Revue des arts et médiations humaines
1Digital Drifting is a fanzine that aims to explore and document digital folklore in the manner of a cabinet of curiosities. The publication mixes documentary textual writing based on the description of images gathered from the Internet (Leibovici, 2007), with the production of a visual essay. This first issue is presented in an A2 format (42 x 59.4 cm), folded twice to produce an A4 sheet (21 x 29.7 cm) that includes a cover, two inside pages and a back cover. The A4 booklet displays the text, and once unfolded, the visual essay takes the form of a poster. Below is the republication of this issue, originally written in English, which traces the genealogy of the Wojak meme as an editorial walkthrough.
2We chose the Wojak for its relative persistence online: first drawn ten years ago, its forms are constantly updated and taken up by antagonistic political communities, in the form of iterations that are often mobilized as zany “reaction images” (Ngai, 2015) by participants in conversations. While Wojak’s intrinsic relationship with platform capitalism has already been studied (Gly Burton, 2021), we chose to observe how it was mobilized by these digital actors to generate cleavage around contemporary activities of consumption (of services, commodities and ideologies). Thus, our research-creation work was not carried out with a view to immediately delivering a complete monograph, but more like a notebook, written during digital wanderings, in a state of floating observation (Petonnet, 1982, p. 37-47) while seeking to identify the Wojak species we encountered, just as others spot elements of flora and fauna while strolling through the forest. Our analysis drew on our skills as designers, enabling us to deconstruct the technical gesture that produced these images.
Figure 1
Montage featuring the cover, inside pages and poster of the first issue of the Digital Drifting fanzine.
Photography and editing: Thibault le Page and Kévin Zanin. Graphic design, drawings and fanzine texts: Thibault le Page and Kévin Zanin.
3The earliest currently known Wojak is the nickname of a Polish user on the English-speaking board /int/ of the defunct German imageboard Krautchan, who started posting the image around 2010, often accompanied by a lament about not having a girlfriend. According to him, the image originally came from the Polish imageboard vichan, where it was posted with the filename “ciepła twarz.jpg.”
On the top, three faces, all drawn in a hesitant and irregular line. The first, wearing a surgical mask, writhe in pain as he screams. The second lowers his head, his eyes in shadow, seemingly in deep sorrow. The last one holds his head in his hands, in which a few saturated blue tears are flowing. All of them are swimming in a sea of images and logos: PornHub, CNN, FoxNews, TikTok, wayfair. The price of petrol. A Ukrainian flag. A mushroom cloud. An anthropomorphic COVID. Several sentences, titles, questions: “IS YOUR NFT RACIST?”; “The Moon Landings Were Faked Conspiracy”; “WHERE’S MY FUCKING SOFA? This part of the image is captioned “People with Internet:”
Below, two portraits, the same hesitant and irregular line. A woman, blond, white with half-length hair. Her eyes are slightly squinted, she wears mascara and a blue blouse dotted with dozens of small daisies. Her cheeks are pink, and in front of her, at the other end of the composition, a man, blue eyes, in profile, is looking at her. His facial features are square, in a realistic style. He has short hair and his moustache is drawing the beginning of a spiral. He too is white, and behind both of them, a sublime landscape unfolds, beautiful snowcapped mountains over a lake. A sunset completes the serene atmosphere of the composition. A caption heads: “People without Internet:”
4These characters are wojaks. They populate the Internet and depict our lives, telling us what’s trendy, who’s ahead, that everything was better before, that everything will be better after, but also who to vote for, what the jobs of the future will be, that we should invest in cryptocurrencies and that we should definitely not invest in cryptocurrencies. Wojaks are our mirror and leap from reddit posts to Twitter threads, they are punk cliparts1 escaping from a convoluted PowerPoint presentation. They are the “enfant terrible” of the commonsense philosophizing, JPEGs and cave paintings.
5For the past ten years, these characters, which seem to have been drawn with a single stroke, have been appearing on our screens. Wojak means soldier in Polish. They are also known as Feel Guy: the mission of these soldiers is above all to express the contemporary emotions of those who use them in the comment spaces of social networks interfaces.
6The origin of the term “Wojak” comes from the pseudonym of the first known user to have posted one of these characters on the Germanic imageboard Krautchan,2 in 2010. Frequently associated with the expression of boredom with being single, it was in 2011 that it evolved by being associated by an Internet user with the legend “I know that feel bro,” hybridizing with another linguistic meme present on social networks, the “that feeling,” which consists of posting a sentence beginning with these words and describing a feeling. This is how the Wojak becomes a “reaction image”: an emotional icon, allowing the Internet user to express his or her emotion about a content. The fortune of the Wojak raises the question of why its users are still mobilised today, more than ten years later, to express their melancholy on a massive scale.
7A lot of variations of Wojaks are circulating today. So many positions on the spectrum of melancholy. The Doomer, who appeared on 4chan in 2018, wears a black T-shirt and a cap. He is frequently surrounded by a cloud of words, among which are intermingled nihilistic and nostalgic markers associating friendship breakups, depression, alcoholism and consumption of video games and TV series. The Coomer,3 appeared in 2019, with a sparse hairstyle is associated with a solitary life and excessive masturbation. The NPC (Non-Player Character) with an inexpressive face is frequently used to represent crowds of apathetic and interchangeable humans. Finally, the Soyjak has a permanently wide-open mouth, giving it a particularly surprised and ecstatic look. It is used to mock communities of “soy” men whose interests are considered childish and unmanly.
8While these male examples represent profiles of individuals presented as emasculated men, the female Wojaks play more on the divide between overthinking and consumerism in the classical patterns of misogyny:
At the top, a woman drawn with a feverish line cries tears of a saturated blue. A shower head sprays her with water. She has red hair, wears two pigtails, frowns and has bloodshot eyes. In a bubble, a cloud of images and words is represented: we can see people with their legs crossed, obviously meditating, others seeming to be sleeping, or Buddhist diagrams. The wordcloud is composed of the words “Acupuncture; Reiki, Mindfulness Meditation; Reflexology; Visualization; Sound Healing; Box Breathing; Ayurveda; Mantra Meditations.”
At the bottom, a blond-haired woman, drawn with the same line, is meditative. She is thinking too, through a bubble that reads: “T.J. MAXX; SEPHORA; Starbucks.” She looks calm.
9The line that delimits the contour of the Wojaks is typical: it is shaky and irregular, and if the viewer zooms in the image they will frequently be confronted with a mass of greyish and black pixels. This lazy line seems
10to be executed with the trackpad of a laptop and inscribes the form in an anonymous style, negating the possibility of an artisanal gesture, of a virtuosity of mastery of traditional drawing tools. The inscription drawn within the Paint software is opposed to the gesture of the engraver or the painter and their simulation by graphic tablets allowing managing the pressure applied with the stylus. The clear line used by the authors of the Wojaks paradoxically gives them a good readability in their poor execution: associated with text, the drawings are tinged with a hyper-expressivity allowing the characters to mimic a non-verbal communication operation. This drawn representation of a hyper-expressive body or face is traditionally done by image professionals, able to magnify the line of a movement (animators) or an expression (caricaturists). In the context of creating a Wojak, the precarious balance between the finger sliding on the trackpad and the Paint interface constrains the quality of the final shape. The style of the Wojak object thus becomes anonymous, reproducible and appropriable. Once the delimitations of its bust are set, it becomes easy for the person who appropriates it to erase the facial features and in a few moments, an atonic doomer becomes an ecstatic coomer. Add some yellow hair and orange skin and you have Donald Trump. A three-piece suit and well-combed hair: Ceausescu. A military officer’s uniform and hair tied in a ponytail: Natalia Poklonskaya.4 Created independently of each other, the variations of Wojak with each other to form a multiverse of our generational, social and political conflicts: zoomer versus boomer, doomer versus bloomer, Trump versus Biden. They cover an ever-widening and renewed spectrum, through the simplicity and ease of appropriation of this anonymous and uncertain trait.
11It’s just a few “badly done” lines and yet the Wojaks make us laugh, sadden us, overwhelm us or tell us true truths about the world, sometimes more than a cartoon made in three dimensions thanks to the latest Graphic Computers Units (GPU). Maybe Wojaks strokes us because we think we could have drawn them, because we project ourselves in the unknown author, who in front of his trackpad, took his time to express his melancholy, describe an injustice or a simple moment of life.
- 5 In reference to the clothing brand Praying.
Several Wojaks dance and party. Their clothes are signified by collages of textures embedded within the outline that delineates their contours: jean print, speckled, ochre and black marbling, pale purple cotton, polka dot patterns. All have “interesting” hairstyles, some wear mullet, others have long hair cascading down their backs. Two basketball caps, several T-shirts with messages: “GOD’S FAVORITE”5; “SWANS.” One of them is dooming in the corner, Doc Marten’s on his feet. He thinks: “They don’t know I’m pretending not to have rich parents.” All the other characters in the scene think exactly the same, except for one of them who wonders: “I know it’s 3 am but I wonder if my dad will Venmo me $80.” Here, in a few strokes and a few collages of textures, the Wojaks criticize, divide, draw the limits, those of a privileged social class lying to themselves about their origin.
12By using iconic textures and references to cultural products, the Wojaks recreate the aesthetic surface of a social group and isolate it from the rest of the world. Here, it is a question of pointing out the contradiction between the self-presentation of a well-born youth, simulating, however, the precariousness by choices of consumption. In other cases, it will be a question of making fun of the tourists of misery in Detroit, by showing the juxtaposition of a couple projecting its cultural references on the city (Twin Peaks, etc.) and what is presented in contrast as the reality of life on the spot: morose characters, dilapidated buildings and vehicles. The Wojaks are often used to mock aesthetic choices and consumption choices of some and others. By mobilizing their plots to divide, their authors choose to show contrasts between consumers and lifestyles. By sticking on them the name of a brand, they become the time of an image, the ambassadors of this brand. By juxtaposing a few brainlets6 watching, blissfully, the Pfizer7 logo, they become zombies enslaved to a “dominant discourse.” With the spectacles of critical theory, we could easily put Wojaks in the category of cultural objects that cancel and prevent thought because they cleave, cut the world into two categories only. Yet their intense circulation and the number of modifications made to the original files lead us to believe that, on the contrary, these cleavages fuel finer conversations, and allow us to understand and describe the world, with humor. The abundant comments that follow them on social networks testify to this. In a few strokes on the Paint software, Wojaks redraw our spatial, urban, national, ethnic, generational, political and gender boundaries. The Wojaks are empty shells, waiting for the ideologies of their spreaders.
Gly Burton, A. (2021). “Wojak’s lament, excess and voyeurism under platform capitalism,” Critical Meme reader.
Leibovici, F. (2007). Des documents poétiques. Al Dante.
Ngai, S. (2015). Our Aesthetic Categories. Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard University Press.
Petonnet, C. (1982). “L’observation flottante. L’exemple d’un cimetière parisien,” Revue d’anthropologie française, 22(4).
1 Copyright-free designs and icons made available to users to users in Microsoft Office Software Packs.
2 Forum with a focus on visual content, without registration and anonymous, a digital equivalent of public notice boards. It is also characterized by a sometimes inexistent moderation and the absence of archives (the messages disappear according to the time or absence of answers).
3 The coomer is a wojack depicted as a masturbation addict man, always looking for dopamine hit. His excessive consumption of porn is often associated with his characterised misogyny.
4 Natalia Poklonskaya is a Russian politician from Ukraine. In 2014, following the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, she was nominated General Prosecutor of Crimea. The video of the press conference posted on YouTube following this appointment made her popular in some internet communities, turning it into a meme.
5 In reference to the clothing brand Praying.
6 Brainlets are wojaks illustrated with atrophied brains.
7 American multinational pharmaceutical which developed COVID-19 vaccines.
Haut de page |
|
|---|---|
| Titre | Figure 1 |
| Légende | Montage featuring the cover, inside pages and poster of the first issue of the Digital Drifting fanzine. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/docannexe/image/4843/img-1.png |
| Fichier | image/png, 725k |
Thibault le Page et Kévin Zanin, « Digital Drifting, exploring network folklores », Hybrid [En ligne], 12 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2024, consulté le 12 décembre 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/4843 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12m9x
Haut de page
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Haut de page
Flux RSS
