One part of such reality is a sizable slice of society that art has traditionally ignored. It resides in the dark underbelly of the social psyche, one which in recent years has gained daylight in the tangible psychosis of prevalent circulation of conspiracy theories - the degeneracies of culture that manifests in prideful ignorance - dark fantasies, anti-social behavior, walking talking “fuck yous” that embrace their outcastedness. They yearn to be heard, same as you or me. Though their siren song is different, we all sing nonetheless.

An internet that prompts itself into oblivion

If a genre were to be prescribed to BAD JPEGS, it would likely read as something like “Post-Internet American Horrorcore.” Its images are crude and hideous artifacts from ancient hidden corners of the forgotten web. They represent types of relics that polite society would likely prefer to be left in the ground.

The composer of this inglorious symphony is an artist who goes by the moniker of Mind Wank. He came of age in the early days of AOL, dial-up modems, and pre-modern chat rooms filled with anonymous strangers. In imagining the work that would eventually become BAD JPEGS, the artist began with the question of what could happen if AI was prompted on the early internet itself.

Web 1.0 was defined by users experimenting with new possibilities of broadcasting content around the world. In what was a magnificent leap in the history of global culture, ideas became distributed cheaply and with no regard to borders. Internet cultures formed and influenced one another. From the world wide web, new forms of publishing like online diaries and low-fi video streaming came into being.

From this new media condition, emojis and memes arose as cultural tokens that could be shared widely as a shorthand for an increasingly attention-scattered audience. And it’s these tokens which manifest in crude live action facsimile that form the backbone of Bad JPEGS and its brashly animated cultural critiques.

Honesty // ugliness // the aesthetics of authenticity

Mind Wank’s grotesque opus imagines an archive of found footage of internet anons who document themselves for unseen audiences. On a basic human level, the pictures represent a compulsion to be seen, or perhaps a desperation to be noticed. The internet’s tools are largely aligned to help users gain attention, and in BAD JPEGS we feel private lives turned public for any and all to see. Their self-documentation becomes sermon to any congregation willing to bear witness. God help us if their churches are full.

The world that Mind Wank has created is a funhouse mirror reflecting parts of society we don’t want to see. Lifestyles that are bizarre, masochistic, repulsive in their unquenched deviancy. The production values of the images themselves are poor enough to offend, but there is also honesty in ugliness, and a distinct trustworthiness that comes packaged with the vernacular. A bad snapshot of a family gathering is an earnest one, while a well-produced and cinematic picture of the same family may well raise questions about authenticity.

Of course, these AI-made works don’t describe a firm reality, but their low-fidelity, poorly lit, pixelated, discolored, and badly composed natures lend them a degree of high-believability, which in turn amplifies their abilities to disturb. These are horror pictures spoken in hyper-casual internet parlance. Their vulgarities are monsters in the closets of our social, political, and technological conditions.

In Mind Wank’s work, to what do we owe the illusion of documentation but the feeling that these synthetic pictures feel closer to reality than we wish to think? They provide glimpses into lifestyles we do not want to live and people we probably don’t want to know. Who are these people? What are these lives they lead? In all likelihood, there’s probably someone in your own life that these images remind you of. You probably avoid them if you can.

Inverse influencers // death spirals // bad medicine

Our internet now is littered by influencer culture that wallpapers our lives with promises of cleaner, happier, more beautiful worlds. The popular web is one vast, scrolling commercial that incessantly suggests how things can be better. Production values are well honed, everything is accompanied by a catchy beat and funky font. Such content stacks faster than it can be discarded, and we now swim in deep seas of superficiality. It all looks the same now: a consumer-driven monocultural internet swamp.

In the throes of an endlessly recycled ecosystem of online culture, mimesis spirals downward into inbred content - forming cultural offspring with overwhelming deformities. In the way that a jpeg itself loses information if saved over and over again, memes loop into disintegration, never quite expiring, but continuing a march down the cultural family tree, picking up detritus along the way they were never intended to carry.

At the end of this generational line we find BAD JPEGS, in which fragments of memes and emojis appear as shells of their former selves. They are stripped of their allure, jolted into real life context, and appear struggling in an environment they were not suited to survive in. They are pictures of the dead and dying, they decompose before our very eyes.

Against the backdrop of alluring influencers, clever photographs, and stupid sparkly 5-second web ads, BAD JPEGS becomes an extreme antidote. A rare shot of antithesis that, for a moment, breaks our fever from the virality of commercialist junk. Yes, the medicine tastes bad, that’s how you know it works.