreatening due to users knowledge of his bo ish looks and outh. Jne user, (esusfever, did a rare thing in explicitl identif ing with the character, making an alt account called 4pegg 4 that now receives man pegg -related posts as 4W4 messages. Fventuall , I discovered that <or a + ( no )eans co)p&ete0 ti)e&ine that # )ade of so)e of the =ric >rad 3inger incarnations as of :ece) er 2/12? 'isit https455%esfi&es1%es&e(an1edu5ho)e5rpincus5du)pfra)es1ht)&
5

42

>egg $ was the name of his mother, and his identification then made more sense. "hus this floating signifier was finall re-territoriali'ed, and in a wa that suggested a powerful attachment to a user9s ps che, rather than the detached experimentation more t pical of dump.

>hotoblaster# 3 lightweight, online tool When >hotoblaster, an online image-editing utilit , was created b Ga>lace in -.//, it provoked a small renaissance in dumps collective creativit , particularl in the opinion of its creator. It brought the creative process online and awa from the expensive, resource-heav and difficult to master applications like >hotoshop and into a collaborative, online modalit . Certainl , the marks of its features as well as its limitations are visible in man of dump.fms familiar visible tropes. 6or example, it could superimpose gifs on top of an existing image and scale them, but onl dead center in that image. %ome users en(o ed working with these limitations, but others, seeking to specificall match the visions in their heads, preferred to work with the utilit s strong areas, such as the abilit to shift the entire color scheme of an image with little effort, or turned to WQ%IWQ! editors such as Jnline Image Fditor, despite their vastl different audience.

<oderator <ischief =sers on the site that were designated as 4mods,4 in addition to having the responsibilit of policing the site, were also allowed to use the more H"<G, 5avascript,

5/

and C%%. Jften in the evenings the used this privilege to create a mood or bring out certain images with a particular background or font set. "he also mischievousl created buttons that launched pop-up windows with 4secret4 messages, posted images that took up the entire screen, or set Qou"ube videos, often kitsch music videos, to automaticall pla . While mods were all active users, the sometimes took on a greater creative role# other than muting and blocking troublesome users, the could be highl influential with their additions of H"<G and 5avascript. ?ew features sometimes emerged as a result of their pranks and experiments, such as a persistent faved-image palette recentl having become a permanent part of the site. "he lingua franca of the site, however, remained either hori'ontall arranged rows of images, or composite images that made sophisticated (okes on their own. "he former could fall into a variet of categories or combinations of categories.

@ump.fm 3ssemblages and Image " pes# 3 %potters !uide %patial Belationships <uch of dump9s visual punning was based around gestalt recognition of visual patterns, 6or some posters, however, the hori'ontal rows in which their arrangements would eventuall appear was a plane of space. "he presumption of visual continuit between images could thus create a narrative, even if it appeared wildl surreal and fantastical. @ifferences in scale between the images caused users to come up with ideas that the ma not have thought of in the ph sical world, where man ob(ects alwa s occur in similar si'es unless specificall designated as miniature$ or (umbo.$ Fxamples

51

included 5enga blocks falling on a woman in a wheelchair ,http#OOdump.fmOpO(ertronicOII7-PPE1. Images that were intentionall left incomplete ; for use in a website la out, for example ; also served as points of departure for scenes that were impossible or improbable in actual life. If the placement of images within their framed lined up perfectl , the could create surprisingl realistic continuous-looking narratives, such as pixelated blood spurting out of an arm whose hand was still writing with a pencil.

Bepetitive 4spams4# @ue to dump9s flat la out and the gathering of all members into one room, the flow of images in this room served as a kind of commons for all members. "his fact was brought to the fore when members made attempts to overtake the commons with hundreds of copies of an image, an image larger than the 8..-pixel limit ,which could onl be done b someone with moderator privileges1. %ometimes glitter text was used to repeatedl and redundantl enforce a message, often for humorous effect, as when eliath, clearl self-conscious of the obnoxiousness of such behavior created a wall of pink glitter text reading @estro ing the Communit $ amid a conversation about trolls.7 When text screenshots were used, their lack of visual impact was often offset b long stretches of blank space. E When someone complimented kiptoks aesthetic prowess, he made a screenshot of their words at various heights within the frame and tiled the screenshots artfull in a relativel graceful spam.$ 3ee http455du)p1f)5p5e&iath52517/811 #n this case? du)p archi'e pages sad&( don@t preser'e the in'asi'e effect of such eha'iors upon the co))ons1 7 A&so see http455du)p1f)5p5%a.efu&ness524678481
6

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Captioning "he association between the image and its caption might have been sub(ect to several interpretations, especiall when a single caption was acting on multiple images. =sers would fave even if their interpretations differed, so long as the could cobble together a connection that made sense to them. <an caption$ relationships, despite connections that seemed initiall tenuous, were good at directing the beholders attention, perhaps because gifs were more successful at embod ing verbs than man still images.

53

Figure 1, http !!dump"fm!p!#o$!%&%2'(2

In this example posted b (o , the mom$ was likel to be taken to describe the animation of the e e on four legs, despite the fact that there was little that was momlike$ about it ,unless, perhaps, one was a fan of Gouise *ourgeouiss spider sculptures, which are named <aman.$1. "his was because there was a salient connection between caption and illustration. "he caption engaged with the two accompan ing images on distinct levels# walking$ being the action in which the gif was engaging, and all over$ with the fact that the clip art accompan ing it depicted mountain exploration.

3 <illion !ifs of Weird Gines$ 3n intervention that improved upon the tendenc of dumps to provide too much information at once was the use of lines or other unconventional connectors to describe the relationship between ob(ects. Gines, aside from creating breathing room ; similar to how punctuation divides a sentence; could be read diagrammaticall or metaphoricall as describing the relationship between two elements. It could be ambiguous whether an image )ualified as a connector, but often an image would read that wa because it 54

contained little semiotic information in itself, or seemed to have been devised to reconcile hori'ontall ad(acent elements. 3 soccer ball bouncing from side to side, for example, was championed as a connector when it appeared on dumpA one user remarking that the missed this relationship.$ >erhaps users had forgotten about the balls use as a connector in its earlier incarnation, and it was actuall being rediscovered in this instance.

55

%ome lines could be interpreted as having either a metaphorical or a literal useA in funWindows dump, for example, the central line evokes the tra(ector of a cat to , a cats ga'e or a cats paw in the air, but it also evokes an indirect, circuitous path between the concept of a bottle of pills ,and the recreational use the evoke to most dump users1 and a cat that is fascinated with the movements of a)uarium fish.

Figure 2, http !!dump"fm!p!fun)indo*!+(%,-2+

>unctuating with Images %imilar to how a word can look strange and appear to lose meaning when one is forced to write it over and over again, dump sometimes became oversaturated with a

56

single image when it was nearl introduced. "he reverse of accumulated meaning could occur with such images, particularl in the case of forced memes$ ; themes favored b one particular person that dont )uite catch on with others, or dont catch on in the same wa . >lams, a oung college student who had built up a m sterious persona on dump b refusing to reveal his entire face in webcam photos, was also fond of overusing forced memes. He used an animation of a cute mother hamster suckling her babies, for example, in several bi'arre scenarios where it was seemingl placed (ust for the sake of being irrelevant, perhaps due to the aimless ga'e of the mother hamster. %he can be seen failing to bat an e e at footage of a violent, sexual dance between a black coupleI or react to a
Figure ( The .las/ hamster"

flirtatious anime girl or a tailspinning airplane ,http#OOdump.fmOpOplamsOP0CP80.1. "he lack of expressive power of this meme didnt stop it from becoming popular among other usersA it merel meant that the hamster mother and her babies were acted upon instead of being perceived as agents that could themselves act. ,http#OOdump.fmOpOplamsOPC-I8E.1

% mmetr @ump.fm users usuall cared about the aesthetics of their posts on a less-than-holistic levelA though there were harmonies and contrasts, the overall effect of posts on the site was often somewhat crude and heterogeneous. Jne intervention against this tendenc that was eas to carr out without below-the-surface image tinkering was that of s mmetr .
8

3ee http#OOdump.fmOpOgrinickOP--CCI7 57

%ome users might have repeated a certain image on either end of their post for little discernible conceptual reason other than creating something more aestheticall pleasing. It serves this function in 5ertronics post, with the twin Hell$ graphics ,ostensibl generated using 6lamingtext.com1 creating the sense of a foreboding entrancewa , albeit in a facetious wa considering that the Hell$ presented here looks like a corporate office, possibl a doctors office.

Figure &, http !!dump"fm!p!#ertronic!%,(12(,

8rends in Bontent 3dbusters# @ump.fm and Commercialism =ntil the internets culture of sharing made it impossible for brands to protect their images and logos, the appropriation of commercial imager for derivative works existed in ver proscribed spaces. "he 3dbusters st le of subverting brand logos was familiar to man people. It involved using the weaponr of advertisers, such as logos and mascots, and reversed their messages so that the become 4un-advertisements.4

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Jccasionall , however, 3dbusters had been accused of duplicating the aggressions of their target corporations, b , for instance, encouraging readers to fetishi'e its 4=nswooshers4 sneakers instead of ?ikes.

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@ump users sometimes engaged in this sort of pla , parod ing corporate logos on the same dialogic terms as h pothete has in figure / below. Here Wal-<arts rollback$ smile face is replaced with a similar logo that is instead frowning.

Figure - http !!dump"fm!p!h$pothete!&%&,100

With few monetar pressures and no supporterOsubscriber base to rall , however, the could also have a more ambiguous relationship with corporate imager . "heir 6/

method was more likel to be idle experimentation than purposeful sabotage. Without a need to use material means appealing to the t pical consumer, such as slick printed maga'ines and sneakers, to disseminate their ideas, the could instead focus on sophisticating those ideas. Commentar on capitalism on dump is more explorator , skirting the polemical, one-sided statements usuall desired in capitalism. @ump.fm users seemed particularl aware of the tendenc of countercultural aesthetic movements to get absorbed into capitalistic pro(ects, such as mainstream fashion movements. "he idea of developing a unified aesthetic that opposed these pro(ects was thus pointless to them. Working from an urban, 3merican perspective, the were, like 3dbusters, aware of the imager to which people are overexposed and used this familiarit as a point of leverage, often lampooning the excessive )ualities of certain brands image and the amplification of these excesses through repetition and advertising. %ometimes the drew attention to this sort of overexposure b reproducing it themselves. @ump.fm creator B der Bipps, for example, was often spotted wearing head-to-toe =nder3rmor athletic gear, and the fact that he could use it to make a spectacle out of himself pointed to the ludicrousness of the brand9s encouragement to dress in this manner. His interest in identif ing and intensif ing certain brand images continued with <onster Fnerg and *oost <obile, which, he told design maga'ine >rint was a product of his attraction to pubescent male aggression as a thing to attain$ ,5ohnson -.//1. "he virtuall elicitable e)uivalent of this performance was careful looking. In this wa , dump.fm users made the most seemingl commonplace ob(ects, such as brand logos, into something disorienting and unfamiliar. 3 brand logo, for example, ma have

61

been broken down into its formal characteristics and (uxtaposed with another image that ma have shared its iconic properties but not its s mbolic ones. "he s mbolic characteristics, in fact, ma also have been hilariousl , ironicall divergent from those of the brand logo. !rIpevine, for example, (uxtaposed the =nder3rmor and Chanel logos, creating a sense of visual homogeneit ,both logos were essentiall
Figure ,, http !!dump"fm!p!gr%pevine!-&0+'' 1

interlocking, round shapes1. "his homogeneit subverted the gendered marketing of the brands# Chanel is much better known for its womens products, and =nder 3rmor for its mens. "he message of a (uxtaposition, however, was not necessaril that =nder 3rmor was failing to be masculine or Chanel failing to be feminine. Instead it made visible the codes that become habituali'ed in advertisings audience and contrast their m riad ; and cultivatedl uni)ue$ ; associations with the starkl uncommunicative )ualit the taken on in this environment of defamiliari'ation. Cloroxx took this idea one step further b swapping the geometric shapes associated with the Windows and 3didas logos. P

See http#OOdump.fmOpOcloroxxxOI0IPII8, http#OOdump.fmOpOcloroxxxOI0IPIIC

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Comparisons were also sometimes made between corporate imager ; often of the banal kind that is meant to be looked past ; and art.$ "railmixxs post below is interesting because the art$ image it uses is iconic and powerful ; usuall poor fodder for dump because of the lack of semiotic freedom one has with such an image ; while the commercial image it uses is banal and utilitarian, a milk carton from a budget brand in the ?ortheast that is all but overlooked b the customer. Qet, the similarit in color scheme between the two highlights how commonplace the both are and pla s with different notions of iconicit . In an environment like dump, it also almost goes without sa ing that this post )uestions the line between high and low culture.

3lternatel , dump.fm users self-consciousl incorporated some of the logic of the institution referenced. 6or example, b inserting another user9s name into the Qou"ube logo, benXdover turned it into 46rank Hats,4 thus imitating the commodification of personal information brought about b toda 9s highl invasive social-media corporation B&assicis)

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<ore fre)uentl , the s mmetr trope on dump fre)uentl uses !recian columns and other Classical imager as its content. "he relativel fre)uent appearance of !recian columns on dump.fm ,at least in comparison to the m riad other sub(ects that could appear1, particularl when the were s mmetrical framing devices, seemed to be a continuation of a larger tradition in ?et 3rt. Jne wa of imbuing the use of the s mmetr trope with greater self-consciousness was through evoking this pseudo-!recian aesthetic. Its repetition had alread become a running (oke in internet art circles outside of dump.fm, as indicated b %terling Crispins compilation "umblr entitled !reek ?ew <edia %hit.$ @ump.fm users, however, were less interested in mindlessl reproducing this aesthetic than using it as a marker of self-consciousness about the principle of s mmetr , and perhaps attention to traditional aesthetic ideals in general. "here were pla ful subversions of this usage as wellA pegg sandwiched the text fragment Im not racist butN$ between two Boman columns, acknowledging the conceptual link between /Pth-centur racist ideolog and an elevation of Classical human achievements and facial features made in texts like %tephen 5a !oulds "he <ismeasure of <an/., and perhaps )uestioning the ?et 3rt worlds motivations in making such Classical allusions. 3s a graduate of *ennington Colleges art department, he was likel aware of such aesthetic debates. Jthers hoarded columns and other Hellenic structures into single posts in what could be seen as a burles)ue of other users behavior or a resource for other users to draw upon in their posts.//

1/ 11

3ee http#OOdump.fmOpOpegg OP0I77C/ 3ee http#OOdump.fmOpO@oritoWitchOPC7E0CP 64

Figure 0, http !!dump"fm!p!nicool!%2-&,&1

"he fre)uenc of this particular content was observed b %terling Crispin on his compilation blog !reek ?ew <edia %hit and anal 'ed b *rian @roitcour on Bhi'ome.org, who took the urns and statues, used with complete, intentional seriousness, that existed at the intersection of art histor and a posthuman world 4perceive,d1 primaril with the aid of machines4# 4"he art of the !reeks has been used in the past as a touchstone for artists who measure their own vision against an anthropocentric one4 ,@roitcour -.//1. In the words of artist, blogger and dump member "om <ood , however, he was 4schooled4 b commentersLCM, who explained that the ob(ects were present as defaults in man 0@-modeling programs. <ood 9s reaction to the piece was generall scathing, as he feared that this piece gave net art an excessivel legitimate place in the course of art histor for all the wrong reasons ,<ood -./-1. "here were values inherent in software companies9 choice of these shapes as example images too, however, and dump.fm members continued to engage in criti)ue b (uxtaposing them with images representing what these values might be. 65

Whos %peaking2 >uppetr and >eformance 6ar more common was users performativel using text ,screencapped or not1 to suggest speech on behalf of some entit in an image. 3ccording to "erri %ilvio, the practice of attributing speech and agenc to inanimate ob(ects, in what he refers to as animation, has a long histor in performance studies, where it takes its cues from investigations in the anthropolog of religion of practices of Den-souling matter$ ,?elson -../#0.A )uoted in %ilvio -.//1. 3lfred !ell ,/PPI1 theori'es that sacred ob(ects are invested with human agenc through both formal )ualities that represent personhood and through individuals interactions with them. It is )uestionable whether images can be seen as sacred to such an iconoclastic communit , except perhaps as something to be immediatel blasphemed. However, %ilvio also adds that <ausss theor of the gift as part of an individual invested in an ob(ect, as well as <arxs commodit fetishism, do the work of pushing such attachments outside the overtl religious$ sphere. "he fact that webcam photos and other images of dump users are highl sub(ect to this animation, and that dump continuall explores commodit fetishism through its various operations on commercial imager , means that dump users are definitel engaging with this secular kind of animation. @ump users used these animations to impersonate or address other users using snippets of text that were spoken b those users. "he text could also merel sound like it was spoken b them, and thus be intentionall misattributed to a particular user through the use of some other mark of that persons identit , such as a webcam photo. It was sometimes difficult, however, to discern which figure in the post was

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speaking if more than one was present. >osts attributing speech to other users usuall included a webcam image of them with an appropriate facial expression, but this did not alwa s make the post communicate an more clearl . 6or example, bitch posted a picture of sakalak (uxtaposed with the phrase %omebod catch that damn bird:$.

Figure %, http !!dump"fm!p!.itch!%1'&%1,

6or someone unaccustomed to them, these moments of animation could sometimes be difficult to read. "he image of the grackle, heavil cropped, had long been a memetic favorite on dump, but the fact that it has been animated in this post to move around in circles like an actual bird ,albeit a cartoonish one1 takes the meme to a new, bi'arre level. %akalaks image, bounded b the straight-lined limits of a webcam photo, also struggles to transcend the limited conditions of its mimesis as the post attempts to imbue it with the power of speechA its difficult for the viewer to imagine him speaking those words, as the wild animation of the bird draws the e e more and has more agenc through its animation. "he post ultimatel communicates clearl , however, because of the s)uare boundaries of both images, which indicates their self-consciousness as representations and places them on the same plane of realit . "his explicitl acknowledged the presence of other personalities and how the 9ve left their mark. "he text snippet 6rankhats explain,$ for example, "here were

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several subcategories of dumps that involved the author performing as a character rather than as hierself, but this was one of the most explicit. 3nother subt pe involved impersonation of a person outside the room, or indeed, outside of the realm of normal humanit . In one post b -@FF>C=, Jprah Winfre had supposedl 4signed off4 on the idea of a dog that pra ed alongside monks./- "he facetious use of the signatures of famous people was similar to the reterritoriali'ing pro(ect of the 4>egg 4 meme. "his logic was repeated in the facetious addition of man different t pes of watermarks to images, such as adding the *ra''ers$ watermark to images that could be humorousl ,mis1interpreted as pornographic. 3nother t pe of dump can animate various figures in the post to the posters liking. "hese 4speechOthought bubble4 dumps tread as though an entit in the post were speaking or thinking the ad(acent text. 3nimation was not restricted to first-person speech alone, either. =sers sometimes identified themselves or others with certain ob(ectsA a small animation of a pair of ankhs, for example, was associated with kiptok and ssnack b one user with the usage of a text snippet reading kiptok ,left1 and ssnack ,right1$. %ometimes text and an accompan ing image had a loose enough relationship that the text might be interpreted as either addressing the person or being spoken b that personA %amantha didnt remember whether she mimicking Begina$, complete with hand-clap emo(is for extra sass, or pleading for an end to her harassment in a post she made earl in 5anuar -./0. However, the post did conve the hostile nature of Begina$s t pical communications, and Begina$ herself faved it, happ for the attention.

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3ee http#OOdump.fmOpO-@FF>C=OPC.P08E 68

Figure +, http !!dump"fm!p!1lam2am!+&'1&%1

"he caption might be made more explicit through the use of various t pes of speech or thought balloons,$ a trope borrowed from cartooning. ,http#OOdump.fmOpOkintralaOI.8CP/.1. %creenshots of actual conversations from i>hones, which use a speech-bubble theme and are a part of internet popular culture due to blogs like @amn Qou 3utocorrect:,$ have been 4illustrated4 using images as well, with the images on the left and right sides of the post representing participants in the conversation.

Conceptual pastiches 3 decidedl difficult$ t pe of dump, conceptual pastiches more closel resembled traditional paper collages, as the made no claim to spatial relations between images, nor were the performative. Instead, the images evoked one another in a web of signification. Interpreting them could re)uire background knowledge stemming from 3mericanOWestern popular culture, academic culture, and the uni)ue fusion between the two that was dump. 6or example, !rasss dump was a chain of partial and unusuall fragmented

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screenshots b various other members ,the first in the series, for example, bridged two images1A the most e e-getting one in the series seemed to be a )uestion about sweating vodka,$ and the most recogni'able image was that of Qo-Gandi +isser, a member of the %outh 3frican band @ie 3ntwoord who is perhaps best known for her outrageous dress and )uestionable Yef,$ or white trash, taste. Jn the margins, however, were an image of !oldfish crackers ,evoking a seapunk$ aesthetic, but in a distant, contrived wa 1 and two s mbols denoting nuclear waste, as well as a small fragment from a graph with a rainbow underneath. "hese latter three connoted instead of denoted, connecting the idea of alcohol and illegal drugs sweated out of the bod to the idea of toxicit and artificialit . "he erraticall ordered ideas in these posts ma have made them difficult to interpret, but the also reflected the fast-moving and multifarious communit in microcosm, and thus the never looked out of place. http#OOdump.fmOpOgrassOP8-EC.E

7/

Figure 1' http !!dump"fm!p!grass!+-20&'0

>roduction and >rocessing of Images @espite the fact that a rich interpla of meanings occurred with the reuse of images in rows in its chat room, dumps old front page alwa s promoted self-contained images that s nthesi'ed disparate elements, and these tended to be the images that reappeared in other mediums, such as "umblr and 6acebook. "hese images pla ed more nicel with traditional notions of the unified art pieceA the maintain their integrit when alienated from their neighbors b a "umblr dashboard or a 6acebook photo page. However, if a self-contained image contains too much information to fit into users short attention spans or the 8..x8.. pixel threshold for resi'ing, it reaches a certain point

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where it loses exploitabilit . "hus, in some cases images that have gone through multiple transformations b the dump.fm communit can be said to be more finished$# both more developed in terms of ideas and less likel to be dumped again because of their proliferating significations.

@rawings @espite the lack of emphasis on traditional first-order artistic techni)ues in the dump.fm communit , such as drawing, painting, and photograph , there has been a histor of original drawings, most of them cartoonlike, that have been well-received in the communit . <ostl the consist of drawings that have been re)uested b various usersA one user post a single drawing, designating their interest in it, and other users might re)uest drawings in a similar vein. %amantha9s caricatures and portraits of different members on the site seemed to be referenced from life. Gilcriticals, with a simple, untrained st le, drew >okRmon from memor on re)uest. He also made irreverent cartoons about other dump users. %ome of his drawings seemed to mine below the surface of dump9s visual lexicon, uncovering sexualit in places where it was never expected or warranted. "he contain an element of satirical commentar that is difficult to express in a straightforward wa with collage alone. 6or example, when sakalak posted pictures of himself eating a slice of pi''a in a hospital gown but refused to explain wh he was in the hospital, lilcriticals he added computerdrawn elements to the picture# a nude bod exhibiting a vagina. His (oke was that sakalak had had a sex-change operation. Gilcriticals was best known, however, for his grotes)ue and cartoonish drawings

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of >okRmon characters. "he blobbish appearance of most of them was due to their being drawn from memor , but the also created a sense of childish innocence that was )uickl disrupted upon closer inspection. 6or example, one drawing was of three well-known >okRmon, having somehow sprouted penises, filming a pornographic movie. When asked about this particular drawing, lilcriticals said it was a commission$ re)uested b frakbudd , a user who occasionall has garnered negative attention for his abrasive communications, usuall for delving little too personall into his identit as an autistic ga man ,for example, he once cammed his perineum and reposted the image repeatedl 1. 6rakbudd had also made some fora s into drawing, but instead of appealing to the familiar childhood sub(ect of >okRmon, he made personal versions of Bage "oons, a form of four-panel comic strip originating with Cchan that involved a set of stock characters with grotes)ue and exaggerated facial expressions. His portra al of himself was self-deprecating ; he drew himself as a balding, thumb-shaped head, and intentionall misspelled much of the dialogue ; and the sub(ect matter, which involved conflicts between himself and 6rederick, the moderator who eventuall banned him, was self-pit ing. His difficult-to-digest ideas, which told of the pain he experienced in his life, found a more endearing manifestation in lilcriticalss fan art, where it (oined the re)uests of other users in a standardi'ed s stem of input and output.

6igurative Combinations %ome of the most successful self-contained images on dump.fm drew together images that would have been unlikel to coexist in an one persons imagination, let alone nature. "hese included wlatimer being lifted into the air b two stationar drawings

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of frogs, or a nude version of leanback gu and a crocodile (umping rope. %ome of the images that involve the likenesses of dump members speak to the ob(ectification that comes with making their likenesses into memes. 6or example, wlatimer edited the same animation of himself floating in the air to include Begina$s head/0, in particular an image of her wearing a strange flowered denim hat and an overl cheerful expression that had appeared in several memetic contexts. "he fact that her head is unrealisticall oversi'ed and separated from her bod indicates that this usage of her likeness is meant to con(ure other memetic usages rather than Begina$ as a person.

Commentar on Computer =se 3s man dump users found themselves simultaneousl living in a digital milieu and complicating and sophisticating it for themselves, it perhaps followed that man would use this as an opportunit to make the creative process more transparent and democratic. "hough watching someone else use image-editing software is usuall an infuriating rather than edif ing experience, it sometimes added to the humor of a memetic image to watch it be transformed. %ince it is nigh impossible for affect to manifest in the wa one operates a mouse or uses pulldown menus, )ils animation of how he spheri'ed a popular memetic image in >hotoshop/C highlights how images with particular affective components for humans are nonetheless indifferentl converted into data b computers. ?ot all work concerning computer use was predicated on master , howeverA dvvidpws mesmeri'ing !I6 of the opening splash of >hotoshop C%/8 defamiliari'es a mundane activit and shows a bewilderment at all the strange processes that occur upon
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3ee http455du)p1f)5p5%&ati)er581/7523 3ee http#OOdump.fmOpO)ilOI-/7P83ee http455du)p1f)5p5d''idp%52718157 74

opening that behemoth of an application.

6ormal Characteristics# 6irstness >la ing with %hape and Fdge "he perfectl white or transparent image backgrounds demanded b web designers had led to stark contrasts between figure and ground in both animated gifs and commercial stock imager . @ump.fms site design, with its white background, generall cooperated with this commonplace ethic, but this didnt mean that it wasnt noticed and commented upon, often visuall .

>la With >ositive and ?egative %pace Instead of tr ing to simpl conceal or ignore this empt space ,as much as it was necessar for superimposing images on top of each other1, some users took advantage of it as a design element. "he role of positive and negative space was often highlighted when a moderator changed the background from the standard white to something more colorful, making images with white backgrounds obvious. Jther times, mere familiarit with an image did the trick. In order to draw attention specificall to the negative space, here @ada umn used imager that had become iconic on dump.fm ; a gif of a pair of kicking female legs, ver similar to the image patterned here; had found itself attached to all manner of creatures on the site. "his created a familiar surface be ond which the viewer is more likel to peer to notice the white space.

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Figure 11, http !!dump"fm!p!Dada$umn!+(%0%2%

<aking <incemeat 3 few users, particularl kiptok and (o , liked to cut up images into narrow strips with little regard for their sub(ect matter, in the process making them into generic design elements.

Figure 12, http !!dump"fm!p!3ipto3!+&'&2-(

"he t picall indifferent nature of these posts was successful contrasted with human warmth in kiptoks post, which expands upon an acknowledgment made b "om <ood in a blog post of his role in making a pastiche-like !I6, alongside ssnack and (o .

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<ood called the !I6 Industrial >rocess Camo.$ "he images glitched mixture of elements, none of which were actuall drawn b the users but rather found b them, effectivel collapses an labor that went into creating it. In a new dump featuring this !I6, kiptok decided to expand individual users work and presence, taking advantage of the hori'ontal compactness of puts a bunch of his and (o s minces$ to la down a large number of them. "he effect, for those familiar with <ood s blog post, is that of a chopped-and-screwed version of itA this is helped along b a screenshot of part of an acknowledgement made b "om <ood in his blog# generous nods to ssnack, (o , kiptok,$N in the original blog post, the final item is the anon mous others,$ but here the sentence is left unfinished, perhaps setting the stage for future expansions of labor and subse)uent laundr lists b other dump members.

%hape Cutouts 3ll digital images, in the end, have s)uare edgesA some (ust have them more obviousl than others. Intensif ing this condition on dump, man of the crops that dump users make from larger images are done using the %creen Capture feature built into computer operating s stems, resulting in s)uare borders. "here have been man attempts, however, to subvert the hegemon of the s)uare, some rooted in new media and others in more traditional aesthetic ideals. Cutting out parts of images in wa s that mischievousl subverted their contours was a refreshing answer to the hegemon of s)uare images on the site. "he feathering tool in >hotoshop allows users to smoothl cut around the border of a figure, but used to an extreme extent, it can also make an edge look excessivel smoothed out or blurred.

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"he aesthetic of this transformation suggests an exaggerated version of I.s glam shots, but the focus on the center of an expressive face is also reminiscent of the close-ups in soap operas and melodramatic films. %imilarl , maxlabor had also masked commonl used images and fragments over moving shapes, such as a gif of a wisp of smoke, so that memetic images could be suggested without being entirel present. Heavil feathered renditions of these images, b contrast, melodramaticall drew attention to these images.

%cale

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dump.fm automaticall resi'ed all images to 8.. pixels or smaller, but it was difficult to determine whether some images that are close to this threshold would be resi'ed or not. @ump users would sometimes cut a large image into several 4slices4 and post them rapidl one after another to get past the limit, often becoming irritated when someone interrupted them. When users hunted for images on !oogle %earch, the sometimes failed to notice their small si'e or proximit to the resi'ing threshold, resulting in accidental ; and sometimes comic ; contrasts in image si'e. Garger images read as louder and more significant, but small ones, perhaps because the were unobtrusive, had more memetic power. Beverberasias dump of a thumbnail-si'ed version of the leanback gu (uxtaposed with a blurr picture of dancers at a prom hugging themselves takes on a different mood because of the scale used. "hough the original leanback gu drawing is roughl the si'e of the dancers in the photo, the shrunken version indicates that he belongs in a different universe entirel . His empath for the dancers and possible earning to (oin them is thus made comical.

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http#OOdump.fmOpO(o OPC7ICIC

Figure 1(, http !!dump"fm!p!rever.erasia!%,,+(%1

"he more tin , fragmented images were entered into the present dump lexicon, 8/

the more likel posts were to consist mostl of absurdl undersi'ed thumbnails and fragments of images, as well as the nondescript minces$ of images described below. !rass and (o pioneered this st le.

!estalt matches in shapeOcolor @ump users often had a strong intuitive sense of echoes in shape, color, and movement across widel disparate images. 3 popular dump b godless$ compared a raccoon pla ing with a water irrigator to a woman pla ing a harp ,http#OOdump.fmOpOgodlessOI/-7//E1. >epper was a longtime member whose posts were so well color-coordinated that some people referred to him as a 4bot.4 He often used >hotoblaster to alter the colors on one image so that the 9d match another, even if it looked unnatural. His st le was so distinctive that an image appeared on dump of a t-shirt that read 4>epper 3esthetic -.0-4 L-M.

!litched Images @espite their embrace of technolog as a creative medium, dump users were also attracted to its vulnerabilities and potential for failure, and this was manifest in both the content and st le of their images and posts. !litching images, in particular, was one of the more officiall endorsed aspects of the dump aesthetic, as evinced b the glitched <icke <ouse9s place on the leader board ,in spite of its author9s lack of commitment to the communit 1. >erhaps this was because it communicated this interest in failure in a wa that would make sense to an outsider. =nlike man of the operations mentioned in this

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section, glitching an image re)uites some knowledge of image programming. "hough someone can glitch an image b opening it as a text file and hapha'ardl deleting sections of data, making actual artistic decisions re)uires a knowledge of the hex data that commands the arrangement of colored pixels. 3nother process known as datamoshing, which scrambles video data so that color and motion data are mismatched, re)uires data to move through an intricate circuit of programs and file-t pe conversions. %ince the he da of proficient glitchers inhabiting dump, however, Ga>lace had been at work breaking down these technical barriers. In -./-, he developed a tool called 4>hoto 6ucker4 in connection to >hotoblaster that allowed users to intentionall corrupt images b repeatedl , aggressivel clicking a button, imitating the digital aura of ears of data conversions and transfers. It made sense that an online medium meant to fight the approach of banal imager might have sought to make users more aware of the medium that the used ever da . !litched images, however, were rarel a part of the realit of online image encounterA poor images,$ as Hito %te erl details in In @efense of the >oor Image,$ were far more commonl encountered b the masses with the manhandling and filet pe conversions. "he poor image is a rag or a ripA an 3+I or a 5>F!, a lumpen proletarian in the class societ of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution,$ he writes. 3las, beaut had not et been found in the exploitation of the artifacts and flaws that came with these new methods of distribution. It seemed that such discoveries must be rediscoveries,$ having some latenc from the time in which the were common. 6or example, the blurr edges that distinguish bicubicall resi'ed images, and were

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considered undesirable on images with sharp edges, such as pixel-art !I6s, had begun to be used intentionall in some images, once the nearest-neighbor algorithim, which preserves sharp edges, became an option on >hotoblaster.

!estural 6ragmentation >osts on dump can sometimes seem devoid of their authors emotionsA its hard to tell how the feel toward the ob(ects within. %ome online communities have adapted to the absence of facial expressions with reaction faces,$ but dump.fm seems to favor other miscellaneous parts of the bod , particularl arms and hands. 5ust as dump users found existing partial images of bodies, including their own, highl exploitable, the also found salient areas of more complete images to be prone to exploitation as well. "hese bod parts arent exclusivel human, either ; tin images of various dogs paws have appeared in countless dumps, looking comical next to ob(ects that are larger or have more contrast. 6ragments can also have more abstract uses, including trul abstract dumps where the are embraced as fragments rather than being seen as part of something larger and more figurative.

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Figure 1& http !!dump"fm!p!dvvidp*!+,,&'(-

"hese images give a place of appreciation to graphics that are meant to be ignored, such as buttons ,from the era when images were favored as conve ances for links in web design1, divider lines, or bullet points. "he also create order out of disorderA here dvvidpw has created a triangle shape, as well as some semblance of s mmetr . "he variable directions of the lines and shapes present lead the e e backward and forward, keeping it from veering off of the image.

=se of "ext @uring the time of m fieldwork, screenshot culture on dump.fm was burgeoning. Capturing text in screenshot form is part of a culture of capturing online interactions that is detailed further in the next chapter.

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3nother wa textual ideas or concepts could be propagated on dump was through text generators. 6lamingtext, !litter "ext !enerator and 6amil Gobb allow users to enter text, which the generator then turns into images of what Curt Cloninger called blingee-modified nuptial-script t pograph ,$ replete with flames, swirls, and sparkles. Jnce banished to the bin of bad web design with the garish spin the put on text, found a new life, even getting openl promoted on dump.fm9s dropdown menu of image-editing tools. "he ideas propagated through glitter text tended to be more anal tical and a priori than purel observational, and with their self-deprecating humor, the offered a reflexive take on dump practice because their text was not merel copied. "hough plent of screenshot-like fragments of sentences ; useful for linking multiple clauses together in collage ; and lowbrow stuff, often written in chatspeak, existed in dump9s vast cache of 6amil Gobb images, the intellectual background of man dump.fm members also emerged here, manifest in namedrops of famous intellectuals ,46uck 3ll 6oucault4, rilke$1 and trend technolog -related academic terms ,4post-human41.

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Figure 1- 4 search through dump5s images from Famil$Lo..$ reveals language in a variet$ of registers"

<ore reflexivel , some of them gestured toward common dump experiences that went unspoken as the sub(ect matter of users chats veered awa from the user experience to which the became so habituated. 46aving with m e es closed,4 addressed the m sterious motivations of some faves, 4- much concept4 spoke to the overwhelmed feelings of those who couldnt mentall process ever post. @espite the extroverted uses for which these text generators were originall intended ; such as greetings like Welcome to m Homepage:$ ; some glitter texts also took the form of notes to self,$ such as one that read possibl useful for a future dump.$ "ext could also be deterritoriali'ed in classic dump.fm fashionA words meant to be innocuous could be turned around to speak of stronger meanings. %apphire, for example, dumped the sentence i want D<iscellaneous !raphics to die,$ the middle phrase t ped here in scare )uotes because it was in a different st le from the rest of the text. 3dorned with blues swirls and sparkles, it appeared to have been taken from one of the websites of ore that featured collections of public-domain$ graphics for other webmasters to use.

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"he i want to die,$ decked out in an incongruous rainbow pattern, meanwhile, was originall a single image posted b mikeveeeeeee, but cut in half b either himself or bunn hentman so that other images could be recursivel inserted into it. "he text in previousl existing screenshots, was (oined with other st li'ed text were sometimes pasted together to create a kind of cut-up poetr . "he ideas expressed in individual lines of text making up these 4poems4 were often wildl contradictor due to the heterogeneit of the materials, so connectors like but$ and then$ were particularl important. "he success of this t pe of post often depended on the grammaticalit of individual sentences or clauses.

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Chapter ( The 2pectacle of Interaction

"he catchphrase with which dump.fm was originall marketed was talking with images.$ "he wa the image culture on the site developed, however, has left the verb talk$ a little misleading. "hough there is no doubt that a visual language has developed on dump, it doesnt use verbal language as its handmaid. Instead, as we saw in the previous chapter, posts are cobbled together based on visual connections between them, the concepts to which the refer, andOor some s nerg between these two. "he have a communicative purpose, but no set audience. Jftentimes these (uxtapositions roll on and on for hours and hoursA their creators occasionall appropriating images posted b other users, in a format that doesnt resemble verbal conversation so much as musical improvisation. "his exchange is periodicall interspersed b more conventional text conversations, which in less creativel productive groupings of dump users sometimes distract from the image. In these times, talking with images$ became more like chatting alongside images.$ "his sometimes leads to admonishments in the form of "FZ" *BF3TFB$ images from users not involved in the conversation. "his was about as close to directl addressing one another with images as dump users got. Instead of content it was through the creation and performative repetition of those images that users established relationships with one another. I use the word performative in the sense 5.G. 3ustin la s out in How to Do Things ith ords. "he most vivid

example 3ustin proposes is that in the actual world is that when a )ualified officiator in the right context pronounces a couple married, their legal relationship is transformed. %imilarl , on dump, posting or reposting certain images had a transformative effect that is ontologicall e)uivalent to an action. I use word repetition in 5udith *utlers sense in that 88

it is imperfectA meanings of images were transformed b social context as well as ad(acent images.

"extual 3ppropriation "ext memes, for some, held a subordinate place in the ranks of dump9s scale of value. 4Jver the last ear, though, @ump has degenerated into three main sub(ects -trolling, c berbull ing, and screengrabs,4 said r ', thus placing screengrabs alongside artistic banalit and hostile behavior. @ump users indeed used screengrabs to make fun of others, and to free'e textual moments in time that might otherwise recede into the deep recesses of dump9s databases. 3s man instances of text in dump.fm posts were in fact screenshots from previous discussions on the site or elsewhere on the web, it was difficult to tell whether words on the site were a users own or copied and pasted from somewhere else. Fven when a users posts could be verified to be actual text ,through highlighting, or b toggling the "ext$ option on and off1, users were fond of posting strange or melodramatic missives that were entirel out of step with the conversation. "hese scraps were clearl intended b their contributor to be to ed around with as was an image on the site, but sometimes the pasted text matched up too neatl with what users expected the contributors mood to be, leading to confusion as to the users mood. 6or example, in 6ebruar -./0, surferrosa, a user known for his fre)uent emotional benders, posted a repetitive, denunciator message before signing off that seemed to betra a discomfort with the internet at pical of a dump user. "his led users to guess that it had been )uoted$ from somewhere else#

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im deleting ever thing i ever posted here. nothing i write here is an official statement and i reall resent this shit turning into news but i guess i should have learned m lesson the first time that happened so an wa , im out because i need some semblance of a normal life in order to be happ . b e internet im out because i need some semblance of a normal life in order to be happ . b e internet [0$

"hat somewhere else$ turned out to be the tumblr of the musician !rimes, and the original had line breaks that made it appear less like mental illness and more like song l rics. "he post opened up a discussion between m self and aoifeml about the shiftiness of identit on the site. I am %uspicious of ever one on this siteN because several of m friends are on here and the wont tell me who the are,$ she wrote. "he feeling of communal identit among experienced users is undercut b the confusion that can result from the dump user experienced, characteri'ed as it is b a column of creative but difficult-to-distinguish names rolling down the side of the screen rather than imagecentric public profiles. When such text was combined with images, it was performed anew through an alienation from its context, and thus its meaning was imperfectl reproduced through its repetition. "his could be as simple as a user presenting a personal image and using it to illustrate a statement about themselves that the had made in text, or it could be as complex as an of the dump t pes described here.

Identit , Individualit and 6lanerie <an dump users remarked that the felt pride at their images being reused.

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@espite this nominal amount of ego dump users ma have invested in their art, all aspects of the site9s design left user pages in a rudimentar form, which sometimes made it difficult to displa ones best work. Fver users list of image posts was also archived completel b the site, and a list of dumps that cannot be sorted except for a top--. list of the most-faved posts. Clearl , all of the action was focused on the chat room. =ser pages were hardl a destinationA users intentional spectacle-making of themselves seemed to be through webcam usage, in the social arena of the central chat room. "o wit, there was little to see on a persons individual page. "here was a rudimentar messaging s stem ; users could send each other direct messages b putting an W before a mention of a username ; but the messages were ver much public, having usuall been sent from the main public room, and old messages were pushed into oblivion @ump users, however, seemed aware that their individual presences on the internet were highl marketed spectacles, not even through the subtle breaches created b cookies but in the highl visible transgressions created b websites like 6acebook and second-order social media like Tlout. Tlout is a service that is meant to track users popularit $ and influence$ b taking into account the amount of attention the get on a variet of social media platforms, from 6acebook to GinkedIn to 6lickr. Instead of documenting each new wa social media offended their privac or sensibilities ,the wa 6acebook users often complain within the constraints of the site1, @ump users embraced the fact of encroaching social media but mocked it as it approached. 6or a brief time in -./-, dump users fetishi'ed and mocked the idea of the 4Tlout score,4 meant to )uantif one9s 4influence4 through social media on their audience. @ump.fm users

21
Figure 1,

got caught up in this surveillance and )uantification of social activit . Cloudonshore9s image 4*ad Tlout %core4 melodramaticall e)uated a bad score on the site with cause for depression and heav drinking. "he turned Tlout into a mock-popularit contest, with Cloudonshore espousing views like I )uit weed and m Tlout score went up like /. points$ that mocked the wa the site seemed to want to connect even the smallest evidence of actual-life activit to a )uantifiable measure. Jther (okes on the site around Tlout involved wlatimers mockanxiet that he would need a certain Tlout score to get into art school. Comments like bitches love m Tlout score$ seemed to fortell a ,d stopic1 world where the score would mean more than it did at the time. "hese endorsements seemed to be sarcastic# other users showed earnest anno ance and consternation about Tlout. I think Tlout encourages people to unfollow people to increase their score,$ wrote 6rankhats in 6ebruar -./-. "he message was faved in an expression of agreement b melipone and wlatimer.%uch earl -adopterism had the benefit of keeping users in control of their online experience as vanguards of certain t pes of online experience. "he stakes were high for a group that spent so much time on the internet. * crafting such fictional ideologies around other sites, dump users, alread so heavil ;but self-consciousl ; influenced b the various modes of being encouraged b social media, attempted to outpace the threat of other users behavior on those sites becoming a norm to which the had to conform.

"umblr "uesda # 3 @irect Challenge to %ocial <edia @ominance 6acebook is a large and significant arena in which behaviors have become ver normative. 3t the time these norms were formed, few people were around who could

22

articulatel challenge the norms of this social media platform and broadcast these challenges to a significant audience. 3 challenge to this status )uo came in -./- from Ian 3leksander 3dams, an insanel lo)uacious internet presence$ who decided to start using his 6acebook as a "umblr or image blog. "his action, which he archived each da with screenshots, soon inspired a related group of individuals, some of them dump.fm members and man of them their friends, to create a fan page called "umblr "uesda s on 6acebook. "here the continued to reblog content and pla with the notion of identit and anon mit . 3n one who (oined the page was automaticall added as an admin. "he group9s content consisted chiefl of screengrabs with a similar aesthetic to those on dump ; flaneur-like, strange (uxtapositions, the observational humor that stems from moments of human and technological failure ; but its leadership ensured the panoptic anon mit of its members, who saw and mocked all but rarel posted as their individual identities. 3 member who had been added as an admin on a 6acebook fanpage sent likes and comments, b default, as the name of that 4page,4 not using their individual name or account. "his created interpretive chaos, as the page often appeared to be conversing with itself on wall posts, but the conversation was actuall the product of several 6acebook users, all speaking under a single, anon mous guise. "he hori'ontal leadership also meant that each of these members had complete control over the group as content creators,$ and some took the libert of repeatedl changing the title of the group. Jnce one member did this, others were drawn back to the group through notifications that 6acebook sent them. Jnce the generic name of "umblr "uesda $ was subsumed b what was clearl one individuals cra' vision, others were moved to reclaim it, changing the group title in rapid succession

23

to such outrR names as !iant !reen %ea "ush 3ttacks a *oat,$ to %tatutor 3pes,$ to %top changing the names so fucking )uickl it is fucking confusing$, subverting the hierarch in fan pages that 6acebook encourages. ?otifications were automaticall sent to other members of the group, encouraging them to (oin in on the ma hem.

%creenshots# "he %pectacle of Interaction Images ma have informed users9 interactions on dump.fm most of the time, but users often emplo ed the screenshot function on their computers to take small snippets of text from various corners of the web, as well as from the dump.fm chat itself. Converting text into an image form had an important function in the context of dump.fms archival limitations. "he site onl preserved pure-text posts that had been 4faved4 b another member, so to make an image out of some text was to single it out as important b subverting its usual ephemeralit . %creenshots of text usuall were sentence fragments, incomplete sentences, or complete ones taken out of contextA the former, with their commas and missing sub(ects, en(oined uses from completing them, while the latter seemed to prompt (uxtaposition or illustration with images. "hese 4text memes4 were sometimes visuall indistinguishable from text itself. "he difference was that, unlike text, which could be freel modified after being copied and pasted without leaving an evidence of modification, the could not be edited without external tools. "his made them similar to a morpheme in linguistics, in that the were difficult to alter or break downA thus the were more likel to persist as intact images. " pos, as liminal moments in which human error shows itself through the

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homogeneit of t ped text, were a favorite source of text memes for dump users, whether the were found within dump9s chat rooms or outside them. " pos were 4serious (okes4# much like the 6reudian slip in speech, the revealed t ping as having fluid meanings and variable parole, or usage. 3 screenshot b dvvidpw, for example, captured a moment where the phrase m dick looks so good$ was t ped as m dick loks so good.$0 "he fact that the misspelled text read like another word ,locks$1 in Fnglish added to its appeal, giving it two simultaneous meanings that could be addressed through its accompaniment in future repostings. @ump users were unlikel to correct their t pographical errorsA seeing them preserved and reworked into dump9s visual lexicon through screengrabs was usuall preferable, particularl if the misshapen text was divorced from its original author. Jne rare case in which a t po was screengrabbed with a correction was a case where the correction was needed to make it readable. >erhaps putting his hand on an entirel wrong part of the ke board, wlatimer t ped 4@omronr hoolmr Usomeone hold me,4 in 5ul -./- and immediatel screengrabbed it. It became commonl used in posts that conve ed situations in which blocked communication is a part of the narrative, such as animals tr ing to talk. In this post b reverberasia below, the image of the goat is being animated into speech, and the domronr hoolmr$ takes on a specificall anti-sexual connotation. "he image of the goats lecherous-looking, strangel human smile had become memetic on dump and was often (uxtaposed with sexual concepts. "his might be in part due to the Western association of goats and sat rs with sexualit . "his usage is congruent with the \< *o@ \$ portion of the speech, the stick caps of which conve s a seductive swa to the voice. 3s so often happens in dump text collages,

25

however, the rest of the text contradicts this speech, and it becomes a narrative of the poor creature avoiding either sexual activit or consumption as food.

Figure 10 http !!dump"fm!p!rever.erasia!%21&+%1

6or a dump user, the semantic power of domronr hoolmr,$ despite its indecipherabilit to an outsider, was enough to alter a repetition of another image that had accumulated a lot of meaning through memetic repetition. "he reflexiveness of this screengrab contextuali'ed itA whoever saw wlatimer make the mistake knew that it was a homegrown dump.fm meme, and also the product of self-deprecation rather than the feeling of superiorit over others that provoked other, more appropriative screencaps. @ump users knew it so well that it was sometimes invoked without the correction.

%creengrabs and 3ntagonism In their repetition and reiteration, members were repeatedl exposed to statements and made to deride them, or perhaps to think about them seriousl . "hough the nature of dump.fm posts meant that meanings were usuall imperfectl reiterated, there was something about the meaning of these little )uotations that persisted, particularl if one knew the person who uttered them. 6or example, Begina$ made a screenshot of pol mer, in the context of an argument, retaliating that 4I actuall make gifs and images.4 26

"hough making images from scratch was still an admired )ualit , especiall among man old-time dump users, enough people disagreed with this more conventional ethic to find this statement na]ve. "he continued to propagate the image in various contexts for several da s. >ol mer eventuall became convinced that this statement was embarrassing, detaching herself from it. %he was able to do this, fortunatel , because her name was not attached to the image. 3nother reason text memes and screen grabs were denigrated was the sometimes ethicall )uestionable ends to which the were put. <an dump users had a dubious conception of the division between the public and the private on the internet, and were willing to make use of an thing at their disposal, often screengrabbing 6acebook chat conversations or using images from corners of 6acebook that were supposedl 4protected.4

<i(in awa# @ump.fms Fncounter with its Jthers %ometimes the source of a particular exploited phrase actuall did have a distinctive individual behind it. "hese individuals became developed characters over time in the dump.fm communit , as their image was used and users reported on their continual interaction with them. "hese interactions with these individuals outside the dump.fm sphere became public spectacles in the communit as more people began to reach out to these individuals, generating memetic images and screenshots. Jften these screenshots spoke for themselves in their absurdit , re)uiring no explanation or embellishment through additional images or text. "his happened most notabl with <i(in awa <uhammed, a horn /E- ear-old

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from ?igeria, apparentl an engineering student, who approached several dump.fm members on 6acebook, 6rederick being the first of them. "he )uotes and images selected for sharing and preservation b dump users highlighted their differences from dump.fms general culture for the purpose of humor. 6rederick compiled his exchanges with <i(in awa, in the form of screengrabs, into a blog post. 3t the point in time portra ed in the post, he and other dump members mostl focused on the fact that <i(in awa had onl a single photo of himself on his 6acebook profile, in which he was sitting in an airplane seat and looking anxious. "he ke to this displa , in the vein of 6uck Qeah:$ blogs, seemed to be the variet of the reactions to this single image, which scroll on and on, numbering well over a hundred and lacking an specific authorial attributions ,other than that the were produced b dump users1.

28

%ome of the photo composites seem keenl attuned to remaining naturalistic, as well as displa ing the interpla between <i(in awas worried expression and the (uxtaposed content ; one anon mousl authored image, for example, made use of his anxious expression b superimposing him in front of a photo of two tweens kissing. 3nother ventured into even more fraught territor , addressing one of the few visible aspects of <i(in awas identit ; his race ; b superimposing him in front of a photo of the artists of the !ucci <ane-founded rap record label /./E *rick %)uad. "he contrast is between their 3frican-3merican-ness and his 3frican-ness, and it specificall interpellates him as both black and 3frican.

Figure 1% :u)p users grapp&ed %ith %hat the( .ne% and didn@t .no% a out MiCin(a%a fro) his first picture1&

Jther images in this litan seem utterl indifferent to content, instead introducing a slow creep of imager selected for similarities in primar )ualities, such as color and shape. <i(in awa busts fl out of a dreadlocked mans mouthA <i(in awas head grows out of a bunch of grapes that roughl match the purple of his suit. "his latter group had a performative aspect, at least within the communit ; some were probabl done b users eager to participate in the meme who had had no contact with <i(in awa, and probabl never did. "he collectivel acknowledge a profound enigma. It could be 6redericks 22

head growing out of the grapes, and the (oke would be the same. 3 third t pe of combination included memes specific to dump.fm, such as a hamster cracking a whip sitting on his shoulder. "hough the humor of these is slightl different ; it is specificall that of (uxtaposing a total stranger with a dump inside (oke, thus contrasting in-group and out-group ; the effect is ultimatel (ust as noncommunicative. 3ll this t pe does differentl is announce that an in-group exists. =ntil he communicated with them further, users were convinced that <i(in awa was somehow not real, that he was one of their fellow dump users, logged into a false 6acebook account and constructing misshapen sentences in ?igerian pidgin for a laugh. "hough the access gap to information technolog still affects man parts of 3frica and ?igerian bank scams pla a role in popular culture, none of the few preconceived notions that dump users had about ?igerians seemed to match up with the main thing <i(in awa desired# a cool bitch.$ He attempted to claim man of dumps women as his girlfriends, and his reactions to their re(ections were swiftl screencapped b those women and reposted. However, when a couple of users finall succumbed to his insistent re)uests of 4= gat %k pe24 the gained a window into a radicall different world that was ver much real. 6redericks view of him became less s mpathetic, perhaps because of the difficulties in communication that resulted. <i(in awas microphone seemed to be barel working, but he also appeared to be unable to speak above the level of a low mumble, leading 6rederick to declare him functionall retarded.$ 3side from a general frustration at being unable to hear him speak, the lack of opportunities for 6rederick to appropriate his speech in this new medium ma have led to this diagnosis.$

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3ttempts to include <i(in awa on the dump website itself mostl resulted in misunderstandings. <i(in awa made an account on dump.fm, but mainl used it to further his frustrated accusations, in text, that all dump users are the same person hiding behind the same username. In a fit of paranoia, he rattled off declarations of identit between various dump users# 6red is <i(in awa, Begina$ is Gux, Gux is @a tonN$. "he accusations of inauthenticit , it seems, are bilateralA it seems neither part can )uite make sense of the existence of the other. %till, these users were the closest thing dump had to satellite users, those who know of dump but don9t use it. @espite the fact that his use of the site was sparse and greatl differed from that of most users, <i(in awa9s use of Fnglish had perhaps permeated dump.fm9s textual culture more than that of an other user. In a reversal of the t pical relationship between the coloni'er and the coloni'ed, dump users sought to imitate his idios ncratic usage, and it was difficult to tell whether this imitation continued to be mocking or even aware of its original source. If there was 4dump slang,4 it surel consisted of randoml capitali'ing words, spelling 4got4 as 4gat,4 and making allusions to some of his more infamous )uotes, such as 46ucked =p Yoe is a bitch in the sea.4 In their repetition, tales and speculation about <i(in awa sometimes became distorted, creating a dubious m tholog around him. >lams and his friends, such as sakalak, used the word Wife$ to merel signif a woman8. It was often accompanied b pidgin-like grammatical constructionsA for example, someone asked plams if he was ga , and he replied ?o I want Wife.$ "he word seemed to be used in cases where users, afraid to be forthcoming about their true desires, instead hid behind a kind of mockearnest and formalit . "hough the formalit of the word and its capitali'ation would

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point to <i(in awan origins, I can find no evidence of <i(in awa ever using the word in this manner, and indeed his sexual ambitions at his oung age seem to point to something less formal than marriage. "he character evoked b these sa ings instead evokes a caricature more like Fddie <urph s character in Coming to 3merica, a film for which sakalak has professed a liking. In a h perreal world ruled b representations, it seems, truth and fiction about individuals and cultures can blur much more easil .

"here was also his sister Heater, and Treco @odd', a black woman from Tansas who fre)uentl boasted about her husband9s (ail time and appeared to have a double named Treco Henderson. "hese users, who seemed to have initiated the contact with dump.fm users themselves over 6acebook, are emphaticall from a different cultural background than an dump user and of a different race than most of dump9s population. @ump users9 interest in these individuals, however, was perhaps of a more reciprocal nature than the ma have reali'edA while it was difficult to account wholesale for the motivations of users who 4friend4 strangers from distant countries over 6acebook, cultural curiosit often pla ed a role, and ultimatel these figures provided a muchneeded sense of perspective on dump9s largel white and western milieu.

%elf-Image and >rivac In this world of multiple, changeable identities, it was webcam pictures that created authenticit and trust among dump users. Webcam photos were unlikel to be edited, at least in a wa that deceived. Jften a users gender, age, and race were ambiguous until the cammed.$ Webcam pictures also ignited most of the controversies

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occurring on the site, as the linked users9 real-life identities to their usernames. Webcams were easil captured and shared on dump using a dedicated button next to the text field, were another medium through which users tried to propagate their images through incompleteness and the semiotic pla that it invited. >hotos that users took of themselves might have captured their arm onl up to a point, so that an existing image of an arm, often bi'arre or cartoonish, could later be grafted on b themselves or another user. @ump was a more intimate space than, for example, 6acebook. "hough it appeared somewhat secluded from the !oogle searches of emplo ers, man pages of users logs and faves had in fact been crawled b the search engine, though the lack of semantic information in man file names and the hapha'ard pattern of indexing protected a lot of images potentiall ob(ectionable to emplo ers from view. In addition to that, man users specificall used usernames that had no connection to their more official, professional identities. @ump users were perhaps more free with their webcam use than man people would be on a more public website such as 6acebook, and relativel few of the users who 4cammed4 their bodies, including breasts and genitals, later regretted the decision and asked to have them taken down. However, these images, (ust like an favored b dump users that got taken down, had a tendenc to persist be ond an action to remove them, through the various creative modifications and reinterpretations created b other users. "hese actions tended to be particularl profuse in the face of anxiet about the actions of another user, in contrast to dump.fms creative agilit involving pornograph and its more anon mous actors. 6or example, when 6rederick took a nude webcam picture of himself with nidnoi, eating ice

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cream and dissolving blotters of acid on their tongues, dump.fm collectivel denigrated their defiant attitudes b making them seem unattractive# for example, one user pasted reddish, sweat skin that appeared to be scrotal in origin onto their necks and chests. >art of the ill will manifested in this composite seemed to come from the fact that 6rederick had violated other womens privac in this wa A for example, he once took a webcam picture of the naked back of a girlfriend of his, seemingl without her permission. Jther reactions to users nude camming was more gentle and pla ful, particularl in response to pictures of situations that were unambiguousl consensual. When wlatimer posed nude in front of the camera, his confidence and narcissism, bordering on camp ,one of his props$ was a bottle of ranch dressing1, led to nidnoi cutting his penis out of the picture and reusing it in various absurd contexts. In addition to the various (uxtapositions with the disembodied penis, a screenshotmaking metagame formed around this image. *ecause of the number of faves various iterations of this image received, it immediatel appeared on the front page for the da . "here it appeared alongside other, unrelated webcam pictures that users took of themselves with bored or mildl disgusted expressions7. "hese were in turn interpreted b Begina$ and reverberasia as reaction shots, even though man of them had timestamps from before Wlatimers photo shoot. @umps involving the disembodied penis also sometimes took on a self-conscious air. @ates commented on the penis images lasting meme value b dumping it with a text collage reading tom mood would sa l ke we all have ghosts,E$ possibl referring to the fact that the memed penis persisted for a good month, longer than wlatimer ma have expected or desired.

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?ot ever attempt at representing other users had such lasting reverberations. "here were examples of users creating representations of each other that garnered positive interactions, but at the same time were more ephemeral. 6or example, @auragon made dithered portraits of various dump users and there was a sort of game that involved matching up users with totemic >okRmon, dog breeds, etc. "he fact that these characteri'ations didnt catch on stands in contrast to their role in fannish internet communities, where attachment to a particular character often pla s a strong role in establishing ones individualit . "he fact that webcam photos were so widel used, it seems, established them, and b extension the ph sical, actual-world bod , as the primar s stem for identif ing and recogni'ing users.

"ext and "ransgression 3s in the actual world, with its >B agents and damage control, dump users were )uietl possessive of their image, despite, or perhaps because, the so freel used images of themselves to address sub(ects considered taboo in more visible areas of the internet. "here seemed to be a substantial difference between reusing one9s own image and finding it reused b others, and there were man instances of users9 likenesses and )uotes being reused in a wa that made them uncomfortable. Be)uests for removal were rare, and much more likel to happen in the case of apparent and potentiall harmful slander. 3 wider range of behaviors were thus acceptable to document and discuss, but there were still, of course, records of behavior that users preferred that others forget. "rolls sometimes attempted to sabotage other members reputations in the communit b propagating screengrabs, which had a

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permanence and potential for testimon unlike that of actual, plain text, reminding other users of a particular users transgressions. 3ppropriations of text from another user could )uickl turn into representations as the influenced a users reputation. >roblems arose when users were interpellated through this techni)ue, particularl when the communit s idea of them began to diverge from how the thought of themselves. 6or example, Cheetos once made a deprecating comment about women who experience rape fantasies, to which other users in the room reacted with contempt, and >ol mer took a screenshot of it. >ol mer felt remorse for the blow to his reputation that ensued, and partiall blamed Begina$ and 6riendster, who had bullied her over dump in the past, for propagating the screenshot excessivel . Fver bod was like Ddear god ou are dumb,$ she told me. Fven so, all i did was capN it was Begina$Ofriendster who blew it out of proportion.$ "he two nicknamed him the rape man$, which seemed to trigger a self-fulfilling prophec as he posted more misog nistic statements. %uch interpellatons were taken more seriousl when the involved an individuals face. In a surprisingl forthright statement that contrasted with the usuall ha' meanings of dump.fm9s content, Begina$ posted a picture of >ol mer with the word 4racist4 scrawled in red across it like lipstick on a school-bathroom mirror. "he accusation was unfounded ; it had simpl been made for provocations sake, and Begina,$ like >ol mer, is white ; and the image was swiftl taken down at >ol mers re)uest. When such representations were malevolent but not slanderous, the were allowed to remain online, and responses that this harrassment engendered demonstrated the role of vigilance, self-consciousness and resourcefulness in preserving ones reputation, literall ones public image,$ on dump. 3 few da s later, the same user

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LBegina$M inserted a photo of >ol mer into a !I6 of the iconic scene in 3lien in which the alien bursts out of a patient9s stomach at an operating table. >ol mer9s likeness pla ed the part of the alien. "his time, however, she provided a more creative response than re)uesting outright removal. %he reclaimed her personal image b posting an older gif made of her using the flash on an i>hone camera next to that !I6. L7M "his response worked on a variet of levels, both performativel and contentwise# since the animation of >ol mer with the camera was made b a user not hostile to >ol mer under more pla ful circumstances, it served as proof of the existence of her allies. "he graphic showed her in possession of a camera, a s mbol of vision and awareness in this case. In the popular liberal-arts visual imaginar of which >ol mer is likel aware due to her education, it is also a phallic s mbol that in the hands of a woman reverses the usual d namics of the male ga'e ,<ulve /PPP1. Jn a performative level, the mere fact that she re-dumped the image showed an acknowledgement of its existence. %uch acknowledgement was meaningful because there were significant ludic barriers before it. In such a fast-moving chat s stem, a user could easil miss uses and mentions of their image and name. 6ilenames were often ambiguous, particularl after images have been run through >hotoblaster, which mashed together all the images previous filenames and authors,$ or Jnline Image Fditor, which obscured original filenames entirel . "his meant that images concerning a certain person often did not come up on the dump.fm search tool, at least not with the expected ke words. In such an ambiguousl documented communit , mere vision ; as well as vigilance on the part of allies ; could be a weapon. %ometimes such image-wars could be fought with the reframing capabilities of

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the screenshot as well. In a reversal of their t pical relationship, Begina$ found webcam images of her posted, with no explanation, b <i(in awa on 6acebook. "his reframing ; putting a webcam image meant for the small communit of dump on the broadcasting medium of 6acebook ; called for another reframing in turn, one that decried the first ones transgressions. "his assertion of power was swiftl counteracted b Begina$, who took screenshots of this appropriation and posted them, captioned with an exasperated 4wow mi(i4 and 4mi(i W"6.4 >ol mer, thinking back to her encounter with Cheetos used the word impulsive criticism$ to describe such performative repetitions. "here was shock in these repetitions, and the were also a bit passive-aggressive, a wa of sa ing Dhe listen to ourself.$ We disputed the speech acts to which such acts were e)uivalent, over whether such actions ,or thoughts ; we often conflated the two, in the spirit of dump cultures impulsivit 1 could be considered introverted and extroverted. "here was a note to self$ element to them, like somebod sa s something retarded in class like ou (ust repeat it in our headN in italicsN slowl .$ 3 desire for mocker , which usuall re)uires knowledge of the others habitual behaviors, clashed with disbelief both in the statement made and in the person behind the statement. "hus, while screencaps could frame and interpellate, the also revealed moments of instabilit in the character of individuals. 6or better or worse, the laid out standards to which the user targeted could aspire ; or showed them a side of themselves that the wished to avoid.

Conclusions @ump is an impulsive environment of schematics. 3s shown with Cchan and

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countless other communities on the internet where people act )uickl , impulsivel , and relativel anon mousl , this does not alwa s cause people to reach their highest intellectual aspirations. Image-centered online communities have a habit of enforcing a status )uo of racism and if not sexism, patriarch . Cchan-influenced sites like Pgag and humorcouch, for example, are rife with anon mous (oking at the expense of women and their bodies. @ump.fm is often able to criti)ue this kind of internet folk humor$ because it positions itself as post-internet.$ Instead of assuming a universal reader or reading, for example, as do the Bage Comics, the create narratives from the viewpoints of specific individuals. "he difference between the earlier t pe of digital image and the assemblages found on dump.fm sometimes seems as wide as the difference between poetr and the novel. 3s we saw in dumps use of animation, images are given virtual agenc and character as images, not (ust as the entities the represent. When Bichard @awkins proposed the idea of almost limitless power for slightl inaccurate self-replicating entities,$ was he perhaps foreseeing how these fictions, whether the are repurposed graphics or regrettable screencaps, seem to take on a life of their own$2 Is leanback gu $ (ust a collection of pixels that is indifferentl , and perhaps a bit cruell , manipulated, or is he a character in his own right, vulnerabl in ver specific wa s to being dragged along on such adventures as surfing and sexual contact to which he is apparentl averse2 "he heterogeneit of images found on dump is a means of passive investigation, but combining and (uxtaposing them with other images is potentiall an active and creative event of meaning-making. 3nother lens through which to view the achievements made on dumps particular

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platform is that of postliterac . @ump is predicated upon existing t pes of literac ; digital, textual, visual, perhaps even academic or art-historical ; but it also re)uires a literac of its own as one masters the use of the platform and its particular ancillar tools. @espite the internet-oriented in-(okes of the content, with its fast-moving format, dump.fm also combines )ualities of nondigital media as well. What we are seeing here is the free-association of spoken conversation combined with the weight of written posterit . @umps effortless visual conventions make it eas to sketch out schematics in which one is not et confident. In creating these new modes of living and )uestioning, dumps imager comes closer to what 5. Hillis <iller has argued is the role of fictions in societ . "he social and ps chological function of fictions is what speech-act theorists called DperformativeN La stor M makes something happen in the real world# for example, it can propose modes of selfhood or wa s of behaving that are then imitated in the real world.$

Works Cited

*audrillard, 5. ,/PE71. % mbolic exchange and death. In <. >oster ,Fd1. "rans. 5. <orrain. Selected writings ,/st ed., pp. //P-/CI1. Betrieved from http#OOwww.humanities.uci.eduOmposterObooksO*audrillard,^-.5ean^-.-^-.%elected ^-.WritingsXok.pdf

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*akhtin, <., _ %ollner, >. ,/PI01. Babelais and !ogol# "he 3rt of @iscourse and the >opular Culture of Gaughter. <ississippi Beview, 0C-8..

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Bamocki, <. ,-..I, <a 1. Bobert *ean, Ilan %andler ,Chairs1. Surfing clubs. organi'ed notes and comments. Jbsolescence and culture of human invention, ?ova %cotia College of 3rts and Crafts. Betrieved from http#OOwww.ramocki.netOsurfing-clubs.pdf

Bose, @eborah *ird ,-..C1. &eports from a wild countr#. ethics for decoloni'ation. % dne # =?%W >ress.

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