Dead Chat Is Ded* (2021)

 
Commissioned by the academic journal Mechademia, Dead Chat Is Ded* is a series of digital collages and an accompanying essay exploring the rise and dissolution of the raucous not-so-clandestine communities attached to bootleg anime streaming sites. Built from archival screenshots of one of the hubs of illegal anime streaming (the pseudo-defunct Anime Place), these digital collages take place in three chapters. The first is during the site’s prime in the mid-2010s, when I found it simply because it was the first Google result for a series I wanted to watch, with thousands of people bantering together. The second chapter is from 2017, when the streaming site had been shut down, and all but the most ardent community members had left. The final chapter is from 2018, when even the chat room tech had decayed, leaving sex spam bots to chatter endlessly with each other. These dubiously legal sites flourished to meet an unmet audience need in the odd era between the fall of torrenting and ubiquitous streaming. Over time, bootleg streaming platforms became a digital reef of sorts, attracting and nurturing large self-governed, often anarchic and sometimes disturbingly vitriolic, online communities. These communities collapsed into haunted emptiness once the large media players offered cheap and omnipresent streaming, but during their brief heyday, offered a glimpse of an internet outside of platform capitalism, but also the roots of some of the abusive online behaviors that have bubbled to the surface of American social discourse.

Read the accompanying essay from Mechademia Vol. 14.2: New Formulations of the Otaku (guest ed. Susan Napier) for more historical and social context:

Dead Chat is Ded*: The Rise and Dissolution of Chat Communities (PDF)

Content Warning: As noted in the accompanying essay, content warnings are myriad with this work: sexism, bullying, racism, drug use, self-harm, suicide, transphobia, homophobia, allusions to incest, and more are documented throughout the visual essay.