Jason Eppink (born 1983) is an American curator, designer, and prankster. His projects emphasize participation, mischief, surprise, wonder, generosity, transgression, free culture, and anti-consumerism, and they are staged in public spaces and online as street art, urban interventions, and playful online services and hoaxes, frequently for non-consenting audiences.
Eppink served as Curator of Digital Media at
Museum of the Moving Image in
New York City from 2006-2018. His work at the museum revolved around participation in a variety of fields, including
video games,
interactive art,
remix
A remix (or reorchestration) is a piece of media which has been altered or contorted from its original state by adding, removing, or changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, book, video, poem, or photograph can all be remixes. The o ...
,
animated GIFs, and online communities.
Additionally, Jason Eppink is a senior agent with prank group
Improv Everywhere, a member of art collective
Flux Factory
Flux describes any effect that appears to pass or travel (whether it actually moves or not) through a surface or substance. Flux is a concept in applied mathematics and vector calculus which has many applications to physics. For transport ph ...
, and a recurring character (40-Year-Old Goosey) on
The Chris Gethard Show.
Notable Design/Prank Projects
Pixelator
In 2007, Jason Eppink created a series of boxes from foam core and diffusion gel that he placed over video billboards at the entrances to New York City subway stations, turning advertisements into abstract geometric art. Eppink published a video and diagrams to encourage others to continue and improve on the project.
Astoria Scum River Bridge
In late 2009, frustrated with a sidewalk perpetually covered by residue from a leaking drainage pipe, Jason Eppink and frequent collaborator
Posterchild
Posterchild is the pseudonym of a street artist based in Toronto, Canada who may be best known for his Mario Blocks project, the purpose of which is to install homemade Mario blocks in public spaces. After being featured on Boing Boing the pro ...
constructed a footbridge from recycled wood and installed it at the site of the leak. The bridge and the press it attracted embarrassed authorities into fixing the decades-old problem.
Kickbackstarter
In 2011, to poke fun at the increasing popularity of
crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...
, Jason Eppink created a parody
Kickstarter
Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...
campaign to raise money so he could fund his friends’ Kickstarter campaigns.
Notable Curatorial Projects
We Tripped El Hadji Diouf
In 2012, Jason Eppink curated an installation of
animated GIFs by members of
Something Awful in response to a
Photoshop challenge
“What tripped El Hadji Diouf?”Participants modified an animated GIF of the unpopular soccer player so he appeared to be tripped by a variety of sight gags and pop culture references. The 35 selected GIFs were displayed in a 50-foot-wide projection in the lobby of Museum of the Moving Image. In 2015, the project appeared for the first time in the United Kingdom at the
National Museum of Football
National may refer to:
Common uses
* Nation or country
** Nationality – a ''national'' is a person who is subject to a nation, regardless of whether the person has full rights as a citizen
Places in the United States
* National, Maryland, ...
, as part of the exhibition Out of Play - Technology & Football.
Cut Up
In 2013, Jason Eppink curated an exhibition of short form video remixes that primarily use popular media as source material. The show examined genres and techniques that emerged online over the last ten years along with their historical precedents, proposing that remix is an increasingly common way of participating in shared cultural conversations. Exhibition sections included
supercut
A supercut is a genre of video editing consisting of a montage of short clips with the same theme. The theme may be an action, a scene, a word or phrase, an object, a gesture, or a cliché or trope. The technique has its roots in film and televis ...
s,
recut trailers
A re-cut trailer, or retrailer is a mashup video that uses footage from a movie or its original trailers to create a completely new context or one different from the original source material. The mashups are parody trailers that derive humor from ...
, and
vidding.
The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture
In 2014, Jason Eppink engaged members of
Reddit to identify frequently used reaction GIFs: animated GIFs posted in response to text in online forums and comment threads. Thirty-seven GIFs and their translations, provided by Redditors, were selected for the exhibition, which examined the increasingly popular use of the animated GIF as a form of non-verbal communication.
How Cats Took Over the Internet
In 2015, Jason Eppink curated an exhibition that addressed the phenomenon of
internet cats as
vernacular culture. The exhibition included a 20-year timeline of cats online; a quantified look at the popularity of cats and dogs on significant leisure websites; sociological, anthropological, and evolutionary explanations for the phenomenon; and an investigation into animals that perform similar roles on other national internets.
References
Additional References
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External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Eppink, Jason
American designers
American art curators
1985 births
Living people
People from Spring, Texas
American humorists