Extremely fast and incredibly online: a conversation with B Wijshijer

Image courtesy B Wijshijer.

B Wijshijer has been living two lives. In one life, they’re B Wijshijer, post-internet artist. They have an MFA from the University of Waterloo, and they hold terms and concepts like “ambient intimacy,” “parasocial relationships,” “neurocapitalism,” and “authenticity marketing” close to the vest as they struggle to maintain autonomy in a physical world networked technology is rapidly infringing upon. The other life is lived in computers, where they go by the performance art alias shrimpychip, stepping up to viral internet challenges, filtering selfies, and building their brand with react videos.

The artist characterizes their practice and casual online life as “distinct and overlapping,” but 2020 took that to another level. At the time still labouring at a thesis and an art practice entrenched in digital culture in the early months of a pandemic that essentially restricted all interactions to online platforms, Wijshijer felt every aspect of that relationship come rushing into extreme focus.

“Everything that I was thinking about multiplied tenfold. Every mundane task — everything — became performance art.”

With in-person learning on hold, Wijshijer would have to complete their MFA in an entirely digital format, even defending their thesis via video call. 

“Suddenly my online character was the only thing that was interacting,” Wijshijer reflects. “It was kind of sad/funny.”

Centred on a series of YouTube videos Wijshijer created under the guise of their online performance art persona shrimpychip, the thesis is a document of Wijshijer’s experiences pushing algorithmic structures to their limits through satirical video explorations of online media suggesting digital intimacy, empathizing with internet culture while critiquing how neoliberalism manifests through it. 

Clowning on the viral internet challenge of the same name, in Mannequin Challenge, shrimpy takes the premise literally, posing next to a mannequin torso, recording it all through an object detection app, results for each cycling through “person (may be,)” “person (must be),” and no identification at all; in one amusing instance, the app suggests shrimpy’s legs might even be a sofa.

As a non-binary person of Southeast Asian descent, Wijshijer is also keenly aware of the biases they experience through the marginalized matrix of their identity.

In their How to Edit Your Selfies video, shrimpy demonstrates the inequities of facial recognition software by exploring the extremes of its potential. Using FaceApp to convert their face back and forth between gender binaries, shrimpy’s face becomes a hyper-sexualized anime character with exaggerated eyes and lips, or a weathered, darker-skinned man. Wijshijer notes that subsequent off-screen tests using images of white people did not create significant changes in their skin tone, suggesting that their exception was due to their “more ‘ethnically ambiguous’ appearance and the lack of such faces in the algorithm’s training data.”

Through another work called How to Find Your Doppelgänger, Wijshijer used reverse image searches on Google to reveal how the algorithm matched their selfies to stock photos, ads, and profile photos, forming what they called “false narratives through their grouping” and highlighting the way networked technologies appropriate the aesthetics of private images.

“In spite of our digital labour and countless contributions to AI, the technology can deny our humanity or, in some cases, be used against us,” Wijshijer’s thesis explains, but by manipulating online technologies in ways in which they are not intended to expose capitalism’s manipulative designs, Wijshijer is able to achieve some semblance of autonomy. 

As consciousness building, Wijshijer’s practice also counters capitalism’s atomizing control of individual user behaviour by turning their viewers’ minds on to technology’s biases.

Wary of acts of ostensibly personal online media’s tendency to be appropriated for neoliberal functions, Wijshijer is conversely celebratory of anonymous platforms and the unique position they afford users to build around community interests.

“I’m so interested in Reddit,” they enthuse. 

In January 2021, Wijshijer was drawn to the messaging platform as a result of the momentum surrounding the rocketing rise of GameStop’s (GME) stock value driven by a historic boom of millennial interest in trading and enthusiasm from Reddit users, particularly in the subreddit r/wallstreetbets. The activity surrounding the subreddit entered the public zeitgeist as users posting memes helped drive the GME stock to unprecedented heights. A generation raised on video games suddenly had access to fractional shares and no-fee online trading platforms like the Robinhood phone app and they were changing the game; Wall Street couldn’t see it coming. “It’s kind of scary in some ways. It’s like a beast.”

Noting the tendency for content to get buried on the platform, Wijshijer dove in and assembled GME: A Memeumentary — a nearly four-minute-long YouTube documentary telling the story of the moment through a hyperactive collage of found memes from the subreddit.

“I was interested in this trickster figure and the idea of play in a kind of godly sense, or in a way that can overcome these firm authoritarian structures,” Wijshijer explains. “Memes and jokes were able to actually affect this elite class in a way that was real.”

A strictly visual documentary, the video contains no sound, but the barrage of images is overwhelming on its own.

While Wijshijer’s shrimpychip performance art typically engages online activities that are coded feminine, the GME memeumentary is overwhelmingly dominated by images of male protagonists from popular culture properties like The Matrix, Forrest Gump, even Dragon Ball Z and CNBC’s Mad Money host, Jim Cramer.

“I wanted to cosplay as this bro artist while doing this piece in some way,” Wijshijer says. “Take this GME redditor stock broking thing that seems very masculine and then pretend to go undercover — but it also is undercover, because Reddit’s anonymous — and create this time piece for this bro-y event.”

Wijshijer’s avatar doesn’t appear in the documentary, but engaging with themes of gender expression also anchored their documentary to their performance background. Still, as with most of their projects, the line between performance and participation was easily blurred. Wijshijer even purchased some GME.

“I had some FOMO investing maybe. I didn’t wanna be a fraud, I wanted to actually get in there.”

The FOMO is real. Shortly after GME had its moment, NFTs exploded across the speculation landscape and metaverse and Web3 conversations followed, permeating media platform discourse. By comparison, the GME speculation feels of a certain vintage.

At the same time, Wijshijer is energized by the fact that “new media art’s more accessible than ever” and its implications for their practice, looking forward to opportunities to “build on the new feeling that everyone has” and expand their direction and research. 

At the rate the culture’s accelerating, they sort of have to.

“It moves really fast.”

B Wijshijer’s GME: A Memeumentary appears on Long Winter TV tonight (Jan. 27, 2022) at 7PM EST. Tune in here.