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alright, brief update.
i just hired an expert from the courtauld institute of art, one of the world’s leading institutions for art history and visual culture, to give his take on the emi posting situation. here's what he had to say.
he began by affirming the originality of the emi posting phenomenon, describing it as "a participatory spectacle that straddles the line between meme culture and institutional critique." according to him, the relentless flood of high resolution, aesthetically honed emi posts, often posted without explicit commentary, functions almost like a digital readymade. in the duchampian sense, the repetition itself becomes the medium.
what makes this particularly compelling, he noted, is the stark contrast with ellie’s sporadic, often low effort posts. this visual dissonance isn’t just a meme format, it’s a structural commentary. the imbalance becomes the artwork. the audience is positioned not just as consumers but as active participants in the tension between scarcity and surplus, noise and silence, signal and distortion.
the viewer is forced to see an emi post. it appears suddenly, arrogantly, yet somehow feels familiar. it speaks a language you didn’t even know you could understand. in contrast, an ellie post is just noise, static in the background, a half forgotten whisper compared to the clarity of a signal that demands to be noticed.
he also pointed out that the idea of "the conscious observation of an ellie simp" collapsing the artwork into reality parallels quantum observer theory, where art acts like a wave function resolved only through collective attention. the very absurdity of it is part of the point. it’s not about emi or ellie specifically, it’s about the ritualized nature of digital fandom and the way identity is sculpted in hyperreality.
he ended the email with, “it’s a form of net native conceptual art. what we’re seeing is the gamification of desire itself, artfully disguised as chaos.”
