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
The Museum of the Moving Image is a media museum located in a former building of the historic Astoria Studios (now Kaufman Astoria Studios), in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens in New York City. The museum originally opened in 1988 as the Am ...
in
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
from 2006-2018. His work at the museum revolved around participation in a variety of fields, including
video game
A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...
s,
interactive art,
remix
A remix, also sometimes called reorchestration or rework, 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, poem, or photograph ca ...
,
animated GIFs, and online communities.
Additionally, Jason Eppink is a senior agent with prank group
Improv Everywhere, a member of art collective
Flux Factory, 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 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, alternative finance, to fund projects "withou ...
, Jason Eppink created a parody
Kickstarter
Kickstarter, PBC is an American Benefit corporation, public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York City, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative project ...
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
''Something Awful'' (SA) is an American comedy website hosting content including blog entries, Internet forum, forums, feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews. It was created by Richard Kyanka, Richard "Lowtax" K ...
in response to a
Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. It was created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. It is the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editin ...
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, 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
supercuts,
recut trailers, and
vidding.
The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture
In 2014, Jason Eppink engaged members of
Reddit
Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...
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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{{DEFAULTSORT:Eppink, Jason
21st-century American designers
American art curators
1985 births
Living people
People from Spring, Texas
American humorists