My virtual performance and accompanying gallery installation r/RoastMe (2024) engages with areas where the virtual forces spill out into lived experience and exert influence over people from a distance. This work consisted of me posting a photo of myself to the subreddit r/RoastMe. I then took screenshots of the comments, printed them, and added them to the original post (OP) pinned to the gallery wall. The comment thread spilled out into the gallery—a cascade of snide quips and memes punctuated with occasional outbursts of homophobic vitriol.
In this work, I sought out and invited cyberbullying as a way of drawing attention to its prevalence in virtual spaces and the ways it mixes hate speech with benign memes. On Reddit, 4chan, and Twitter if you can’t be witty, be racist or homophobic instead. Rage-baiting can be a powerful way of drawing attention–the internet’s most valuable commodity. But due to what post-internet theorists call context collapse, what starts off as satire or parody can easily morph into full-blown ideology.
Exhibitions
- Shown at: Double Take: Reimagining Duality, Des Lee Gallery, 2024
- Photo documentation: Roy Uptain