betamale

As you look at the screen, it is possible to believe you are gazing into eternity. You see the things that were inside you. This is the womb. The original site of the imagination. You do not move your eyes from the screen. You have become invisible. The images captivate you, but still you drift off. You can still see every detail clearly, but can't grasp the meaning. Whenever a shift in your spiritual life occurs, fragments such as these surface. You won't be distracted; either by the reflection of yourself, or by the last glimpse of the things now being lost forever. As you look at the screen, it is possible to believe you are gazing into eternity. For a moment, it all interlocks. But then a new pattern of ordered disorder emerges in front of you. Always the one before the last. You are again in a dream, walking endlessly winding paths. You can't find your way out of the maze you are convinced has been solely created for you.

- Still Life (Betamale)

With a total running time of four minutes and 54 seconds, Still Life (Betamale) is a work of video art by Canadian artist, filmmaker, and essayist Jon Rafman (born in 1981). The video consists of a montage of photographs, digital drawings, and short clips of video, in which Rafman uses visual and compositing effects to manipulate color, scale and movement, emphasizing the different on-screen materialities of digital artifacts. Still Life (Betamale), the first part of a video trilogy followed by Mainsqueeze (2014) and Erysichthon (2015), was initially posted to YouTube in September of 2013, as a music video for Daniel Lopatin’s homonymous song. In what some considered “an unprecedented move,”[1] the video was banned from YouTube, then re-uploaded to the video-sharing website Vimeo, only to be taken down again due to its explicit content. Rafman has since re-uploaded it successfully to Vimeo, and the video is also available on both artists’ websites. In addition to the music by Lopatin—better known under his stage name Oneohtrix Point Never—Still Life (Betamale) is accompanied by the lyrics at the beginning of this section delivered by a flat female voice. On Rafman’s website, Still Life (Betamale) is accompanied by a notice expressing “Special thanks to FM TOWNS MARTY, Swampy T Fox, Winifox, Kigurumiwa, Rajutenrakuza, Kiwikig2, ShittyBattleStations, Gurochan.net, Daniel Swan,” as well as a 43‑page‑long PDF document of a thread from 4chan’s /mu/ board, in which users react to and discuss the video at length (http://jonrafman.com/4chan.pdf). The document, heavy on Internet slang, image macros, and reaction pics, records a wide range of conversations, including the realization that Rafman himself had anonymously initiated the 4chan thread.

Contentwise, Still Life (Betamale) is like a stream of consciousness from the wrong side of the Internet, a downward spiral towards the creepy stuff. For instance, kinks that have gained a reputation for being weird or disgusting, like furries and dollers or animegao kigurumi. While neither is necessarily sexual,[2] these subcultures are frequently understood as deviant erotic preferences, thriving in the underbelly of art and video‑sharing websites like DeviantArt, YouTube, and Vimeo. In Still Life (Betamale), Rafman uses footage from the YouTube channels of amateur fursuiters and dollers around the world: Winfoxi from Ukraine, Kigurumiwa from China, Kiwikig from the UK, among others. The countries vary, but with their masks on, these performers are stateless and timeless, their velvety muzzles “gazing into eternity,” beyond the camera. The animegao girls, too, move uncannily about like living dolls. Furries and dollers embody the “interspecies affect”[3] of cuteness, as a “process [that] may bring us closer to animals, or other humans, but… also functions if the cute object is a toy, doll, or fictional character,”[4] expanding intersubjectivity beyond its organicist tenets, towards the broader field of interobjectivity in which commodities take part. Still, the suggestion that such “interspecies affect” might overflow the boundaries of propriety into bestiality, agalmatophilia or technophilia, casts a long shadow, keeping furries and dollers wrapped in the abject phenomeno-poetics of the Internet’s “wrong side.”

Furries and dollers easily “stick” to other paraphilias, like WAM (“wet and messy”) or sploshing fetishes. In Still Life (Betamale), Rafman includes videos from the (now defunct) Vimeo channel of Swampy T Fox, “a quicksand pornographer who specializes in furries”[5] who existed in the niche where furry desire meets the arousal of sinking in quicksand. In his appearance in Rafman’s video, Swampy struggles to pull himself out of a mud pit that slowly engulfs his body. In another, he is drenched in pink and blue liquids, pouring from an invisible source above him. In an interview for Vice, Swampy explained that he was inspired by the slapstick humor of animal cartoons to react against the “elitism and drama of the furry community… who deemed fur suits too precious to handle a romp in the mud.”[6] The disruptive cuteness of funny animals, which in early comics and cartoon often bordered on cruelty,[7] is picked apart and slowed down here, in an affirmative stance on furry materiality resulting in oddly intimate and dramatic videos. Swampy rejoices in becoming nothing but mud—thick and coarse, formless mud.

Still Life (Betamale) is also packed with Japanese eroge (“erotic videogames”) from the 1980s and 1990s, poetically thread together in sequences of screenshots and GIFs, from coveying an ethereal sense of eeriness. There are glimpses of interspecies love between a blonde woman and an anthropomorphic green wolf-unicorn. Eviscerated cats, hanged bodies, suicide bridges. Girls urinating or sleeping in trains, with spread legs revealing their underwear. Saucer-eyed schoolgirls with colorful hair appear next to old technologies: VCRs, CDs, old computers, landline telephones, fax machines. Nightscapes of electrically powered skyscrapers and neon advertising signs contrast with unlit rooms, shadowy staircases, and the recurrent first-person shot of a night drive through the forest. Not unlike Swampy’s mud pit, these hypnotic visuals, resembling classic Windows 95 and 98 screensavers, echo the erotic pull of vortexes, voids, and mazes on screen. Like Swampy, too, there is something cute about the earnestness of early videogames, with characters pixelized and compressed into small colored units. Static or moving ever so slightly, these images translate into an immersive experience of futurepast scenarios filled with longing, arousal, fear, pain, or disgust.

At one point, Rafman uses layers and masks to deliver a particularly feverish collage of pornographic images from Gurochan, an online artwork community specializing in ero-guro, often in animanga style and with lolicon themes. Gurochan has been called one of the creepiest websites on the Internet, whose “fetish physics”[8] reflects Rafman’s process of surfing the Internet ad nauseam. “There’s this moment at the climax of the film where there’s an enormous accumulation of this violent fetish imagery,” Rafman explains. “I was trying to express the feeling of sensory overload after surfing the deep Internet and consuming so many images.”[9] Gurochan characters in Still Life (Betamale) are deformed and dismembered, inflated, overflowing with abject body fluids, violated by tentacles and other monstrous attackers. One illustration, showing a pool of bikini-clad anime girls dissolving into blobs, calls to mind the tigers in The Story of Little Black Sambo, racing each other around a tree so fast that they turn to butter.[10] Although these drawings are hardcore pornography, there is a softness to their contents and form, mirrored by the smooth gradations and highlights of digital painting, fleshy pastel hues, and the fuzzy outlines of blown-up images.

Fittingly, one of the first images to appear in Still Life (Betamale) is the photograph fat white man coming “towards” the viewer, increasing in size from a tiny rectangle at the center of the screen until it occupies the whole field of vision. The naked man sits in a room covered in Japanese anime posters, pointing two revolvers at his head while wearing a face mask made of pink panties with cute cartoon girls and two kid bikini tops. The image appears again in brief, quasi-subliminal flashes, with superimposed digital sweat beads running down its surface, in a glaring collage of photograph and computer-generated imagery emphasizing a body about to burst from its limits. Such a squeamish body is the beta male that Rafman’s still life represents—not the nerdy Silicone Valley entrepreneur but the emasculated incel (“involuntary celibate”) whose resentment, misogyny and self-pity constitute a toxic residue of hegemonic masculinity, threatening to spill from the fringes of the Internet where it dwells and brews.[11]

Rafman relies on cuteness to articulate what some have termed the “Beta Uprising,”[12] i.e., the revenge of the “pale, white and angry”[13] manosphere of Internet forums like 4chan’s /r9k/ or Reddit’s r/ForeverAlone, manifesting, for instance, in their adoption of the starry-eyed anthropomorphic frog character Pepe the Frog, a grotesque-cute Internet meme adopted, as unofficial mascot (against the wishes of Pepe’s creator, Matt Furies, author of the comic series Boys’ Club).[14] Still Life (Betamale) wallows in how beta culture mixes an “aestheticization of powerlessness”[15] with terrorism enacted in fantasy, when not in reality—at least four mass murders in North America were committed by self-identifying incels or men known to be aligned with incel ideology, resulting in forty-five deaths.[16] The connection of beta-maleness with animanga and cuteness is unsurprising. After all, “chan” culture (from “channel”) initially sprang from Japanese imageboards like Futaba Channel (a.k.a. 2chan, launched in 2001) and their gaming, underground, and otaku culture, before it spread to hacktivist groups like Anonymous, Internet troll culture, and far-right Internet phenomena like the alt-right movement and the Gamergate controversy. Otaku, themselves, are stigmatized as failed beta men,[17] effeminate in their habits of shopping or staying at home, contrary to the ideal of salaryman masculinity.[18]

Other artists besides Rafman have explored the connections between the incel, alt-right, and trolls with animanga culture, using similar strategies of shocking Internet ethnography and found objects. An example is An Illustrated Guide of Capitalism (Onamatopee, 2017) by Italian visual artist and poet Ddk (Davide Andreatta), an unconventional comic book accompanied by an essay about the relationship between capitalism and Twitter trolls, thoroughly intertwined with manga and anime imagery. Ddk explores the contradictions of contemporary cyberculture by presenting, like Rafman, a piece of digital anthropology, consisting of a collection of tweets and memes with displays of extreme racism, misogyny, far-right politics, and violent and scatological imagery—by users whose Twitter avatars are pictures of cute anime girls. Ddk presents the collection in comics form, with smooth, light blue gradients serving as background and speech balloons (containing the tweets) coming from the adorable user profile images. All this is digitally printed on glossy paper, contrasting the kawaii characters and almost techno-utopian “cleanliness” of the panels with the sheer abjectness of the tweets, in which the fandom of moé and CGDCT (“cute girls doing cute things”) animanga, in all its supposed innocence, runs alongside and blends with the lowest, most toxic confines of the “wrong side” of the Internet.

Works such as Rafman’s Still Life (Betamale) and Ddk’s An Illustrated Guide of Capitalism highlight how incel and chan culture undermine the “triumphant narrative”[19] around nerds and “geek chic,”[20] in the Western media and Cool Japan campaigns alike. One eroge illustration in Still Life (Betamale) captures the obsessive, dangerous, unhealthy streak of such ignoble desires particularly well: the hand of an unseen man gripping viciously at a wire fence while spying on a happy couple playing tennis on the other side. Like that invisible man clutching at the fence, such works succeed in making one aware of the act of seeing by either looking away from or despite the unbearable things coming at us from the glossy screen or comic book pages. In the case of Still Life (Betamale), along with quicksand furry erotica and lolicon amputee porn, Rafman instrumentalizes our disgust to make the work “intolerable to the extent that it cannot be absorbed by the pluralist economy of an aesthetic eclecticism.”[21]

Nevertheless, when the anthropomorphic body is absent in Still Life (Betamale), the result is equally terrifying. The real “still life” in Rafman’s video emerges from the Reddit thread ShittyBattleStations, where Redditors share their photographs of appalling desktop computer setups.[22] Rafman uses several images of these computers in perilous situations, complete with garbage and messy cable arrangements. Some of the rooms in these photographs show large quantities of hoarded objects, covering cramped living areas and gaming setups. Computer monitors, towers, keyboards, laptops, external hard disk drives, graphics tablets, televisions, printers, home consoles, virtual reality headsets, DVD players, CD boxes, and headphones can be spotted among empty beer cans, used cigarettes, unfished food, plastic bags, and scattered blankets. In other pictures, the hoarding is replaced by stark basements, void of any amenities except for a computer and its accessories on the floor. There is improvised bedding nearby, infiltrations on the walls, exposed bricks, ripped wallpaper covered in newspapers. One “shitty battlestation” shows an elaborate arrangement in which a bulky computer monitor hangs over an adjustable bed, with the keyboard on a bed tray and a cat lazing on the mattress. This self-sufficient unit to eat, sleep and play is a grotesque show of human ingenuity, homely and revolting, mocking the comforts and technological achievements of first-world countries. But perhaps the most notorious picture in this series is the simple close-up of a computer keyboard, with grease, dirt, crumbs and human hair filling the spaces in between the keys. In these “shitty battlestations,” our home computers have been stripped from their upright position, floored “against the axis of the human body.”[23] The photographs are devoid of both people and ergonomic amenities, with a notable scarcity of “proper” chairs, desks, tables or beds. Here, the beta male emerges in what is left out, omitted like “a disposable non‑technology”[24] traceable only through the waste they leave behind.

But the “bad matter”[25] in Still Life (Betamale) cannot be reduced to dirt. “Dead time,”[26] too, is played to its full hauntological effect,  focusing on still images, slow motion, and minimal movements, matching the intermittences and interruptions in Oneohtrix Point Never’s music. Lips are moving in a frozen face — cities, motionless, except for window lights turning on and off. A river is undulating in an otherwise inert forest or the barely noticeable splash of someone falling from a bridge. But also, the eventlessness of amateur fetish videos on YouTube and Vimeo. Fursuiters and dollers that parade in front of the camera, performing simple actions and poses with no beginning or end, their dullness accentuated by Rafman’s use of slow motion. Even when there is a progression, like Swampy T Fox’s quicksand videos, it is a “cancelation of the future”[27] rather than actual progress, as Swampy is steadily sucked to his demise in the mud pit. Still Life (Betamale) envisions the time of contemporary pop culture as a stratified pile of obsolete artifacts, memeable resonances, unprocessable fetishes, and electronic waste—the deposition, and erosion, of pop-cultural debris. As such, it evokes a broader category of digital disgust, those sticky, “mammalian”[28] practices that clog content circulation in (supposedly) democratic, informed and participatory Web 2.0 societies.[29]

It is ironic and oddly appropriate that  Rafman’s “online anthropology”[30] is itself the target of disgust and contempt. As mentioned before, Rafman initiated a 4chan thread on Still Life, as a homecoming to the Mecca of viral Internet content and shock imagery to which in video pays tribute. But this did not translate into a red-carpet walk—nor, one suspects, would Rafman expect it too, if the action of nevertheless turning the thread into an “archival art” PDF document is any indication. Indeed, the thread attests to the extent to which Rafman’s artistic integrity is found problematic by those who are familiar with his sources, eliciting sarcastic comments like “this is just a bunch of tumblr and furry shit thrown together” or “wow, you have a tumblr! good job. furries are so WEIRD! japanese porn is so CREEPY!” (sic).  The most indignant comments, however, came not from 4chan but Tumblr, revolving around Rafman’s use of over 30 screengrabs and GIFs of Japanese video games from the Tumblr blog fmtownsmarty, without permission or proper credit. One fellow Tumblrer, ulan-bator, was particularly vocal in their protests, accusing Rafman of perpetuating the practice “slumming” in outsider cultures.[31] These claims are not without reason, as Rafman compares himself to the “figure of the Romantic explorer”[32] trailblazing through the Internet’s most exotic regions and cultures. Rafman’s series of photographs You are Standing in an Open Field (2015) shows the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and other Romantics serving as backgrounds for a cyber‑consumerist “apotheosis of trash,”[33] much like that in Still Life (Betamale).

In art magazines and the artist’s own words, Rafman’s work is said to stand in “resolute solidarity with the virtual revelers who populate his work, from the denizens of Second Life to the ‘furry’ fetishists of 4chan.”[34] But the adverse reactions in 4chan and Tumblr against the appropriation of amateur labor by a professional artist hint at a more complex, certainly less harmonious, interplay between the realms of the art gallery and gritty mass culture. Indeed, even if Rafman was granted permission by the authors from whom he appropriates, most of us “do not care if the copyright papers are all in order; for what is at stake are the aesthetic rights of style based on a culture of originals.”[35] There is a dissonance in the fact that, although Rafman replicates an Internet “cut and paste” culture that celebrates anonymity and permissiveness towards intellectual property—and that, according to “Luddite” writers like Andrew Keen, is “enabling a younger generation of intellectual kleptomaniacs”[36] — Still Life (Betamale) still ended up in a gallery in Chelsea.[37] This stresses the privileges and inequalities at work in the processes of both in digital culture and art historical recognition, and the resentment it generates from those who, as George Bataille famously put it, are “like a spider or an earthworm”[38] that gets squashed everywhere and has with no rights of its own. The beta male becomes a metaphor for the broader construction of humanity not as something but as “no-thing.”[39] The female voice in the video had it right all along: “You do not move your eyes from the screen. You have become invisible.”

The body and electronic horror at work in Still Life (Betamale) tells us that humans, like computers, rot away; that they are soon-to-be obsolete. Or, as Donna Haraway writes, “we are all compost, not posthuman”[40] — that the reassuring, self-contained “author” or “human” subject is no longer living, but undead, and rotting. The realm of digitality struggles against its chaotic waste, the amorphous matters that pollute our high technological milieus, highlighting “the unsustainable, politically dubious, and ethically suspicious practices that maintain technological culture and its corporate networks.”[41] In Still Life (Betamale), the “clean and proper body”[42] is an unattainable construction, applicable neither to humans nor to our filthy computers bursting with obscene content. It perceptualizes Simon Reynolds’s suggestion that we are heading towards a “cultural-ecological catastrophe, when the seam of pop history is exhausted.” [43] Rafman fuses the bad taste of plagiarism and amateurism with the bad time of nostalgia, encapsulated in the millennials’ obsession with retrogaming and 1980s and 1990s cartoons. Like looking up-close, the Other blurs into the Self, disturbing the “boundaries separating the animate from the inanimate, the organic from the inorganic, the dead from the living.” [44] It is significant that, at the very beginning of the video, a man in a suit points at the viewer while falling in and out of focus, leaving a trail of zigzagging lines and chromatic aberration. Here, the human cannot (can no longer?) be represented, existing only as a loud absence. As no-body and no-time, devitalized by the encounters of flesh and technology, yet surviving, persisting, drawn on longer than necessary.