[1] Kyle Chayka, “An Introduction to the Early Web Aesthetics of Geocities,” Hyperallergic, February 14, 2013, para. 2.

[2] Mark Wilson, “RIP Blingee: Here Are The Best, Worst Blingees of All Time,” Fast Company, August 19, 2015, para. 1.

[3] Molly McHugh, “Blingee Is Dead, Long Live Blingee,” WIRED, August 14, 2015, para. 1.

[4] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Berg Pub Ltd, 2013), 340.

[5] Marcos Natali, “History and the Politics of Nostalgia,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 11.

[6] Laura Miller, “Expressive Energy in Female Self-Photography,” in Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade (Abingdon ; New York: Routledge, 2017), loc 2464 of 13426.

[7] Lu Pan, Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities (Bristol: Intellect, 2015), 107.

[8] W. David Marx, “The History of the Gyaru – Part Three,” Néojaponisme (blog), June 6, 2012.

[9] Alicia Eler and Kate Durbin, “The Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic,” Hyperallergic, March 1, 2013, para. 14.

[10] Benjamin Noys, “Georges Bataille’s Base Materialism,” Cultural Values 2, no. 4 (October 1, 1998): 499.

[11] MPVTOX, “Puking Rainbows,” Urban Dictionary, January 13, 2012.

[12] Irina Kuleshova, “I am a free woman now, I married Blingee,” interview by Olia Lialina, September 14, 2015, “You are the author of 263,207 stamps...”.

[13] Stuart Kendall, “Making More (of Waste),” in Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought, ed. Will Stronge (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 90.

[14] Kendall, 74.

[15] Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide by Yve-Alain Bois (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 120.

Cute. Forever Friends. Best Friends. Love. Sweet. It’s a Girl’s World. Good Morning. Happy Birthday. Adorable. 100% Me. Thank you! Princess. Cutie. Emo. The Cutest Girl in the World!

Add to that layers of sparkling glitter, kittens, puppies, babies, hearts, stars, ribbons, fairies, unicorns, rainbows, flowers, anime chibi and big-eyed cute girls [Figure 1]. Ah, did I mention sparkling glitter? Lots, lots of sparkling, maniacally sparkling glitter, corroding the images away like the uric acid in Andy Warhol's legendary Oxidation (or, more colloquially, piss) paintings from the 1970s, made by having his friends urinate on copper panels as a homage to Pollock [Figure 2]. This is the substance of Blingee, a website founded in 2006 by German multimedia conglomerate Bauer Media Group, one of the most popular online GIF generators that allows users to create animated pictures using photographs and artwork, combined with user-generated ornamentation called "stamps”—once created, a stamp is made available to all other Blingee users and cannot be deleted once it is used in a GIF (some stamps become extremely popular and widely-used). An embodiment of deep Internet digital matter, Blingee GIFs forefront the workings of unruly cybercultures, whose stubborn adherence to kitsch aesthetics betrays the high expectations promised by the digital revolution—a betrayal which happens at the level of the pixel.

Initially, Blingee was created to help teens and young adults easily craft animated contents to decorate their personal accounts on platforms that were then (i.e., by the mid to late 2000s) at their peak, like Myspace, the first social network with a global audience. In 2015, the site was about to be shut down, but due to massive outcry from fans and specialized media, it managed to secured funds to continue its operation to this day. It is not too hard, however, to understand why the company (perhaps not quite aware of the website’s cult status) decided to shut down Blingee. After all, in the mid-2010s, the “Myspace era” already seemed like a long-buried layer of Internet stratigraphy. What is more, Blingee’s nostalgic appeal goes back to an even earlier Internet—one would not say prehistoric, but definitely a period in the late 90s, when GeoCities reigned over the Earth.

Thus, even at the time of its birth, Blingee already felt like an atavistic remainder of a vanishing aesthetic. The aesthetics of the World Wide Web’s age of innocence, of cheesy personal websites and fan pages, of Tenshi Muyu and Sailor Moon tributes and primitively animated cute emoticon mascots. The Internet Archive did a favor to humanity by preserving over 4 500 000 GeoCities-era animated GIFs through their special project GifCities: The GeoCities Animated Gif Search Engine, available online at gifcities.org. Similarly, Internet artists and archeologist Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied created a Tumblr-based project called “One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age” to collect screenshots from defunct GeoCities homepages, resulting in “a treasure trove of outdated aesthetics, web design tropes, and apologies for not posting more or not having the site cleaned up.”[1]

Blingee's continued popularity is therefore a noteworthy phenomenon that points to the chemistry of the Internet's formative fabric, made from the interweaving of authentic tween “sparkle-vomit”[2] and adult “tongue-in-cheek, retro take on remix culture”[3] fibers. Like other obsolete technologies revived by the love of devoted fan communities—for instance, Polaroid and its rescue (and eventual merge in 2020) with The Impossible Project, or the current popularity enjoyed by risograph printing at the hands of visual artists—their appeal is ultimately nostalgic. Nostalgic, not necessarily in the syrupier acceptation as “sentimental rubbish,”[4] as Adorno put it (although, in what Blingee is concerned, this is exactly right), but in the sense of being attracted to outdated things which lay “outside of the modern framework”[5] of emancipatory progress. In other words, although Blingee was rescued from the digital oblivion and resurrected, it was also “zombified” in the process: that is, it leaves us with the impression of an artifact of the past without a “future” proper, one which has overstayed its welcome in the teleological march of history. The anti-futurity becomes embedded in Blingee GIFs as an integral part of their materiality, like a clot blocking futuristic visions of the Internet’s information highways.

Blingee follows in the tradition of Japanese purikura (from the English “print club”), a form of photography taken in specialized coin-operated photo booths (available in malls or on the streets, in neighborhoods like the fashionable Harajuku) that allows one to add stamps and manipulate the image digitally according to a set of options, for instance, “backdrops, borders, insertable decorations, icons, and text writing,”[6] as well as “hair extensions or twinkling diamond tiaras” and, notably, eye-enlargement and “tenderized light effects”.[7] [Figures 3 & 4] The underlying idea is to beautify, or rather, “kawaii-ify” the photo. Mostly devoted to female group selfies, purikura became popular in the second half of the 90s, intersecting with the evolution of coeval female and cute street fashion subcultures like gyaru or decora—in fact, both styles imported purikura into real life by gluing glitter and stickers on the face and other areas of the body and clothes [Figure 5 & 6].[8] Although Blingee is an animated version, many of its primary features of stamp and glitter-based cuteness galore adhere to the aesthetics of the older Japanese purikura.

Besides stamps, texture (instead of opticality) is arguably the primary aesthetic feature for which Blingee is known, namely, its heavy use of glitter, affectionately nicknamed “sparkle-vomit”. In Blingee GIFs, sparkles can be superimposed on the entire image or restricted to parts of it, using masks. For instance, one can add glitter of various shapes and colors to the clothes of a pop celebrities like Drake or Avril Lavigne [Figure 7], or to the hair of a beloved anime character. Additionally, like in purikura, cuteness and prettiness become all-absorbing (although not exclusive) forces indexed by the medium, to the point that gothic and grotesque darkness themselves can be rendered cute and cuddly. Color combinations like black, white, purple and red are popular choices in such cases, combined with stamps of bat and spiky angel wings, black hearts and butterflies, sparkling skulls and spider webs, and “dark” or “depressive” text (e.g. “gothic love,” “100% crazy” or “emo girl”) [Figure 8]. On occasion, as can be seen in Figure 9, Blingee is also used for political activism, for example, to undermine the image of macho figures like Donald Trump. Or, in another sense, to produce what writing duo Alicia Eler and Kate Durbin have termed The Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic, which combines dreamy adolescent girl sensibilities with “immediate, hyper-embodied, raw and vulnerable”[9] expressions, a move akin to a fourth-wave version of 1990s kinderwhore. Eler and Durbin’s article is headed by a GIF found on Tumblr featuring artist Frida Kahlo with a glittering unibrow, which beautifully encapsulates their point by mixing the cuteness and prettiness of Blingee sparkles with an icon of the visceral strength of female physical and psychological pain [Figure 10].

In its undermining of the aesthetic integrity of images, Blingee's “sparkle-vomit” may establish a surprising relationship with concepts such as Georges Bataille’s “base materialism.” As Benjamin Noys puts it, “base materialism” as defined by the French philosopher is an “active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilizes all foundations,” that, in doing so, “destroys the promise of liberated spaces and offers a more radical disorienting freedom”[10] unreducible to politics. While “sparkle-vomit” (in Internet lingo) means an excess of cuteness or prettiness which becomes too much to handle by the standards of decorum and good taste, the term—in which "sparkle" denotes an idea of light, purity, and idealization, while "vomit" its dialectical opposite, i.e., the unclean and debased substances one expels to the ground below—already encodes a contradicting, destabilizing absurdity. A similar image can be found on the Internet and pop culture meme “puking rainbows," meaning “To vomit rainbows at the sight of something amazing on the internet” or “To be so overwhelmed with cuteness that you puke rainbows.”[11] Unicorns, for instance, are a common subject of the “puking rainbows” variety of illustrations, signaling that they are so magical that even their lowest excretion is made of everything nice [Figure 10].

In Blingee GIFs, puppies, kittens, and babies rule. Fantasy figures, too: fairies with sparkling wings, diaphanous elves, beautiful princesses, and enchanted princes [Figure 11]. But the probability of finding an anime character with big dewy eyes is equally great, as this kind of character has become a “go-to” to create fluff on the Internet. Add a few hearts, ribbons, and some sparkles, and one gets to have a perfect Blingee. There is, however, yet another common kind of “cutification” of Blingee, namely, when male characters from Japanese animation (or other media), popular among female fans—often, characters with “masculinized” traits of aggressiveness or emotional uptightness—are "cutified" with glitter and other kinds of pretty embellishments and ornamentations. Here, we enter a terrain, if not of deliberate irony, of subversion of masculinity by feminized, and therefore abject, digital matters. There are countless examples of this kind of intervention on Blingee; for instance, featuring popular tsundere or villainous characters, like Uchiha Sasuke from Naruto [Figure 12].

As can be inferred from these descriptions, it is mainly through the “poison” (as Adorno puts in his Aesthetic Theory) of kitsch and other spaces of action which are traditionally “low” in the hierarchy of artistic production and reception for their abundance of “sentimental rubbish” (again, Adorno), such as fandoms of various cultural-industry products and, in particular, fandoms of mainstream manga and anime due to their internalization of kawaii aesthetics, that Blingee GIFs become disruptive and therefore intertwined with Bataille’s “base materialism.” Indeed, one of the more striking aspects of Blingee GIFs is that, despite (or precisely because of) all their brilliance, they exude a material decomposition—or rather, they seem to be in the process of decomposing or being decomposed, both in the biological sense of decay but also in the sensu stricto of being “de- +‎ composed”, i.e., undone, split or fragmented into pieces. Specifically, clouds of  diamond-shaped sparkles, iconic as they of “precious” auras (see, for instance, their use in the iconography of shoujo manga to convey sentiment or beauty [Figure 13]), may actually have an unsettling dimension on the images they intend “beautify.” Because Blingee sparkles are white or brightly-colored and often used in large quantities to give the images a glittery effect, they tear up the fabric of the images, gnawing at their surface (like urine on copper), piercing them with tiny voids that compromise their material integrity [Figure 14].

The fact that in a way, Blingee GIFs already seem damaged or fragmented ties in with their anti-futurity, as mentioned earlier in this text. It is not hard to imagine a digital archaeologist of the future digging up glitchy traces of Blingee GIFs, like fragments of vases from excavations into millenary ruins. Indeed, there is something about them that gives one the impression that they would be fully at home in a ruined environment, as if these images are ready to unravel into poetic muck, despite their aspirations to the stratosphere of sparkling optimism. Because, in Blingee, the worse taste, the better, the damage is not “just” material (assuming that anything can ever “just” happen on a material or formal plane, dialectically divorced from their content), but also aesthetic in that it becomes an aesthetic of culturally poisonous—in the Adornian sense—cuteness.

The name of the website itself, Blingee, comes from “bling,” an onomatopoeic jargon indicative of ostentatious clothing and  gaudy jewelry as well as of the materialistic attitudes that are associated with them—justifying why some of the more popular Blingee stamps are gold gangsta chains, a symbol of status and wealth in hip-hop culture [Figure 16]. As such, following Bataille, the idea of excess and, therefore, expenditure is inscribed in the very etymology of Blingee. A loss of energy, time, and resources visible, for instance, in the works of popular, competition-winning Blingee artists like Irina Kuleshova, a 50-something-year-old Russian divorcee who has, by her own admission, “married Blingee.” As she puts it in her interview with academic Olia Lialina, “All my free time I make blingees or I think about a new trick that would make my pictures more alive.”[12] Kuleshova’s epic Blingee GIFs epitomize the “designing for abundance, joy or delight”[13] which are the substance of Bataillean luxury as meaningless dissipation of surplus energy.[14]

That a significant part of Blingee GIFs are permeated with cute aesthetics establishes a link between cuteness and the excesses of kitsch beautification as a “culture of the gutter, of trash, [which] is itself scatological.”[15] The superficiality—both literal and figurative—is encapsulated in the idea of the “stamp” as a decorative unit that exists over the image, a sticker repeated ad nauseum whose relationship with the image beneath is inevitably shallow. This, in itself, is one of the aspects that “lowers” the aesthetics of Blingee GIFs, as cheap trick associated with amateur (and, importantly, girls’) crafts that goes against the tenets of “proper” composition in the fine arts (associated, in the modernist tradition, with masculinized precision and restraint). In other words, glitter, kittens, cute anime characters, and other “sentimental rubbish” like motivational phrases are scatological insofar as, excreted from any sort of aesthetic or intellectual deepness, they naturally occur on the surface.

This use of texture (e.g., glitter) and stamps superimposed on the images in Blingee, attempting to create a sense of integration that is ultimately futile due to the superficiality embedded in the website’s mechanics, bring us to yet another Bataillean category, the formless. Far from being “informal” (as in the abstract and gestural qualities of arte informale), Blingee GIFs, in their maniac operations, attack the formal qualities valued by modernist taste. In particular, Blingee stamps, compulsively repeated and opened up to amateurism (remember that these are user-generated), create a paradox in which their customization eventually results in absolute redundancy and visual standardization: after a few Google searches, all Blingee GIFs blur into each other, pointing to a phenomenological catastrophe lurking from within the layers of kittens and sparkle-vomit—regardless of their authors’ intentions, they magnificently fail to reach the heights of beauty and imagination promised by their most recurring motives, whether cute or fantastic. If anything, Blingee GIFs may strike one as resolutely anti-lyrical in their baseness; a dismemberment of lyricism itself as the expression of deep feelings or emotions in art, coming neither from the straight path of modernist medium-specificity nor from the emphasis on disgust-inducing (bodily) scatology in abject art, but a curveball from somewhere unexpected. A catastrophe of this kind can, if not be redeemed, at least translate into a radical and interesting (perhaps, to some point, even liberating) material experience.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Dark Web Bake Sale, Floating Dakimakura & Zombieflat.

See in PORTFOLIO – Digitália & Pen-plotted Paintings.

REFERENCES in Blingee.