Following the box office success of the director's cut of
The Return Of The Man Who Never Came Back, viewers, critics and academics alike are busy postulating and hypothesising about its enigmatic director: video artist Ben O'Drowned.
Who is this mysterious creator? An eccentric and visionary auteur? A surreal and nonsensical memetic comic? A visiting omniscient deity? Where did he come from and what is he here to tell us? What is his message? What are the subtexts of his touching, disturbing, schizoid aesthetic? Let us answer this question by taking a closer look at three of his earlier, lesser known works.
#MichealHasEbola
Plain and white against a black background, the titular hashtag is repeated over and over, interspersed with slight variations, one instance highlighted in stark red. The unsettling soundtrack features a hushed barrage of garbled whispers.
#MichealHasEbola came at the height of the ebola outbreak that caused worldwide concern and killed thousands, yet the video focuses on one individual. The occurrence of single words within the lines of text, and the single red instance of the hashtag embody this reference to singularity within a multitude. We cannot say with absolute certainty who this Michael is. The Twitter hashtag format points us towards the false report of footballer Michael Essien having contracted the disease, a relatively small Twitter storm that broke in October 2014, two weeks after the publication of this video.
Whether this is the Michael referred to or not,
#MichealHasEbola paints a claustrophobic canvas of rumours and gossip, emphasised by the whispering voices, which pointedly ignores a major world tragedy to focus on the generation of controversy around one individual and the insidious invective of an internet age where news and public understanding are so easily influenced by the casual yet unfettered derision of trolls and armchair humourists. We can only guess as to whether the red text confers a warning, and to whether the black and white text is a reference to racial issues. Contradictions are present in the inconspicuous variations on the hashtag which are partially off-screen and must be guessed at ("#MichaelHadEbola", "#MichaelIsDead", "#EbolaHasMichael") and draw our attention to the inaccuracy of the information traded in this marketplace of scandals. Unfortunately for Michael, there are no refunds: as the whispers fade away, the textual record remains.
Your my boat without a bottom.
An exercise in deconstruction, this music piece is a re-worked vignette from the loved/hated "walking-simulator" Dear Esther, seen as a "breakthrough" moment for the games-as-art cause by some, and pretentious self-indulgence by others. This piece seems to attempt to straddle this divide.
The hip-hop accompaniment is at odds with the narrator's warm tone and soft accent. The refrain undermines the original prose. The peaceful (yet dramatic) imagery and the slow pan and zoom is in contrast with the rhythm. The image itself (carefully selected for it's ambiguous content) contains a visual contradiction: intact and sea-worthy paper boats juxtaposed with the broken shell of a wooden one.
The meaningless title, complete with a grammatical error that is surely intentional, sums it all up: the debate between entertainment and art is arbitrary and irrelevant. The implied contradiction of such a debate (that the two cannot co-exist) is shown to be nonsense.
1st of November
A Peter Jackson dwarf shopped into a naval uniform, Michael Jackson with E.T., conspiracy theories, an unknown face. These are the images that flash through the static and industrial hum of
1st of November. The soundscape is oppressive; the bursts of near-vocal sound feel tortured. The title of this piece (apropos of nothing but the date it was uploaded and presumably made) implies a snapshot, a day-in-the-life, a momentary glimpse of the creator's internal headspace.
As the face of Andy Warhol emerges from the digital noise, we feel the eyes of O'Drowned upon us, by now familiar with that avatar. A music box heralds his approach as the face slowly expands to fill the screen, giving the avatar a parental presence that is simultaneously protective and threatening. And then a sudden cut to Lennon, the creator's other avatar, and a final distorted scream through a slow fade to black.
What do these two avatars have in common? They were both radical artists whose work had a massive cultural impact with ripples we still feel today. O'Drowned clearly admires these qualities, aspires towards these figures. Warhol is presented spectrally, almost a ghost or perhaps a deity, watching over us, protecting us from the jarring intrusion of insipid pop culture and hints of paranoia. Lennon's sudden appearance ends it all. Whose scream do we hear? The death of the static-machine, the end of the overwhelming noise?
Perhaps, but neither of these figures are presented in entirely positive ways: both have a slightly threatening air, looming before us. This leads to the conjecture that O'Drowned is not entirely happy with his relationship to these figures and hints at a subconscious level where their presence in his day-in-the-life, this snapshot of his mindscape, is unwanted. Maybe this is warranted by an imposter syndrome on behalf of the artist, the inadequacy of a human condition in which we will never have the import or impact of those we try to imitate or who inspire us, even though they help us to cope with the static and noise of an overwhelming culture. For a moment we all share a latent self-loathing with O'Drowned, as the framing of Lennon's extreme close-up and the look on his face both express disdain, a disapproval contrary to the popular image of Lennon himself. We, would-be creators, will never achieve this godhood.
And then the final moment of comic reveal. "I was only joking," it says. "Don't be so serious!" The catharsis is over, and we are allowed to move on.
Conclusion
Clearly inspired by the YTP school, and by video glitch artists such as To The Ark, O'Drowned's is an aesthetic that thrives on eclectic memesis, collecting bricks of pop culture and not using them to build a house of metaphor or representation, but rather dumping them wholesale in a teetering pile of nonsequiturs and allowing the viewer to read their own meaning in the chaos. It is often disturbing without offering an immediately obvious reason why. The motif of static and noise, of jarring and jump-cuts, embodies this and represents a global anarchy of creators and contributors, where peers and role models offer both inspiration and oppression, a babble of voices present misinformation and meaningless arguments and a lone video artist is striving to make sense of it all.
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