In the middle of a heat wave in the city of Hoofddorp, in the vicinity of the aviation JunkSpace of Schiphol Airport, I ambled into Kinepolis to watch Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. This complex was different from the kinds I had once known in the US, which sprawled out horizontally, surrounded by acres of parking lot pavement. Instead, nestled into the heart of the city centre, it extended vertically onto several floors, halls connected to a labyrinth of stairs like an MC Escher drawing. But like the American theatres, at least, the space was filled with a familiar sound object: American country music played through tinny, unlocatable speakers. The air inside was warm, greenhouse-like; this was not unexpected – Kinepolis’s website warned its visitors that the AC was broken in this particular location that day, and the sun-facing windows which stretched across all the floors only amplified the heat.

Up two flights of bifurcating stairs, some leading visitors astray even further up into other halls, the screening was in Hall 3. Half a dozen people gathered outside the door, water bottles in hand, until an employee came. ‘Jullie kunnen gewoon binnengaan, het is al open!’ They only left the door closed to keep it cool. With some murmuring, the small group got up and entered the darkness of the theatre hall. Cool air brushed against my face; I was reminded of the breeze that escapes a refrigerator door, kept shut to preserve food in a power outage. I took a seat in the back in one of the comfort chairs – loveseats usually shared by couples, partitionable with an armrest. The few viewers shuffled in and scattered about a row or two in front of me. The rest of the hall remained empty. The room was small, especially for a major international cinema chain like Kinepolis, far short of the splendour of an IMAX hall.

A Film!

The Odyssey is about control, of which containment – deciding what is included and what is excluded – is one type. Not only is containment one of the main themes explored through the work, referenced through its exploration of hospitality (xenia, referred to simply as ‘Zeus’s law’ in the film), it is itself reproduced across its production and distribution. To even call it a film is an attempt to contain and regulate its experience; better terms may be spectacle, phenomenon or event. The spectacle of The Odyssey begins before taking a seat in the film hall, before entering through its doors, before even walking into the complex to buy a ticket. This spectacle is initiated external to the film-viewing event altogether in the internet’s hyper-dimensional tubes of rhizomic distribution that construct the spectacle. Willingly or not, as beings-on-the-internet, we are all exposed to The Odyssey. As an ambient phenomenon, it is a virus that breaks through the membranes of your subconscious. The glance of discourse on costumes, of a notification on Instagram tantalising you with half a post about narrative inaccuracies, which you can read the entirety of by downloading Threads, and you are infected.

Through this mechanism, The Odyssey asserts itself as an uncontainable presence. The phenomenon demands to be experienced. Memes appear; thousands of discursive blog posts about translations and casting, trending bars on Twitter, news articles on Google all collude to hype up the event. The phenomenon reconfigures the fabric of material reality itself. A stroll in any city street or airport alike, past any bookstore – new or secondhand – reinforces the sense that The Odyssey is unavoidable. Bookstores have long ceased to sell books; they are now are filled with ‘logged on’ paraphernalia like capybaras, Funko Pops, black cat objects, and expensive Japanese stationery (and kawaii-inspired stationery, like Legami Milano). They interpellate you into the consumer persona of the shy, bookish reader and their particular interests. Meanwhile, the algorithm has deterritorialised the very shelves of bookstores, now with shelves laid out to capture the attention of BookTok, Substack and Goodreads; the stores sometimes even sell blind boxes of volumes identified only by a Goodreads score, their titles obscured by paper wrapping. In such occasions when the general public is reminded of the existence of the ancient technologies of codices and printed word, such as this occasion with The Odyssey – one of the Western canon’s most influential works – bookstores rush to restructure their physical space both to anticipate and influence the influx of foot-traffic. The Athenaeum bookstore in Amsterdam has rearranged its front display to include several large maps of Ancient Greece along with assorted translations and versions of the book, as if to invite passers-by to engage with the event. This arrangement is recreated in fractally smaller scales inside the store: a stand with different translations of the Odyssey, a Greek section, and so on.

A Medium!

If you are in Europe, you will likely never experience the film as Nolan wanted you to. You are not once permitted to forget that Nolan painstakingly shot on expensive 65 mm 15-perforation IMAX film, from start to finish, composing everything in its 1.43:1 aspect ratio. Nolan has breathed life into every frame of this film; he has inspired it. Even if the film had been overseen by Nolan to accommodate multiple distribution formats, the exclusivity of the IMAX presentation precedes all these alternatives. The viewing of the film in all of its 70 mm IMAX glory is the event. As exemplified by the outpouring of memes coinciding with its release, where The Odyssey is envisioned through increasingly obscure or degenerated media (both in viewing and in production), the event can only truly be experienced through absolute conditions satisfied by 41 theatres in the world, only three of which are in Continental Europe. This scarcity simply reinforces the film as a spectacle; watching The Odyssey on one of these regular screens is tantamount to committing an atrocity, a disgrace to the cinematic experience.

While films are generally screened in cinemas for a limited time (a temporal constraint), the distribution of this film then imposes an additional spatial constraint. Films today are viewed on a variety of mediums and devices with varying levels of theatre-likeness: projectors, television, computer screens, laptops, tablets, smartphones, Nintendo Switch. This often runs contrary to the intentions of the director, where the work is generally intended to be experienced on the silver screen in the dark room of the theatre hall. David Lynch once objected to watching films on mobile phones, saying, ‘it’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real’. At a time when many places in the world are experiencing the closing of local theatres and under financial pressure, which already creates the scarcity of viewing a film in a hall, the use of 70 mm IMAX technology further restricts the possibilities of viewing. The asymmetric global distribution of IMAX technology stratifies the viewing of The Odyssey into a cartography of Nolan-faithfulness, one which is remarkably Anglo-centric: beyond North America, the UK, and Australia, where the bulk of 15/70 IMAX screens exist, the only other theatres with this technology are in Belgium, France and the Czech Republic. The austerity of the film’s projection has effectively contained its potential viewership into geography. The vast majority of potential viewers are forced to make a pilgrimage, if not across several countries, then into entirely different continents. Hoofddorp and indeed the whole of the Netherlands are some of the places misfortunate enough to be deprived of The Odyssey’s full glory.

The consumer-spectator remarks that the IMAX, with its towering screen that spans the entire field of human vision, allows a sort of full immersion, a totality of embodied experience. Cinema is already a medium which displaces the individual viewer from their own phenomenological existence into one shared by all the viewers in the room and even elsewhere. As Bernard Stiegler observes, this occurs through a merging of the time flow of consciousness with that of a ‘temporal object’ (i.e. the film). He writes,

You arrive at the beginning of the film and you have a toothache; you feel on arrival that you have a pain in this tooth – and then as you enter the film, you forget your tooth. … [as] the film develops, as you enter into the film, taking up and adopting the time of its flow, you cease to think of your […] tooth. You are no longer in the seat, and your tooth is no longer in your mouth, or, rather, you are no longer in your body: you are in the screen. You are in the screen because you have adopted the time of the film.

As anyone who has ever scrolled short form video feeds on a phone may intimately know, it does not take a massive screen to create viewer entrancement. The question of the 15/70 IMAX medium is about optimising the experience and therefore to contain anything that could possibly intervene – including the artefacts of the medium itself. With such a large recording surface, the film is clean, neutral, devoid of any contaminants, absorbing the spectator’s gaze into total presence in the film, crisp like the taste of pure H₂O. This conflict, of content and texture, suggests that a particular uncontaminated viewing experience precedes the medium, whose attributes intervene on the purity of the medium. The medium is therefore at a perpetual battle with itself. We can point to Brian Eno’s quote, which has through its constant citation become a cliché in the discussion of media and its artefacts:

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. […] The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

In short, Eno points to the dialectic of the medium, whose failure to capture the purity of vision, becomes what defines it, particularly in its absence. Cinema technology, through a continuous advance of resolutive progress, has now displaced 8 mm, 16 mm and 35 mm films, miniDV cameras, digicam footage, phone footage, not by barring them outright through technological progress, but by marginalising them into particular affects. They have become signifiers. Rather than allowing the chaos of the medium, we now have 8 mm vacation footage, 16 mm punk videos, miniDV found footage, etc. These lesser formats, through their signature artefacts, seemingly prevent viewing from being the pure phenomenological experience of narrative (and thus life), and it is this that IMAX promises and this that Nolan demands that you experience.

The hyper-resolution of The Odyssey’s 65 mm 15-perf IMAX film captures a crucial visual motif of the film: particles. The film is filled with particles, such as dust and rain, which float around, captured with such effortless detail, emerging from the apparent texture(lessness) of the stock on which the film is shot. Such particles become the main character of The Odyssey. These particles exist in absence of what the medium attempts to suppress: noise and grain.

In our experience of everyday life, our eyes and optical apparatuses are constantly processing input and filtering it into visual signal. The visual field is hardly ever clean; rather it is continuously updated and corrected. Sometimes, if we focus hard enough, we may observe particles of dust that float around us, which are otherwise imperceptible. We take dust for granted – it is spatially noise. Dust in this sense is unwanted: it intervenes in scanning and clings to electronic displays, degrading the appearance. The processes of cleaning and the development of cleaning technologies allow for greater control of dust. Vacuum cleaners and static brushes exist to mitigate dust. The irony then, of the photographic medium which has prioritised resolution so much is that dust itself, the ‘weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty’ presence of physical space, becomes the sign of superior resolution. It is now so clear that we can even see dust!

Through this decision to shoot on such a film stock, the cinematographer enacts a trade: noise and grain are displaced into particle artefacts. But this is okay – the particles exist in the film’s world, in the diegesis. As Joker says in The Dark Knight (2007), ‘Nobody panics when things go according to plan […] because it’s all part of the plan’. It becomes another surface for control; the ascension of resolution to hyper-resolution is not about removing noise but, to borrow the term from Gilbert Simondon (via Gilles Deleuze), modulating it. The relationship with the medium becomes a managerial relationship. No wonder that artificial noise is added to Acrylic elements in Windows 11 Fluent Design, which would otherwise make high resolution displays appear too clean. No wonder that a photographer whose camera captures so much detail often adds grain after the fact, as a textural layer. Those afraid of noise eventually encounter its inversion: horror vacui. Something can be so sterile that one has to add noise back in. It is never about reducing noise but control – about making new kinds of acceptable, modulatable, controllable noise. Noise is in a permanent dialogue with signal and, for total control, noise itself must be sorted into good and bad. (This is to say little of the other discontinuities that Nolan has inadvertently created through this displacement, such as the widely discussed complaints about missed focus. There is no beyond-the-noise.)

An Auteur!

If Nolan is to be regarded as part of a generation, he stands out from the hyper-citation pastiche mechanics of his brethren such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky, David Fincher, or Wes Anderson. His work appears virtually sterilised of this sort of cineaste intertextuality; in wake of this self-sterilisation is a prodigious self-citation engine that courses throughout his work.

Homeric poems are the products of oral tradition and themselves have disputable authorship. Whether Homer is one or several individuals, there is no questioning that the film’s authorship is conspicuously consolidated around Nolan, the auteur. Many have hypothesised that all films of Nolan may be sub-worlds of Inception, figures washed on shore, troubled by obscure sorrows. Such interpreters are in no way kept at bay by The Odyssey, whose frame story concerns an amnesiac Odysseus (Matt Damon) who appears one day, on the shore of an island. His fugue of forgetfulness comes from magic lotus served to him by Calypso (Charlize Theron). The lotus flowers are the opposite of Proustian madeleines; they suppress memory, and he consumes them with excitement, too troubled by the horrors of his journey. But now he slowly begins to recall his past and what he must do, memories which unfold in front of us throughout the first two acts of the film.

The casting of Matt Damon, of course, is first loaded beyond Nolan’s control. Damon, who has played stranded survivors (Gerry, The Martian), amnesiacs in a fugue (The Bourne Identity), infiltrators (The Bourne Identity, The Departed, Talented Mr. Ripley), etc. makes it impossible for Nolan to suppress the intertext. But even beyond this, the traces of his other work appear spasmodically, even jarringly. Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong’o) has her own Two-Face-esque reveal (‘The face that launched a thousand ships – or should I say 500?’); the gritty inglorious existence (‘of piss and shit’) inside the Trojan Horse recalls at once the water tanks in The Prestige and the tense belly of the twin ships, strapped with bombs and equipped with each other’s detonators, in The Dark Knight. In a Nolan-invented subplot, Sinon (Elliot Page) and Antinous (Robert Pattinson) engage in a swap that recalls that of the twins in The Prestige. Odysseus’s return recalls both that of Batman in The Dark Knight, appearing to fight off his imitators, and Gordon’s return from the dead. This is one of the central ironies of the work – an irony of Nolan’s work in general, which at once appears to mourn a death of the centre, of truth, but at the same time is unable to suppress it. Nolan cannot help but produce The Odyssey as anything but a work filled with all of his pre-occupations.

Just as his The Odyssey draws from a composite tradition, it also draws from a Nolanic tradition. The Odyssey is Nolan-branded to its fullest extent, a machinic delivery of unfiltered Nolanness, bigger, longer and uncut, in full overdrive Nolan-production. In this sense, of pushing his branded authorial vision to its recursive excesses, he is little different from Wes Anderson. But where Wes Anderson controls and aestheticises media, often in betrayal of commonly accepted industrial standards (his DP Robert Yeoman relayed concern about softness in the vintage Cooke lenses that Wes Anderson preferred in 1960s scenes in Grand Budapest Hotel), Nolan cannot banish noise from his work in the arms race of technological perfection, nor can he banish pastiche from his own work. Through his own obsession with noise and pastiche, he is his own pastiche. Nothing says this better than Helen of Troy, whose face is unwounded in classical interpretations, now cartoonishly transformed into Two-Face, as if Nolan cannot help but taint his work. The plight of his protagonists – who must banish evil, chaos, corruption, guilt, and pain – is recreated in Nolan’s own plight with the medium.

A Narrative!

Apart from battling the medium, The Odyssey is extensively about containers: the ethics of containment, who gets excluded, who gets included, and what happens when containers are breached. Troy, as a city-state, is a container encased in a wall, impenetrable only until the Trojan Horse is brought to them. The horse itself is a container, a space which traps the soldiers that intend to invade. The ship, which houses Odysseus’s crew, is a container on the brink of collapse, constantly requiring the sailors to seek supplies. The suitors that show up in the palace in Ithaca are also occupying a container, guarded closely by Penelope.

The Cyclops and Circe are conspicuously now portrayed, not as living in communities, but as living alone. The Cyclops’s solitude, unlike the Homeric portrayal where he lives in an atomicised society of cyclopses, leads the crew to conclude that he is beyond human language. Circe likewise prefers to be alone, punishing intruders by turning them into animals, even confronting Odysseus for invading her privacy. Nolan’s Odyssey recasts these interactions in profoundly contemporary terms: the breaching of the hyper-individual’s bubble.

Odysseus’s most virtuous quality is ‘self-control’ – the film’s three-hour runtime repeatedly shows how he is able to withstand anything that would lead him astray from his goal of returning home. Despite all of his will, he cannot intervene in his men’s paths towards their doom; he cannot control them. He only succumbs to temptation when he is finally by himself, spending seven years with Calypso. The film, then, stages one of the central contradictions and greatest fears of the current age: the omnipresent allure to retreat into consumer bubbles in the warm comfort of the algorithmic void, the very spaces in which, ironically, the film is first encountered.

This is what is curious about The Odyssey, a film which cannot resolve its own contradictions; a film concerned with the politics of invasions circulates invasively through algorithms, modulating physical space; a film which is concerned with control and containment but whose technical standards constrain its own viewership. Whether it sets out to do all of this is beside the point – it cannot help but be its own victim.

The final credit scrolls past, and then as the overhead lights brighten, the air is filled with the tinny recording of country music once more, the drawl a signifier of a land in the West, on the other side of the ocean.

Addendum (2026.10.21)

On the very last day of its run in Prague, I managed to catch the 70 mm IMAX screening of The Odyssey at Cinema City Flora, just outside Prague’s city centre. The cinema was located at the back of the food court, its gates lowered to prevent entry until half an hour before the film began. Past the ticket controller, there was a seating area filled with leather sofas, the walls lined with blue and red LEDs, the opposite wall decorated with a cardboard display for the film. Over the speakers, ‘Suddenly I See’ by KT Tunstall played. The entrance to the IMAX auditorium was indicated by a glowing hallway with large illuminated text reading ‘IMAX’. Listening to the variety of languages being spoken around me in the queue, I could determine that many of the others around me also came from outside of the Czech Republic to attend this screening, with many of them speaking German.

The film is preceded by a spot by IMAX in which every detail is promised to be more visible, every sound ‘more intense’, and every frame brought to ‘perfection’. The aspect ratio does not broaden the world but rather makes it more claustrophobic, revealing indeed many of the missed focus as observed by many viewers. But true to the medium, the image now reveals particles in greater detail: not only the spray of ocean, dust and ashes, but also the detailed mush of the dung pile outside the castle (where Odysseus’s hunting dog Argos is abandoned for most of the film) and the swarm of flies in front of the Cyclops’s cave. Screened at one of the very few theatres in a non-Anglophone location, the film is accompanied by ghostly floating Arial lettering in Czech, whose jagged pixelated edges stand in sharp contrast to the film’s world.

In the closing exchange, Odysseus suggests the memory of the Mycenaean civilisation is to be passed down through song ‘because songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write’. To say the line is anachronistic is to get into the weeds of how the whole film is constructed with its own awareness of its distance from Ancient Greece. But I cannot help but point to Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. He recounts Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates recounts the Egyptian myth of Theuth, who claimed that writing is a pharmakon (φάρμακον) for wisdom and knowledge. (The nested references here are deliberately retained.) Exploring the ambiguity of this term pharmakon as both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’, Derrida argues that Western metaphysics has subordinated writing to speech, although speech itself depends upon the structures attributed to writing. The floating pixel text in Czech, the writing superimposed over cinema, is another trace that the film cannot suppress. Even here, the pure experience of the film still eludes me.

In this second viewing, suddenly I see – for all the film makes of war, hospitality and the Greeks’ originary sin leading to their downfall, it tries to pull a fast one, undetected: a femicide, the sacrifice of Iphigenia (Katerina Antemel Mpa) by Agamemnon (Benny Safdie, whose face remains strangely obstructed throughout his brief screen-time). The film stages revenge as divine except, apparently, that of Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra (Lupita Nyong’o, in her other role); this revenge is instead characterised as mere human betrayal, petty feminine scheming. As Odysseus makes clear in a scene with Penelope early on in the film, the war was fought for control over the trade routes. The paleo-postmodernist, he repeatedly disregards divine judgment only to be wrong each time. Then could we not say the curse actually lies in the sacrifice of Iphigenia—absent in Homer’s Iliad and afforded mere seconds of our attention? Hidden in the margins of ‘a face! a fleet! a war! a man!’, behind all the guilt and self-blame that plagues the wise hero, this event in which his people’s misery is rooted eludes even Odysseus’s detection.

References

Atad, Corey. “‘The Odyssey’ Was Made for IMAX 70mm. Good Luck Watching It That Way.” Wired, July 25, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/the-odyssey-was-made-for-imax-70mm-good-luck-watching-it-that-way.

Balling, Gitte, and Marianne Martens. “‘BookTok Helped Us Sell It’: How TikTok Disrupts Publishing and Fuels the #Romantasy Boom.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 32, no. 4 (2026): 1258–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241301271.

Cooke Optics. “Wes Anderson and Robert Yeoman ASC: Straight-Shooting Imagineers.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://cookeoptics.com/news-and-events/wes-anderson-and-robert-yeoman-asc-straight-shooting-imagineers/.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7.

Derrida, Jacques. ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. In Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, 63–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Eno, Brian. A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

Harris, Mike. “Some Call It Soft, I Call It Dreamy: Why Nolan’s The Odyssey Was a Focus Puller’s Nightmare.” Digital Camera World, July 30, 2026. https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/cameras/cinema-cameras/some-call-it-soft-i-call-it-dreamy-why-nolans-odyssey-was-a-focus-pullers-nightmare.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018.

Independent Cinema Office. “Capital Investment for Independent Film Exhibition—April 2025.” April 2025. https://www.independentcinemaoffice.org.uk/advice-support/capital-investment-for-independent-film-exhibition-april-2025/.

Janicek, Karel. “Prague’s Rare 70 mm IMAX Draws Thousands of Europeans for Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey.’” Associated Press, July 27, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/ad3d6aa02381b7253cb486231411a256.

Kodak. “Shooting Entirely on KODAK 65mm Film, DP Hoyte van Hoytema ASC NSC FSF Created a Visually-Thrilling Sensation for Christopher Nolan’s Box-Office Hit ‘The Odyssey.’” August 24, 2026. https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/blog-post/the-odyssey/.

Lynch, David. “Stories.” Bonus feature on Inland Empire. 2-disc DVD. Absurda/Ryko, 2007.

Microsoft. “Acrylic Material.” Microsoft Learn. Updated August 29, 2026. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/style/acrylic.

Nagy, Gregory. “Oral Traditions, Written Texts, and Questions of Authorship.” In The Greek Epic Cycle and Its Ancient Reception: A Companion, edited by Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis, 59–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511998409.004.

Nolan, Christopher, dir. The Odyssey. Universal Pictures, 2026. Film.

Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995. Relevant passage: 274c–275b.

Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Stiegler, Bernard. Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch. Translated by Barnaby Norman. Cambridge: Polity, 2014.

Wilson, Emily. Interview by Walter Isaacson. Amanpour. CNN, July 28, 2026. https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/ampr/date/2026-07-28/segment/01.

The wallflower’s interiority is revealed through the Wojak I Wish I Was at Home / They Don’t Know meme; in such a meme, Wojak is the wallflower, standing in the margins of the event, running internal commentary: ‘I wish I was at home playing video games’ or ‘They don’t know I’m mildly popular on left twitter’. Perhaps we have all been Wojak once. This meme is wildly popular, one which has become standardised into the canon of memes to be resurfaced again and again through meme accounts – which act more as vectors for morphing content into novel memetic shapes. With time, every variation of the Wojak wallflower has become generated or will be generated.

The virality of the wallflower is at one of the contradictions unearthed by the virtual space, in which even the plight of the asocial and antisocial become exploited by the algorithm. This is because the wallflower is no longer a wallflower; as the transformation from the Facebook Wall to the Newsfeed inaugurates the new paradigm of content delivery (the static to the algorithmic), a new hyper-loneliness develops transforming the wallflower into a feedplant, another garden variety whose smoothed-out characteristics are redistributed. When one may feel comforted by the fact that they are not alone in being alienated, they would perhaps also come to realise that this is not new, that tonnes of media throughout the history of art and literature also engage with these themes, of the ‘lyrical loneliness’ and that this is a very familiar condition predating the ‘algorithmic hyper-loneliness’.

We are all feedplants today, visibility delimited by suitability for the algorithm. Unknown orders like the Fibonacci sequence govern our leaf counts. The feedplant bears the right fruit lest be culled, hence the periodic selfie for the feed. Likewise, interaction with social media demands an adherence to legible aesthetics yet paradoxically emergent and divergent content are continuously swept up by the industrial processes themselves to create legible aesthetics as long as coherence develops. Even corecore cannot escape aestheticisation.

Even prior to the feed, the provocations of the Stuckist International in the 1990s uncover a line of flight in the naïve and outsider art. Their target are the Young British Artists, a prominent conceptual art formation which has become mediated through the Gen X Soft Club aesthetic, the sleek and minimal vacuity of what Marc Augé terms supermodernity (often confused for a quiet futurism, a reasonable error when today, the very notions of predictions – and consequently, the future – are carved out through extrapolations of excess data, itself a quality of supermodernity). Stuckism is then a counter-formation, their cultural products part of a counter-aesthetic. The mark of the aestheticisation of outsider art is an instantiation of a new aesthetic paradigm, one which was underway in the avant-garde in the early 1970s, performing a hauntological revival, a reversal of the original departure made by conceptual art as a movement in 1960s. Supermodernity, as one of the conditions that coincides with the mass globalisation in what Francis Fukuyama refers to as the ‘End of History’, is plagued by ghosts of the suppressed Others that become concurrent aesthetics. While Global Village Coffeehouse depicts the collision of the semiotics of haunted anthropology with supermodernity, Stuckism and outsider aesthetics do the same from the fringe, a phenomenon that also coincides with the emergence of ‘outsider music’ as termed by Irwin Chusid. The totality of the discourse is encapsulated, at once in GXSC and GVC and Y2K and Shoe Diva and Whimsigoth and others, through spectacles of genericised representations of the Other: the feminine, the tribal, the machine, labour, the Orient, and so on.

But if outsiderness, remodernism, New Sincerity and so forth can all be recoded, that is reterritorialised and aestheticised, into new regimes, this gestures to the mechanisms of incorporation. The Hipster subculture, a melting pot of a myriad of consumer aesthetics, incorporates many of the naïve into its ecosystem, streamlined into a mosiac which simultaneously refers to itself. Consider the emergence of ‘new weird’ media, of indie and twee, and deliberate attempts at low-budget and naïve aesthetics, as in mumblecore. The Other becomes regulated; there is a place for even it in the world. This is literalised in the South Korean animation, Doggy Poo (2003), where the existentialism of canine droppings is resolved by sacrificing itself wholly to fertilising a dandelion (set to a soundtrack by New Age pianist Yiruma).

The algorithm in fact has no aesthetic ipso facto. Rather, it is a force that continuously generates aesthetics, that reterritorialises, reorganises, recodes, regenerating increasingly atomic orders, capturing all niches and redirecting aberrant flows instantaneously as a mega-switchboard. It is concerned with creating affects, gathering attention, trading it for data and signal. It is unconcerned with content. It is like the titular corporation of Monsters, Inc.; whether scaring or eliciting laughter, the maximisation of output is key – the fact that it is more ‘humane’ is likely a mere advertising point for the eco-anthropologically inclined among the monsters. (Perhaps next time, they will discover that rage and doom are even more profitable than laughter and Monsters, Incorporated becomes an AI slop media company.) With stock images in Korea, the Asadal team standardised their style based on what images yielded the best metrics, today the feed automagically makes anything into a potential aesthetic merely as an effect of virality. Whereas anything that would appear on You’re the Man Now Dog’s top five back in the mid-2000s would inspire the production of more similar sites, thus beginning a fad, the massive planetary scale of social media instead creates elaborate matrixes of aesthetics, automating a runaway process that has, as Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer observed, occurred in art since the growth of the culture industry. This consequently blurs the line between algorithmic and consumer aesthetics.

The risk for the artist confronting this is this: obscurity. Whether one operates through a radicalised hauntology of recent memory, of deliberately planting false memories, or through the production of deliberate chaos, mechanisms of anti-engagement do not merely revolve around edginess or offense – about solely for its own sake creating deliberate counter-aesthetics – but about continuously producing and reproducing the unknown, ignored and marginalised. In other words, of minoritarian pre-aesthetics and non-aesthetics. Of course, this constant production of new aesthetic lines carries the risk of continuous recapturing. Counter-aesthetics are mere seeds to future hegemonies. If you must feed the machine (and we all do) then why transform yourself for it? The influencer has a reason, but we do not have to be influencers. It is perhaps enough to watch, critique, reframe, and interpret. You do not have to dance like everyone else. There are perks to being a wallflower.

Korean version available here.

Birth of a Stock Image Industry

Yunseon Yang: Before we start the interview, have you heard of the term “Frutiger Aero”? It was an aesthetic popular in the mid-to-late 2000s. As digital technology was developing at the time, it was characterized by the way natural elements were blended with digital to make digital experiences feel more familiar and approachable. Asadal’s stock images from that period are a good example of this aesthetic. Do you remember this most famous image among them?

Chang N. Suh: It is a very familiar image to me. The monitor in the image is actually the monitor we used at our company. And do you see the seagull at the top? I think that might be a photograph I took myself. I used to take a lot of photos of seagulls, and this seems to be one of them. The rest was all illustrated.

YY: Could you tell me the story of Asadal? While I was researching Asadal, I came across your interview titled “A Reflection on 14 Years Since Founding.”1 In that interview, you mentioned that among Asadal’s ten new business ventures, the design mall became the most successful. Why do you think it succeeded? What were the thoughts of both you and your employees at the time? Did you expect it to become successful?

CS: I founded Asadal as a sole proprietorship in 1998, when I was twenty-nine years old. After operating for about two years as a personal business, we established it as a corporation in early 2000. During the internet boom in South Korea in the early 2000s, there was the dot-com bubble, the rise of KOSDAQ, and our internet business was doing very well.

At first, we focused on two core services: domain registration and web hosting. People who registered domains and purchased hosting naturally wanted to build websites—corporate clients, small and medium-sized businesses, large corporations, government agencies, public institutions, and civic organizations. In the 2000s, there was a huge enthusiasm for creating websites. To build a website, people first needed a domain name, which they registered through our company. Since purchasing and maintaining their own web servers was expensive, we rented out server space through hosting services.

Over time, our clients started asking whether we could also design websites for them. We could, but custom design work required a great deal of labor, and one person could only produce a limited amount. Then, at some point, we noticed something interesting: one designer would create an icon, and the next designer would make something almost identical from scratch again and again. We realized that if we created something once but created it exceptionally well and allowed it to be reused, productivity could increase dramatically.

This was around 2003 or 2004, about four or five years after the company started. By then, the company had grown to around thirty employees and had become financially stable. At the time, internet shopping malls, games, films—everything seemed to be moving online, so we invested in ten new business ventures, hiring people and allocating resources to each. Nine of them failed. The only one that survived was the design mall.

In truth, it survived because the market wanted it. The response was explosive from the beginning. Initially, only four people worked on the project: a team leader, two staff members, and myself. But the number of downloads on the server quickly became overwhelming, and we realized that this business had serious potential. So we decided to expand the team and hire more designers.

The very first products we created were illustrated icons. Rather than complete web design templates, these were repetitive interface elements commonly used on web pages—announcement icons, microphones, speakers, bulletin boards, comments, reply buttons, and so on. We sold them actively, and because they were vector illustrations, anyone could download the original files, edit them, and resize them freely.

What made them especially attractive was the price. Compared to designing assets from scratch, they cost only a fraction—perhaps one-tenth or even one-hundredth of the original labor cost. Designers who might otherwise spend an entire day creating five icons could instead pay a small amount and instantly download a package of one hundred icons. This saved web designers an enormous amount of working time.

For us, it also became profitable because we were no longer creating a custom product for a single client. Instead of spending days producing something that could only be sold once, we could sell the same product hundreds or thousands of times. It became a win-win structure. We specialized in creating high-quality web elements for websites and sold usage rights at affordable prices, while web designers across Korea could purchase them cheaply and dramatically reduce the time needed to complete their own projects.

Creating for the Web

CS: As the business grew, similar services started appearing. But what differentiated us was our visual approach. Existing image-source companies came from print design backgrounds and worked with subtractive color mixing (CMYK) where colors become darker as more ink is added. But web design works differently. It uses additive color, RGB. Since many traditional companies did not fully understand this difference, they struggled to adapt. We, however, had been creating specifically for the web from the beginning. Because of RGB displays, our colors appeared bright, vivid, and visually striking. Since our work was often used in IT-related contexts, we naturally leaned into a futuristic, digital aesthetic.

Blue, in particular, became very important. In print, it was difficult to reproduce those bright, luminous blues, but on computer monitors, RGB made them appear vivid and beautiful. That is why many of our images—including the fish image—featured blue backgrounds. Traditional printing companies could not reproduce this visual quality, so they struggled to compete. Around the same time, several web-based design companies emerged that shared a similar visual language.

However, we expanded beyond icons. We created illustrated human figures, objects, and backgrounds. Eventually, we even began offering complete website layouts. Designers could download near-finished homepage templates: a main page with navigation structures already in place, plus subpages. They simply had to replace the placeholder text with their own content, and the website was essentially complete.

There was also Adobe Flash at the time, which is now discontinued. We created Flash source files as well and continuously broadened our offerings. We started with illustrated icons, but later added Painter-based graphics, which had a watercolor-like texture, as though paint had spread naturally across the surface.

The possibilities kept expanding. Korean web designers increasingly gathered on our site because we provided such a wide range of resources. We would separate illustrations, Painter graphics, photographs, and other elements into editable layers and sell them as what we called “editable images.” When users opened the files, everything—from water droplets to monitors, fish, and globes—was separated into layers, allowing them to freely recombine and reuse elements. The response was explosive.

There were many visual styles, but among them we increasingly began creating images that felt highly futuristic and digital: visual worlds where fantasy, imagination, and reality seemed to blend together.

Design Factory

YY: So there were other companies producing stock images as well?

CS: Of course there were. We quickly established influence in the market, and as many web designers in Korea naturally began using Asadal, competing services operating in a similar space gradually faced increasing difficulties. We appeared almost like a comet and quickly dominated the market. At some point, I began approaching competing companies directly and said, “Why are we competing and duplicating each other’s efforts? We are both losing money this way. Let’s merge.” Eventually, we acquired several companies through investments worth several hundred million won.23 As these services became consolidated, we became a dominant force in the market. Essentially, we had a monopoly. In Korea, we were overwhelmingly number one. There was probably no designer in Korea who had not purchased our images.

We bundled all of these images onto CDs. I think we produced around sixty CD packages. Each CD contained thousands, even tens of thousands, of images, and with over sixty sets, there were hundreds of thousands of assets in circulation. Designers would often purchase several of these source-image CDs and keep them on hand. At the time, owning a strong design archive was itself a competitive advantage for designers. When designers joined companies, one of the standard questions regarding working conditions was often: Will the company provide Asadal design source CDs? Designers would also pass the materials on to one another, using them extensively in their work. At one point, we had over one hundred designers in the company—more than one hundred web designers alone. Out of approximately 160 total employees, over one hundred were designers producing image resources.

The design division primarily worked on homepage layouts and website mockups, while the content division focused on producing individual visual assets. There were more women than men among the employees, many in their twenties and thirties, and the company atmosphere was very positive. We were earning a lot of money, after all.

Naturally, in the early stages, the quality of the designs varied greatly. To standardize quality, we appointed multiple team leaders. If something felt too unusual or inconsistent with the company’s visual identity, we simply would not sell it—we discarded it. Only assets that met a certain quality standard were approved for sale, which meant the overall quality remained consistently above average. Among those approved works, some of the best-performing design assets generated extraordinary profits. There were cases where a single source file earned more than ten million won.4 Because of this, we implemented a performance-based compensation system, rewarding individual designers with bonuses. Sometimes their incentives exceeded their base salary. As a result, designers worked extremely hard, researched emerging trends, and studied overseas cases. Internal competition became intense. We held design seminars and technical discussions, constantly pushing to create the strongest designs.

For us, the best design was not the most artistic one. The best design was the one most frequently chosen by our customers and users. As a result, download numbers and sales figures became the key benchmarks. If one designer created a successful visual style, everyone else followed it. For example, if someone developed an experimental shadow effect and the market responded positively, suddenly all one hundred designers would begin producing shadow-based designs. In no time, the stock image market became saturated with our visual language.

Because of this, people had both praise and criticism for us. Some would say, “They’re not really a design company. They’re a design factory.” Once a new style emerged, one hundred designers would reproduce it simultaneously.

YY: So there were guidelines?

CS: Countless guidelines. When designers first joined the company, they received training because their work needed to align with the company style. We gathered examples of successful designs and held daily design seminars, constantly discussing and refining internal guidelines. As these discussions shaped the design process, people began asking: How can one hundred designers create work that looks as though it came from a single person? That became a point of controversy. Asadal images were distinctive—you could immediately recognize them as ours. That became one of the defining characteristics of the company.

An East Asian Production Network

YY: Then would it be fair to say that most of the composited stock images were produced by Asadal?

CS: More than ninety percent, I would say, were made by us. There were very few competitors in Korea. Some existed, but we eventually absorbed most of them.

After succeeding in Korea, we decided to expand into Japan. In 2009, we established Asadal Co., Ltd. there and partnered with a local company called Pixta. We distributed our work through their platform, and Asadal images spread widely in Japan as well. Although sales are not as large as before, our images are still being sold through Pixta today.

Before that, we established and operated a company in Yanji, Jilin Province, China, an even larger market, in 2008. At first, sales were promising, but after reaching a certain level, we discovered that people were illegally copying our CDs and reselling them. Not just one or two cases—hundreds. They were reproducing our entire catalog and selling it for one-tenth of the original price, simply changing the packaging and company name. So our images became extremely widespread in China, but only a small portion of those sales came through us. A massive amount circulated through illegal distributors.

In Japan, we established only a small company for sales partnerships. In China, however, we hired dozens of designers locally and produced design assets at scale there as well. Later, during a period of improved relations between North and South Korea5, we even went to Pyongyang. Around thirty designers there were assigned to work on design production as well. In a sense, an East Asian global production network emerged. Main production took place in Korea, while China and Pyongyang also produced images for us. Everything was then gathered in Korea, where it underwent quality review. Assets were either approved or rejected, and approved materials were revised further if necessary. Once finalized, they were sold under the Asadal brand across Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China. Recently, it seems the products have even reached Europe. In addition, in Taiwan, active sales are currently being conducted through a partnership with a local partner.

At that point, the business had grown into a global operation. It became something like an era-defining trend. In the beginning, only one or two people created these designs. But later, when hundreds of people were producing them in the same visual language, it became impossible for others to compete.

End of Asadal-style

YY: Are the designers who worked around the world still active today?

CS: The number has decreased significantly. Design trends changed. At the time, I used to say, “A trend lasts about five years.” I thought that when one trend faded, we could simply create a new visual style and continue. But the problem was that design styles did not just change every five years—the technology itself changed.

Then came the iPhone and smartphones. Compared to today, devices back then were not very powerful, and internet speeds were often slow. Even when the phone itself performed reasonably well, network lag made loading websites painfully slow. Our images were extremely detailed and had very large file sizes.

As a result, design shifted away from detailed, realistic 3D visuals toward flat design, and eventually minimalism emerged. Minimalism? That essentially meant the end of Asadal-style design. Images disappeared from websites, interfaces became text-heavy, and responsive web design became the norm.

Suddenly, our visual language was seen as outdated. People would react by saying, “You still use images like this? That looks old-fashioned.” On top of that, mobile data usage became a concern because people worried about high monthly phone bills. This was not simply a matter of updating our visual style every five years—the underlying technology had changed so fundamentally that people stopped using large images altogether.

As a result, we had to reduce the size of the design operation. Designers no longer received performance bonuses, the work became less rewarding, and many moved to other jobs. The company gradually shrank, and now we are simply maintaining what remains.

In the end, our greatest advantage had been timing. The internet boom of the 2000s aligned perfectly with what our company offered, allowing us to grow explosively and even shape a design trend of the era. At the same time, the reason for our decline was also technological. As devices shifted from PCs to smartphones, preferences moved away from complex, decorative, visually rich imagery toward simplified, minimal interfaces—sometimes even with no imagery at all. In that environment, our images had reached the end of their lifespan. They disappeared.

Still, what gives us hope now is that smartphone performance has improved tremendously. Today, there is virtually no technical burden in displaying large, detailed images on mobile devices. So I sometimes wonder whether things might eventually return in some form.

YY: I agree. That is partly why I am conducting this research as well.

CS: I think there is a strong possibility that highly decorative and visually rich imagery will return. The issue, however, is that humans may no longer be the ones producing it. If someone simply references Asadal images in an AI prompt, they could generate a hundred similar images instantly. Machines can produce them faster and at a far greater scale than people. In that sense, hiring one or two hundred designers as we once did no longer seems like a viable strategy.

The Appeal of Optimism

YY: I noticed that the company philosophy was “A Creative and Innovative Enterprise, an Internet Company in the Global World.”

CS: That philosophy was created because of all this. We did not establish it when the company first started. We defined it around our tenth anniversary, when the design mall was at the peak of its success. At the time, we even received awards from government ministries and recognition from the president.

The first principle was to be a customer-centered service company. Because, in truth, designers did not create these successful designs—the customers did. Customers were constantly voting, invisibly. We uploaded hundreds or thousands of images, and if something received almost no downloads, it meant customers simply did not want it. Our greatest teacher was the customer—not professors in doctoral design programs, but customers themselves.

The second principle was to be a creative and innovative enterprise. We did not want to merely follow customers. Instead, we wanted to introduce new and creative ideas first—innovative designs that customers would then respond to.

The final principle was that we would not limit ourselves to business in Korea. We wanted to become an internet company in the global world, operating internationally rather than locally.

YY: The images feel very bright, optimistic, and clear. Is there a reason for that? What was the atmosphere like at the time?

CS: At that time, South Korea’s GDP was growing explosively. The internet was expanding rapidly, and people were genuinely filled with dreams, hope, and optimism about the future. It was the period when Korea was becoming a developed country. Before that, we had been considered underdeveloped. We had experienced colonial rule under Japan, and for a long time we had felt as though we were always lagging behind Japan and Western powers.

Our slogan at the time was: “We may have been late to industrialization, but we will lead in informatization.”6 The idea was that while Korea may have lagged behind in industrial development, it could move ahead in information technology and the internet. In many ways, that ambition became reality, and Korea eventually surpassed Japan and parts of Europe in areas of digital infrastructure and internet adoption. This was a moment when things felt reversed.

During this period, Korea invested heavily in building internet infrastructure. Through successful network communication between Seoul National University and ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute), Korea established the foundation for the internet as the second country in the world after the United States. Later, the Kim Dae-jung (김대중) administration actively promoted venture businesses and expanded internet infrastructure.

From our perspective at the time, Korea still felt like a poor country, while Japan and Europe seemed wealthy and highly advanced. But as the internet began to take hold, people became genuinely excited and optimistic. Companies experienced explosive growth almost overnight. Naver emerged and rapidly grew into a major corporation, Daum (now Kakao) quickly expanded its influence, and NCSoft’s game Lineage spread rapidly, attracting massive numbers of users worldwide.

When everything around you feels exciting and hopeful, would gloomy images really become popular? Of course not. People downloaded visuals that felt bright, clean, optimistic, energetic, glamorous, and hopeful. We responded to that atmosphere, created images that matched the spirit of the moment, and because they sold well, a cycle formed. Eventually, what people came to recognize as the “Asadal style” solidified.

YY: I was born in 1996, and by the time I got my first computer, it was already the Windows XP era. I remember seeing Asadal images everywhere across the Korean web. They make up a large part of my internet memories, and somehow they bring back that same sense of excitement I felt while browsing the web at the time.

CS: So only a few years after you were born, you had already become a citizen of a developed country. I, on the other hand, was born into an agricultural society. Korea was once ranked near the bottom in GDP—even poorer than North Korea, some people said—and then suddenly became a developed nation. From our perspective as image-makers, we could not help but create bright and uplifting visuals. Those images reflected the spirit of the era: future-oriented, optimistic, and full of possibility.

Asadal’s imagery would not have suited periods such as the COVID era, for example, when society felt anxious, isolated, and closed off. In dark historical moments, optimistic imagery like ours does not resonate in the same way.

But these days, Korea seems to be doing well again across the technology sector, from AI to semiconductors with companies like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. If this continues, I imagine people may once again seek brighter and more visually rich imagery.

AI and the Stock Photography Model

YY: I understand that Asadal has also been pursuing AI-related business. How is that progressing? Are you planning to continue operating the design mall through AI?

CS: We are investing heavily in AI at the moment. The company has grown quite significantly—we now have around five affiliated companies and approximately 270 employees. We still have a company in China, but our relationship with North Korea ended for political reasons, and things in Japan have become rather inactive.

At this point, I think image creation is no longer really a human task. There is no longer any need to download assets either. People can simply generate images instantly using AI and use them directly on the spot. Back then, stock photography was dominated by Western models. There were very few Korean model images available. Celebrity photographs were too expensive for ordinary businesses to use, so companies needed photos of unknown models instead. We hired more than one hundred male and female models and photographed them over several years, using those images as source material.

But now, there is no longer a need to cast models because AI can produce images that are even better than reality. The world has completely changed. The difference between the pre-AI and post-AI era feels like two entirely separate worlds. Because of this, I no longer think our former strategy—creating and selling stock image resources in the traditional way—fits the present era.

Corporate Archiving

YY: Asadal seems to have an enormous archive of materials. I was wondering whether the company has been preserving them internally. Relying only on the website feels unstable.

CS: We burned the data onto CDs and displayed hundreds of them in storage cabinets. Naturally, we also created backup copies and stored them separately, and everything remains on our servers as well. We still have all the materials, but now they are largely considered outdated images, so we mainly preserve them for archival and historical purposes.

YY: I also noticed that some Asadal images were made freely available through Gongu Madang, the public sharing platform.

CS: Yes, that came from a proposal by the Korea Copyright Commission. Because Asadal designs were so widely copyrighted, there were growing social problems caused by unauthorized use. They asked whether we would consider donating some of the materials.

So we donated image assets worth several hundred million won to the Commission, and those materials were uploaded to Gongu Madang and made available for free. They were not recent works—we selected mostly early images that had sold particularly well and donated only a portion of them. Everything else on Asadal still requires payment to download and use.

Frutiger Aero and the Future of Aesthetics

YY: Has anyone ever contacted Asadal directly regarding Frutiger Aero?

CS: Not from academia. There were many inquiries from journalists and broadcasters, but I do not think we had any from students or graduate researchers. Most inquiries were about Asadal as a company. Nobody approached us specifically regarding “Frutiger Aero.” At the time, that term did not even exist.

YY: Yes, that’s right. Frutiger Aero is a relatively recent term used to describe this aesthetic. A researcher named Sofi Xian first coined the term and has continued researching the aesthetic ever since. She has been especially curious about Asadal’s history and visual imagery. She recently visited China and told me that she came across Asadal mural imagery in Shenzhen.

CS: Do you know how widespread Asadal images became in China? Once, I landed at Beijing Airport and saw a massive advertising billboard, about fifty meters long, and the entire billboard had been created using Asadal images. Then I took a taxi through the city on my way to the hotel and saw Asadal images again on large roadside billboards. When I arrived at the hotel, I even saw our images in the lobby. During that single business trip to China, I must have encountered our images hundreds of times.

YY: Could you immediately recognize them as Asadal images?

CS: Of course. We recognize them instantly. The strange thing was, I do not remember us ever officially selling those images in China or receiving proper payment for them. They had spread largely through illegal downloads. At the time, China was also experiencing explosive economic growth under Deng Xiaoping’s (邓小平) reforms. The country was opening itself to Western technology and capital, joining the WTO, and integrating into the global system. Things changed almost overnight. Within just a few years, living standards seemed to double. In that environment, our imagery fit perfectly. The spirit of the era aligned with the direction our visuals were aiming toward.

Our images spread rapidly throughout China, but unfortunately, much of that happened through piracy. We hired lawyers and contacted companies, sending legal notices saying: “The image you are using is unauthorized. It was created by Asadal, and licensing fees must be paid.” But many responded with receipts, insisting: “No, we purchased this legally.” The problem was that they had unknowingly bought pirated copies from illegal distributors—at around one-tenth of our original price. They simply copied our source files and resold them. I saw similar cases in Vietnam as well. Across much of Asia, our images spread everywhere.

In any case, Asadal aligned perfectly with the historical momentum of the time. Korea’s web market was growing explosively, and we essentially came to dominate it. That energy naturally pushed us overseas. At the same time, many Asian economies were rapidly expanding, and our imagery resonated strongly with that moment. Recently, our images seem to be especially well received in Taiwan. The number one stock image company in Taiwan has partnered with Asadal, and our images are still generating strong sales through that partnership today.

YY: Younger generations today seem to experience this aesthetic with nostalgia, while it is also becoming fashionable again. What do you think about that phenomenon?

CS: Since AI may lead to another wave of economic transformation, I think styles like this could certainly return. However, even if the visuals look similar, the creator will probably no longer be human. AI can already generate images in an Asadal-like style very quickly. But AI still needs references—it cannot create without examples. I imagine people will increasingly prompt AI to generate visuals inspired by the Asadal aesthetic. At the same time, copyright enforcement in this situation becomes extremely difficult. Rather than fighting endless legal battles, we are beginning to think: perhaps we should simply use AI ourselves.

If you look broadly at human history, the agricultural revolution during the Neolithic period was one of humanity’s greatest transformations. After centuries of traditional society, the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Britain gave rise to modern civilization. Then, in the twentieth century, came computers, the internet, and mobile technology—and now, finally, AI. I believe the AI revolution may be comparable to the Industrial Revolution, perhaps even ten times more socially transformative.

And I think AI may naturally gravitate toward visual styles like ours. Just as the early internet era favored bright, optimistic, and clean aesthetics, AI imagery often feels futuristic, technological, digital, surreal, cybernetic, and dreamlike. In many ways, the emotional atmosphere of AI-generated imagery resembles the feeling we once tried to create at Asadal. If AI begins producing these kinds of visuals at scale, perhaps this style will become popular again. Or perhaps a completely new visual language will emerge for the AI era—one that still references or transforms our style in some way.

Today, AI-generated imagery is no longer limited to static images; it is increasingly expanding into video as well. I think there is a strong possibility that this will evolve into short-form content. In the past, adding movement to images was difficult. It was expensive, and at most we could only apply limited effects through technologies like Flash. But now, images can easily be transformed into ten-second videos. For example, if you input an image and ask AI to turn it into a video, motion can be generated naturally at relatively low cost and in a very short amount of time—a seagull might begin flying, or the globe might start rotating.7

What’s in a name?

YY: Finally, why did you choose the name “Asadal”?

CS: “Asadal” is an old Korean word meaning “the land of the morning.” It was said to be the capital of Gojoseon (朝鮮), the earliest Korean kingdom. Just as Korean history began there, we wanted Asadal to mark the beginning of a new era: the era of the internet. The name represented beginnings, origins, and being first.

The three-legged crow in our logo appears frequently in Goguryeo tomb murals. It symbolizes a mediator between the sun in the heavens and humanity on earth. In mythology, it represents kingship, absolute power, and the sun itself. Goguryeo was the largest of the Three Kingdoms, and it represented outward expansion and cultural strength. That symbolism matched the image we wanted to project as a company, which is why we adopted it as our logo. 🐟

Transcript has been translated from Korean by Yunseon Yang and sparsely edited for clarity and flow.

Yunseon Yang is a multidisciplinary graphic designer from Korea, based in Germany, exploring digital culture and visual aesthetics. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Visual Communication at Bauhaus University with a graduation project focused on the Frutiger Aero aesthetic.

Paul Sunday: We have oil and it seeps through the ground.

Daniel Plainview: Just because there’s something on the ground doesn’t mean there’s anything beneath it.

— There Will Be Blood (2007)

If what Derrida says about ghosts of the past that haunt us is true, then naturally in every waking moment, we are all haunted all the time. Epic Movie (2007) is a film that has, in its own twisted way, haunted me for nearly two decades. It appears like a black hole, a film whose reception is outrageously negative that it only provokes me to inspect it.

I am not unfamiliar with cinematic detritus. I have seen much of the 2000s IMDb canon of bad cinema, including Battlefield Earth (2000) some eight times. Some of these films have become re-evaluated, like Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered (2001), (a film, above all, about how capitalism cannot tolerate pure libidinal energy until Gordon’s Oedipalisation is outright demonstrated in front of a Hollywood CEO) or Uwe Boll’s Postal (2007) (one I have admittedly not engaged with yet, but I have heard is rife with such sarcastic bitterness that it has earned admirers), some immediately beloved like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003) (still unexplored for its potency as a catastrophic disintegration of the immigrant psyche). At the same time, these are works by, in one sense or another, auteurs whose intensity not only exceeds but brutally violates Hollywood norms.

Friedberg and Seltzer’s Epic Movie is a different work altogether, and this is why it haunts me. Unlike most other ‘bad films’, it curiously was a box office hit while sustaining ruthless evisceration at the hands of audiences and critics alike. Friedberg and Seltzer would go on to make several movies in this vein, each drawing similar reaction although with declining ticket sales. Epic Movie would settle on IMDb’s infamous 100 worst films list at #10. The general criticism of the film is this: it is just a stream of pop culture references and nothing more. This of course flies in the face of traditional satire or parody, where the work is supposed to mean something, to do something with the content it engages with. To viewers, Epic Movie seemed to say nothing at all, that it was as empty and vacuous as the culture it takes its aim at. Mick LaSalle of SF Chronicle writes, ‘[only] a complete idiot could think Epic Movie is remotely funny or worth making at all’. Some even go so far as to say that the work is a labour of pure cynicism, a proto-algorithmic hot keyword targeting deployed to get as much attention as possible. There is, to date, hardly anything positive written about this film nor any attempt to engage with its themes.

At the same time, Friedberg and Seltzer are virtual apparitions; they do not have any presence the way Wiseau, Boll or Green do. The film instead foregrounds the so-called Barthesian death of the author: they are anonymous with little authorial subconscious to excavate. The subconscious is then deferred to the general spirit of the time or, as Raymond Williams calls it, the structures of feeling. Whether intentional or not, I leave this for the reader to decide,1 but the film nevertheless, in its references, creates a factory line of McBling-period signifiers that cannot be ignored, whether they are pop culture symbols (Paris Hilton, Jack Sparrow, Harry Potter, MTV Cribs), then-topoi (orphans, hypersexual older women, breakdancing), or contemporaneous geopolitical events (Hurricane Katrina, 2003 invasion of Iraq). Hardly dated by these references—what is dated other than another ghost waiting to haunt us?—the film instead weaves through this complex web of discourse traversing through other works and other media at the time and says very much about them. The semiotic excesses of the film, as a McBling-meaning-machine, then imbue it with a profound meaning.

Whereas the Nostalgia Critic in his review of the film (one of the few to produce a full-length review of the film) evaluates it strictly on a narrative basis, the film’s seemingly glaring plot holes themselves destabilise the hold of the barely coherent plot. In fact, Epic Movie even suggests this reading: in an early scene, based on The Da Vinci Code (2006), one of the main characters, Lucy, confesses she has not read the book. It then invites a hermeneutic of Hidden Writing: in the sprawling theory-fiction work Cyclonopedia, Reza Negarestani introduces this method of narratology in which plot holes themselves become the mechanism of narrative construction. The narrative of the work is then only a surface, a blueprint for the radical, subterranean connections that lie underneath. If Epic Movie is likened to ‘Swiss cheese’ as a narrative, its porousness in fact only allows for its dark undercurrents, like oil at the Sunday Ranch in There Will Be Blood (2007), to seep up.

I myself did not watch Epic Movie until last year even though I was aware of it and its reputation since its release. Looking back, I suspect that I was not ready for it. Surely not enough time had passed, and I did not know enough about its references. Since viewing it, I have been filled with an urgency to talk about it. It has led me down so many paths, to so many secondary and tertiary sources, and new ways of thinking, that I am beginning to believe no other film will affect me in this way. This is why I am writing this series, to share and make note of my discoveries of this film.

Therefore, here we have the Hidden Writings of Epic Movie, a study in McBling cinema. In this, I will dive down the holey structure of Epic Movie and see what subterranean structures lie beneath. Perhaps there is something to dig up, even in this film.

Dossier 001: Blossoms Black and Sweet as Norwegian Crude

I saw the future flowering like a ruptured vessel
Somebody’s gonna get screwed.

— The Mountain Goats and Kaki King ‘Black Pear Tree’

A large portion of the plot of Epic Movie is lifted from the 2005 film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Rather than ‘Narnia’, Epic Movie instead takes place in Gnarnia, a wintry kingdom run by a despotic queen, the White Bitch. The homophonic name, as Epic Movie’s counterpart Mr. Tumnus explains, is due to copyright claims. The orphans—Lucy, Peter, Edward, and Susan Pervertski2—first enter Gnarnia through a wardrobe at the Wonka Chocolate Factory. They do so to escape the Promethean fate of endless organ harvesting at the hands of Wonka.3

The Kingdom of Gnarnia, as it turns out, is a backwards, oppressive, authoritarian (with wire taps), mediæval state ruled by a brutal dictator, the White Bitch. Her regime not only suppresses mutants and banned gay marriage but also mismanaged a ‘hurricane’ crisis, an event which prompts Kanye West to say, ‘The White Bitch doesn’t care about black people’. On top of that, the White Bitch harbours an incredibly dangerous ‘weapon of mass destruction’, a ‘real’ one and not a fake ‘Saddam’ one. Here, the White Bitch is not only George W. Bush, but also Saddam Hussein—an actual Saddam Hussein with a ‘real’ weapon:

Mr. Tumnus: ‘Under her two terms, we now have wiretaps, no gay marriage, not to mention her bumbling of the hurricane relief effort.’
Kanye West: ‘And the White Bitch doesn’t care about black people.’
Mr. Tumnus: ‘There is a small resistance movement. They learned she’s developing a weapon of mass destruction that can kill all of us.’
Lucy: ‘Wait, a real WMD, or like, a fake Saddam one?’
Mr. Tumnus: ‘No, a real one!’

The only solution is to enact regime change: to support a rebel militia, composed of mutants, Wonderbread men, Borat (‘My name Borat, this is my country of Gnarnia, is nice!’), and an Ewok. The militia is run by Aslo, a lion figure who is a McBling archetype of the sleazy and influential man of power—a cross between Hugh Hefner and Jeffrey Epstein.4 The film’s climax is a battle, a confrontation between the orphans and the White Bitch’s army. Despite being outnumbered, with the entire resistance movement abandoning them due to a vomiting accident, the orphans nevertheless triumph. This is all thanks to Peter’s discovery of the remote from Click (2007).5 After an outright and joyful massacre of the entire army, the White Bitch is spared. A familiar speech follows:

Peter: ‘The new Gnarnia will be a democracy, complete with due process. She shall be given a fair trial, judged by a jury of peers.’

She is however immediately disposed of, mercilessly, by Jack Swallows on his wheel. Peter not only abandons democracy, but in the next scene, along with his fellow orphans, accepts the coronation as the new monarchs of Gnarnia.

Gnarnia then can be read as a petro-state in a regime-change narrative. Oil never appears once in the script, yet its traces seep out of the film’s holes through the despotic ruler armed with a ‘weapon of mass destruction’. Yet this is not merely the Middle East of Bush-era cinema. There are no orientalised Arabs like in Team America: World Police (2004). Nor is this the Middle East as a backdrop, as in Three Kings (1999). Unlike In the Loop (2009) where Iraq is an abstract entity to be invaded or not, Iraq does not exist at all apart from the mention of Saddam. Instead, the film displaces Iraq into a different place altogether.

It is, in fact, possible to conclude that Gnarnia is a mediæval Norway: a perennially frozen, mountainous, evergreen landscape with European peasants, an evil ‘White Bitch’ with fantastical Viking dreadlocks—Vikings did not have dreads, but they do in revisionist mediæval imaginations.6 Europe, in McBling films, represents a relatively neutral non-other on which projections of desire and domination can safely be enacted without the political baggage. Europe then becomes a fantasy-space, a playground of vague erotic, touristic, and geopolitical imaginaries. Sometimes, this is in the shape of the ‘Sexy Foreigner’: in Boat Trip (2002), Nick’s attempt to escape the gay cruise leads him to down an aircraft full of Swedish bikini models. EuroTrip (2004) functions entirely off the European imaginary as a locus for sex tourism. For Epic Movie, C. S. Lewis, author of the original Narnia, seems to all but invite this: if Narnia takes place in a parallel universe, can’t Gnarnia as well, in a twisted world where a Scandinavian petro-state becomes the target of US invasion for ‘weapons of mass destruction’?

After all, Norway is rich with oil, a resource discovered in the North Sea in 1969. A newly arrived Iraqi immigrant with a background in geology, Farouk al-Kasim, was recruited by sheer happenstance to steer the Scandinavian monarchy into its new position as a petro-state. Oil is largely considered a curse, a resource that attracts such an outpouring of wealth that it brings destruction to a state unlucky enough to uncover it. Norway, the largest producer of oil in Europe after Russia, is a special place, thanks to al-Kasim, a displaced Iraqi who had largely spared his adoptive kingdom the fate that befell his homeland. Despite Norway’s security, its founding membership in NATO, and close alliance with the US, Gnarnia suggests an American fantasy of overthrowing even its European allies. Perhaps this is not so absurd: the Arctic and Greenland are well within the geopolitical desires of the USA. Even the sweet taste of Norwegian crude cannot escape the yearning of the American id.

With the orphans’ joyful return to their imprisonment in the Wonka factory, they are greeted by Borat who says, ‘You did it! You made movie film have happy ending!’ before Jack Swallows returns and crushes the orphans. Borat slaps his rear and says, ‘Not!’ Like anyone else who takes over a petro-state, the petro-geist eventually comes for them.

Postscript (2026.06.07)

It should, perhaps, not be ignored that Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe itself portrays a retreat into a regime change fantasy. The perforated map of Gnarnia can in turn be placed on top of Narnia.

References

Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press.

Channel Awesome. 2025. “Epic Movie - Nostalgia Critic.” YouTube. June 18, 2025.

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge.

LaSalle, Mick. 2007. “REVIEW / ‘Epic Movie’s’ Tries at Satire Fail on a Grand Scale.” SFGATE. January 29, 2007. https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/REVIEW-Epic-Movie-s-tries-at-satire-fail-on-a-2653241.php.

Reza Negarestani. 2008. Cyclonopedia : Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Melbourne: Re.Press.

Sandbu, Martin. 2009. “The Iraqi Who Saved Norway from Oil.” Financial Times. August 29, 2009. https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0.

Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford England: Oxford University Press.

The notion of genres and movements categorises cinema, as it does with music, into neat categories for packaging. This is always the fear with creating a label, which can enact the very qualities it aims to critique. At the same time, there is an abundance of labels for film. So why another one?

Genres such as ‘comedy’ or ‘thriller’ encode particular types of moods and conventions that stretch across a large expanse of the history of cinema. Others, such as ‘film noir’ emerge retrospectively in criticism to describe more specific collections. Movements such as French New Wave or Dogme 95 are even more specific, centre around a number of figures, often in a particular location, and engage within a specific and deliberate discourse. Sometimes, modes of cinema emerge in criticism without any intent from the creators, such as the case of New French Extremity or American Eccentric Cinema (Wilkins 2019)1. Nevertheless, films released within a period of time may engage with similar affects, themes, and discourses that transcend cinema. In examining cinema, therefore, there is a need to view it as a subset of other post-media movements in cultural systems—for example, as parts of consumer aesthetics.

Why consumer aesthetics? The term consumer aesthetic comes from the Consumer Aesthetic Research Institute (CARI), which itself emerged from crossovers of Tumblr and the Weird Facebook subculture. An aesthetic (plural: aesthetics) is a way of organising a collection of objects and concepts and motifs around a unified feeling or community. Although art history may use the term aesthetic to denote style—as in ‘Victorian aesthetic’ or ‘Bauhaus aesthetic’—CARI’s usage of aesthetic comes directly from the term’s usage within Vaporwave, a music genre whose visual component consists of repurposing ads of 1980s and 1990s technology, and where aesthetic itself in its stylised, full-width form denotes a particular adherence to the ‘Vaporwave aesthetic’. Aesthetic in this sense is different from the philosophy of Aesthetics, which concerns the conditions, structures and evaluation of sensory perception and artistic judgment. Consumer meanwhile derives from the notion of the observer of standardised aesthetic experiences, as described by Adorno and Horkheimer in the culture industry (Adorno and Horkheimer 1947). As Félix Guattari had observed in 1990, with the emergence of the post-media condition, the distinction between data, TV and cinema has become lost as all begin to influence one another. He elaborates:

There is a decentering of the image outside the subject; the image finds itself embodied in a symbolic field… Images are present in contemporary cognition. New schemas are generated by computational thinking and computer assistance. (Guattari 1990 [2026])

This condition creates formations of style that traverse all kinds of media, including not only cinema, television, and music, but parts of the built environment, such as industrial design, interior design and architecture. Consumer aesthetic, in CARI’s usage, then refers to such a formation: an aesthetic arranged for the passive observer.

McBling is a term coined by Froyo Tam to describe the visual and symbolic culture—the consumer aesthetic—that largely displaced Y2K Futurism. McBling came from a Facebook group originally called Post-Y2K Aesthetics, in which differential analysis was performed on aesthetic orders that clearly occurred after Y2K Futurism. Establishing itself around 2000 and reaching a terminal point around 2008, McBling encapsulates in its name one of the central ironies of the period: the duality of extravagant, excessive, showy luxury (bling) and its nearly banal and trashy ubiquity in global consumerism (Mc as in McDonald’s). Bling comes from ‘Bling Bling’, a term popularised by the New Orleans-based rap supergroup Cash Money Millionaires, which exploded into the mainstream in the 1999 song ‘Bling Bling’ by B.G. The term entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003 to describe ‘elaborate jewellery, clothing, or possessions, or the flashy lifestyle associated with them’. Mc on the other hand connects to a discourse on global consumer culture and cultural homogenisation of neoliberalism that emerged with the end of the Cold War. The term McWorld by Benjamin Barber is a vital precursor (Barber 1995), although by the 2000s, the Mc prefix had become productive, being applied to other globalised, cheaply produced, pseudo-luxurious commodities, such as, notably, McMansions.

Today, McBling forms part of public recollection of the Y2K era; in fashion circles, it has become virtually synonymous. Perhaps there is the question of, why McBling cinema and not Y2K cinema? However, McBling as an assemblage encodes discourses and attitudes which transcend a mere period of time. It is essential to look beyond pure decades. While design was once defined by monarch regimes (Victorian, Edwardian, etc.) or larger eras (Renaissance, Baroque), the practice of delineating styles by decade emerges from a shift in post-war mass media and art history to capture rapidly shifting styles and enforce planned obsolescence (‘Roaring Twenties’). Perhaps this is a form of compression, which served the neat categories of style at the time. While the propagation of styles and subcultures has only accelerated, our ability to disseminate and archive historical styles has also increased. There is an imperative for granularity.

What separates McBling Cinema from mere early 2000s or Y2K cinema is the way a particular perspective is encoded—a sort of attitude or demeanour emerges in these cultural products. The films tend to engender a cynical outlook which surfaces as ironic, caustic, crude, raunchy, and spectacular humour, often disguised as ‘camp’ or ‘satire’. The sentiment seemingly recalls what J. Hoberman termed ‘vulgar modernism’, a self-reflexive tendency in media in the 1940s to 1960s: ‘lowbrow works … heavily embedded with intertextuality … [that] crack the veneer of acceptable materialism and frenzied consumption in mid-century American society’ (Park-Primiano 2016). If McBling Cinema continues this self-reflexive tendency, it redirects it towards conditions of the then newly-established global neoliberal order. Many of the discourses that inform McBling as a cultural formation, particularly in America, have been best described by Colette Shade’s book entitled Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Shade 2025). These include the mainstreaming of hip hop; the sexual culture of the 2000s; mythologisation of the fashion industry and image culture; Bush-era petro-imperialism and War on Terror; tabloid celebrity culture and paparazzi; ‘democratisation’ of fame, especially through reality television; status culture and consumer excess; and so on.

Alongside its attitude and discourses, McBling Cinema functions as a type of assemblage—a constellation of elements with no fixed membership, held together by family resemblance rather than defining conditions. Although the qualities are porous and contextual, some recurring motifs in McBling Cinema include: breakdancing and dance battles, often gratuitous; injection of hip hop into seemingly incongruous moments; tours of lavish spaces in the style of MTV Cribs; class signifiers as signs of villainy (McMansions, SUVs); scenes involving pirates and/or boats; hostage situations; jarring tonal shifts; shopping and clothing montages; autocriticism of the fashion and/or film industries; in-universe elevation of otherwise regular main characters to celebrity status; often forced and cynical display of multiculturalism; destruction of mid-century sets; an ironic engagement with aesthetics of the 1970s, especially disco and the ‘Golden Age of Porn’. Against these motifs, a slew of characters also recurs in McBling: naïve Pygmalion characters, orphans, hypersexual old women (‘cougars’), deliberately tokenised ‘token minorities’, ambiguously bisexual characters, sleazy old men—particularly in the vein of Hugh Hefner and Jeffrey Epstein, Michael Jackson figures, George W Bush figures, and so on.

These are only some motifs and some very American ones at that. Yet McBling Cinema concerns a global pop culture condition, spread through ‘mediascapes’. As Arjun Appadurai introduces the term, ‘mediascapes’,

… whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-centred, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places. These scripts can and do get disaggregated into complex sets of metaphors by which people live … as they help to constitute narratives of the ‘other’ and proto-narratives of possible lives, fantasies which could become prolegomena to the desire for acquisition and movement. (Appadurai 1990)

Through such cultural flows, consumer aesthetics also become localised (or perhaps were ‘glocal’ to begin with), which calls for an examination of McBling Cinema in all of its local and global registers, broadly dealing with themes of fashion and cinema empires, globalisation, celebrity culture, and consumerism. Although some works like Tetsuya Nakashima’s Kamikaze Girls (2004) and Memories of Matsuko (2006) come to mind, I will leave these manifestations to others to explore more in-depth.

My research into what I called McBling Cinema started in 2016 when Evan Collins2 and I would meet regularly to watch a particular strain of comedies from the early 2000s, observing recurring tropes. Although some films such as Mean Girls (2004) never faded from praise, there were many other films of this cohort that remained underexamined. These films included Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties (2006), Boat Trip (2002), National Lampoon’s Pledge This! (2006), From Justin to Kelly (2003), Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004), Lovewrecked (2005) among many others. Through this research, we aimed to establish a loose canon of cinematic works that best represented and shaped the McBling consumer aesthetic throughout its evolution, especially beyond the more restricted interpretation centred around so-called ‘chick flick’ films like 13 Going on 30 (2004), Mean Girls (2004), Legally Blonde (2001), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and so on. While these films rightfully are seeing critical re-evaluation, especially through feminist media scholarship, there is room for a broader view of their discourses. This way, we could see how cinema serves as vectors for aesthetic material, establishing views into interior design, fashion, architecture, and so on, both engaging in aesthetic discourses yet reinforcing their cultural values and messages.

The purpose here is to establish the precedent of McBling Cinema as a term, in order to enact an interpretive framework that takes consumer aesthetics as semiological systems, allowing for the creation of other cinemas, such as Gen X Soft Club Cinema, Frutiger Aero Cinema, and so on. This enacts an approach which Umberto Eco refers to as ‘semiological guerilla warfare’ (Eco 1986); by intercepting media at its point of reception, this rhizomatic approach allows for ambient, buried meanings to come to the forefront.

In the future, I will be examining McBling films as aesthetic products in this way, revealing overlooked logic that underlie a number of films from this period. For example, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), beyond all the Wes Andersonian surface, is at its core a McBling film: it is first and foremost an examination of celebrity culture, depicting film circuits and red carpets—Zissou’s fixation on film narrative colours all of his relationships, most of all with Ned, the orphan who may or may not be his son, taken in as a counter-Oedipal Pygmalion; Zissou’s rival is quintessential McBling: bisexual, charismatic, and most importantly, rich; the tour of the boat echoes MTV Cribs; it has a dance scene, albeit an understated one; its use of bossa nova appears to be a Wes Andersonian response to hip hop through deliberately outmoded signifiers, etc. Likewise, a film like Todd Solondz’s Storytelling (2001), through its sparse and disparate deadpan examination of celebrity in the desert of suburbia subverts many discourses of McBling Cinema. What is important then is not to simply observe these similarities—or risk fixating only on surface—but tie them intertextually into other McBling texts through a critical lens.

This framework is particularly potent for interpreting works like Friedberg and Seltzer’s Epic Movie (2007) which seem to deal almost wholesale with McBling signifiers at the moment of the aesthetic’s collapse. While Epic Movie is disparaged as an empty work, I have come to view it as a crucial McBling text and unusually adept at deconstructing its semiosis and therefore that of other consumer aesthetics. This is an angle which I have been exploring for the past year through an ongoing project of which I will publish parts soon. Part of this is personal—I am fascinated by the taste regimes of cinema and what is deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Films like Life Aquatic or Epic Movie have deeply entrenched themselves in my mind, perhaps because of their lukewarm reception, or in the case of the latter, intense revulsion.

Mark Fisher once claimed the period of roughly 2003 to 2014 will be regarded as ‘the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s’ (Fisher 2014). Whereas he diagnoses the cultural poverty marked by repetition and nostalgia as he searches for ‘lost futures’, I encourage deliberate re-evaluation of works through transmedia aesthetic lenses. In the previous regime of signal to noise, signal risked being seen as noise. Perhaps today’s literacy is one where everything is signal.

References

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. 1947. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (2–3): 295–310.

Barber, Benjamin. 1995. Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Times Books.

Eco, Umberto. 1986. “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare.” In Travels in Hyperreality, 135–144. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.

Guattari, Félix. (1990) 2026. “The Image Machine.” Translated by Ethan Spigland. e-flux Notes, May 1, 2026. https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783490/the-image-machine.

Park-Primiano, Sueyoung. 2016. “Vulgar Modernism.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781135000356-REM354-1.

Shade, Colette. 2025. Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything. New York: HarperCollins.

Wilkins, Kim. 2019. American Eccentric Cinema. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.

KnowYourMeme charts the discourse of apple visualisation to a 2016 Blogspot post from The Neurocritic, who introduces the concept with a rhetorical question of whether one pictures a ‘Red Delicious apple or a green Granny Smith’ when prompted. But as we see in the meme itself, Red Delicious is selected as the most detailed apple, and all lower grades of detail transition from this depiction while retaining its most fundamental attributes. This implies that Red Delicious may be a most quintessential apple, the variant highest on the chain of iconicity. In short, Red Delicious is the apple in this meme.

Even if the iconicity of the apple is stabilised within the meme, it refers outside of itself. Obviously, apples are not exclusive to this meme; apples are an incredibly recognisable fruit and constitute a basic vocabulary in many of the world’s languages, not only appearing high in word frequency lists filtered by fruit names but even functioning as base morphemes for other fruits and vegetables. In French, a potato is a pomme de terre, an apple of the earth. Anyone that can read the instructions understands the concept of an apple. In thinking of an apple, whether you can visualise it or not, we are confronted with all of its associated qualities and experiences: a firm, crisp fruit with a layer of skin and a juicy taste varying between sweet and tart. The apple creates a crunch sensation. You can hear the sound of an apple bite or perhaps even imagine the sensation yourself. It emits a particular aroma depending on ripeness. The apple almost universally comes with a thin brown stem, which once connected it to a tree. The inside of the apple has a core, a hard part which is difficult to eat and contains bitter seeds with traces of cyanide.

Apples like all other living beings are not uniform in appearance. They come in a very large variety which spans the collection of every apple that has existed or continues to exist—the domain of all apples. Still, apples are constrained through the agricultural industry, which optimises apples into a limited set of cultured varieties or cultivars. There are over 7,500 apple cultivars, which means we can divide the domain of all apples into just as many categories. This allows us to understand, through genetic pedigree, what types of varieties of apples there are, and roughly what kinds of qualities to anticipate within each variety.

Within the fruit produce section of grocery stores in America, rather than in a chaotic assortment of heterogeneous specimens, apples are typically laid out by cultivar. The innovation of agriculture allows apples to be a perennial crop, its position designated within a grocery store all year round. The selection classically includes Red Delicious, Gala, Fuji, McIntosh, Granny Smith, and Golden Delicious. The apples are visually distinct to the point that they can be immediately differentiated upon first glance. This creates sites of difference: even if apples are apples—and not, as the saying goes, oranges—apples are segregated by cultivar to fulfil different purposes. Oftentimes, the signage that accompany these apple cultivars also clarify specific qualities and culinary roles. One apple is sweet and meant for eating, one is mealy and meant for making into sauces, one is tart and meant for cooking, one is for baking in pies, and so on. Apple cultivars cannot be too similar or they will create confusion for the consumer whether in selecting or remembering what kind of apples they have selected.

We have proceeded now from apple onto apple variations that delineate apples into groups. But apple variations are not equal. We can understand apples as having an asymmetrical representation, in which one cultivar stands out as the most iconic, and each successive one proportionally diminishing in representation. Every store may have Red Delicious, but not everyone will have McIntosh or Cortland. The representation of apples corresponds with Zipf’s Law, an empirical law most known for its application in the distribution of words in corpora of natural language. Apples therefore undergo roughly a Zipfian heavy-tailed distribution when all cultivars are ordered by appearance in rank in stores.

In turn, the understanding of an apple is similarly skewed. When describing an apple, often you are describing a Red Delicious apple as opposed to a Granny Smith (a green apple of secondary rank) or perhaps something more deviant like a Black Diamond Tibetan apple (a niche luxury purple apple from the Himalayas). Classical apples dominate in not just stores but also imagery. In advertising, there is the notion of the hero: the specimen that is so recognisable that it becomes the focus of the ad. We do not want green apples or yellow apples, but red ones because apples are supposed to be red. The distribution of apple depiction impacts the recognisability of apple as a concept. In stock photo depictions of apples, we see Red Delicious or Gala, unless the intention is to convey the diversity of apples, in which case Golden Delicious (yellow) and Granny Smith (green) often appear. A pile of diverse apples invariably includes these mildly divergent Golden Delicious or Granny Smith apples or apples like Cortland or Braeburn with gradients of traditional apple shades (green, yellow, orange, red). These representations of apples mirror an intuitive understanding of the Zipfian ranking of apples, reinforced by other representations, in a feedback system of apple semiotics.

This brings us back to the Red Delicious and its appearance in the meme. The Red Delicious is a cultivar of apple first identified in Peru, Iowa, USA in 1872. The cultivar won a contest to replace the Ben Davis apple—then the favoured apple in the USA, now an apple regulated to total obscurity in commercial trade. Throughout its life, the Red Delicious underwent a number of name changes, from Hawkeye, to Delicious, to finally Red Delicious. Later shifts in post-war American consumer habits caused the Red Delicious to explode in popularity, owing to its alluring, blood-red skin and tall shape. In such a transition, from experience to visual representation, the appearance of the apple triumphs. The apple crate of the produce section of a grocery store draws your gaze to itself with a wall of Red Delicious’s rich sanguine hue. The Red Delicious is a beautiful apple: the most perfect of apples, the quintessential. This heroic state of this apple inserts it into a sociocultural understanding of what an apple should look like, refined over time.

Apples—as Red Delicious apples—then become what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as overcoded: their possibilities have been constrained and enforced through the apparatus of agriculture and visual-consumer culture. Over time, the heroic specimen is selected again and again, made redder and redder, shinier and shinier, both perfected and genericised. The selection of traits is a process which mirrors the development of agriculture through the growth of capitalism. Everything through the establishment of industrial agriculture proceeds through an acceleration of feature selection, learning and training: produce, correct, repeat. Thus, the lettuce lost its bitter and psychoactive qualities and became salad fodder. The dog became ‘cute’ with floppier ears and smaller teeth, from wolf to puppy. The apple likewise is domesticated, a grotesque deformation of the once-wild sour, green-yellow apples with a faint red blush. It itself becomes simplistic and domestic.

The representational media industry in turn moves in hyperdrive, encoding the apple further and further in a looksmaxxing feedback loop. The cultivar once sold desire for its crispness, its redness, and gloss, but now it circulates through the ecosystem of stock images. Computer display technology improves and exhibits their triumphs in smooth wallpapers of dewy Red Delicious crates. Over time, the cultivar’s representation exceeds and then greatly exceeds that of all other apple cultivars. In order for apples to become legible, the Red Delicious heroes are selected; consequently, they eclipse the visible space of all apples. This too is pure feature selection, learning and training.

By being not just any apple but the apple, the overcoded Red Delicious is then apt for second-order signification. Roland Barthes uses the term second-order signification to describe the creation of social value systems, converting images into myths that naturalise the politics of the bourgeoisie. The apple is no longer just refers to a fruit, but it in turn means something. In the cover of Twilight, the pale hands of Bella Swan bear a Red Delicious apple. In Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2006), Denny bites into a Red Delicious apple. The apple as Red Delicious retroactively stands in as the forbidden fruit of the Genesis, the fruit of knowledge, itself a retroactive insert from Renaissance artists. The apple then extends as a symbol of knowledge as the gift in pedagogy from student to teacher. The apple is the fruit that hit Sir Isaac Newton’s head, thus launching the field of Newtonian Physics, an episode to which we may as well anachronistically assign agency to the Red Delicious.

Red Delicious apples are codified into larger semiological systems of Consumer Aesthetics, like Utopian Scholastic, the aesthetic of 1980s-2000s encyclopaedias, ‘edutainment’, and teaching materials. We have Newton’s Apple, an educational television series from Minneapolis. Red Delicious apples are inseparable from knowledge, the redder and richer the better—not like the impoverished green apples regulated to Magritte’s surrealism. The emergence of neural networks and Deep Learning can only deepen the processes prefigured by early research in Consumer Aesthetics. Consumer Aesthetics, like Thomas Hine’s description of Populuxe for the space age design era, assume the form of hyperdense sign assemblages through excesses of consumer media, retroactively identified and reinforced through sheer representational redundancy. The research predicts the eventual acceleration of cultural production and industry, ramped up by Artificial Intelligence. In the case of apples, datasets feature not only images of apples but also images where the iconified Red Delicious apples appear ambiently, as in Utopian Scholastic images. These datasets then feed into machine learning systems creating deep associations between Red Delicious qualities of apples and the concept of apples, mirroring the general understanding of an apple. Generative AI spits out Red Delicious, the apple most represented and therefore least complex across the vector space of all apples. This is a Red Delicious regime of apple signs; however phantasiac the visualisation meme-experiencer may be, she is semantically satiated like the AI image generator by the wealth of Red Delicious apples and is no longer capable of producing any other apple spontaneously.

But it is not enough that the apple is overcoded and integrated into larger systems, but rather how its excess leads to its stagnation and impoverishment. In Bataillean terms, the semiotic accumulation leads to its excess and finally necessary and violent expenditure. The Red Delicious, selected for its appearance, gradually lost its taste through breeding. Once the most productive crop, the Red Delicious led to a collapse in the apple industry in the USA, a $760 million loss between 1997 and 2000, which resulted in a $138 million bailout. The Hendersonville Times-News frames it in an Icarian manner: ‘Pursuit of apple perfection ends in major disaster’. Its reputation has only slipped. By 2018, it ceded its dominance to Gala with much fanfare from commentators, as if awaiting the toppling of a regime. ‘Good riddance to the Red Delicious, an apple that sucks,’ wrote Rebecca Onion in Slate in 2018, accompanied by a Twilight-esque stock photo of hands offering a Red Delicious apple. ‘The loathsome fruit has finally slipped from its spot as the dominant apple in American orchards, and not a moment too soon.’ The pomaceous crop is even more harshly eviscerated by Hilary Pollack in VICE, in a piece entitled ‘Red Delicious Apples Can Rot in Hell’. In a 2019 episode of Family Guy, Cleveland calls Red Delicious a ‘garbage apple’. Even in 2026, it lingers—actor Sterling K. Brown appears in Internet short-form talk show Subway Takes and declares Red Delicious ‘actually disgusting’.

We arrive then at apple-slop: the Red Delicious apple which, through cybernetic self-regulating processes, has become auto-refined and then cemented into our understanding of apple, overcoded to the point that it leaves behind a residue. The residue—the apple-slop—then is the target of a recurrence of media vitriol, one of the many punching bags of comedians, food critics, and bloggers alike, condemned into the same domains as other overcoded slop signifiers: Arial and Comic Sans fonts, cyan-orange movie posters, Millennial whoop, chord progressions like Pachelbel’s Canon and Sensitive Female Chord Progression, Labubu. The Red Delicious, as apple-slop, is inescapable, a product of the sameness of an intertwined machinic entertainment-agricultural system which builds it and tears it down.

The ‘vibe collapse’ of Red Delicious is therefore indicative of the phasal overcoding and concurrent slopification of apples. The consumer base rejects the Red Delicious and warns others of its dangers (of its bad taste, deceptive appearance, and so on) while its second-order meaning temporarily lingers as everyone becomes sick of this slop. At the same time, images slowly drift to other regimes of apples. Apples are in semiotic cycles, as runner-up Gala apples take first place and the comparably newer Honeycrisp and other novel hype apples like SweeTango, Cosmic Crisp, etc. emerge. Apples are decoded and recoded, and slopification emerges as a by-product of this process.

If the Red Delicious is the epitome of slop in the pomological domain at this moment, then we can also theorise what an x-slop is: font-slop, chord-slop, vibe-slop, quality-slop, etc. One may think of slop as the averaged images that emerge from a dataset, what may be called AVERAGECORE. Often the question of the ‘aesthetics of slop’ frames this subject too tightly—it ignores the slop of everyday. Capitalist production repeatedly expands, generating observable repetitions and representations before catastrophically annihilating them. The uncannily generic outputs then do not comprise the whole system but are symptomatic of everything else. What if the output really just means slop is inevitable? In fact, slop has always been around since the dawn of time, secret seeds waiting for industry to water and fertilise it en masse, then blossom, and fruit, then rot. How do you like them slop apples?

A note to readers: please do not offer me apples, as I am allergic to them.