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 in Queens, New York City. The museum originally opened in 1988 as the Amer ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

from 2006-2018. His work at the museum revolved around participation in a variety of fields, including

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...

interactive art Interactive art is a form of art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Some interactive art installations achieve this by letting the observer walk through, over or around them; others ask the artist ...

, remix, animated GIFs, and online communities. Additionally, Jason Eppink is a senior agent with prank group

Improv Everywhere Improv Everywhere (often abbreviated IE) is a comedic performance art group based in New York City, formed in 2001 by Charlie Todd. Its slogan is "We Cause Scenes". The group carries out pranks, which they call "missions", in public places. The s ...

, a member of art collective Flux Factory, and a recurring character (40-Year-Old Goosey) on

The Chris Gethard Show ''The Chris Gethard Show'' was a phone-in comedy and variety talk show created and hosted by Chris Gethard. Initially a live show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York, the show debuted on public-access channel Manhattan Neighborh ...

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, Jason Eppink created a parody Kickstarter 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 Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in raster ...

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 Vidding is a fan labor practice in media fandom of creating music videos from the footage of one or more visual media sources, thereby exploring the source itself in a new way. The creator may choose video clips in order to focus on a single char ...

The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture

In 2014, Jason Eppink engaged members of

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, imag ...

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 Vernacular culture is the cultural forms made and organised by ordinary, often indigenous people, as distinct from the high culture of an elite. One feature of vernacular culture is that it is informal. Such culture is generally engaged in on a ...

. 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

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Eppink, Jason American designers American art curators 1985 births Living people People from Spring, Texas American humorists