I. People
David O’Reilly
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I. People
David O’Reilly
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Heavy metal:
O’Reilly admits
he’s lost track of
all the trophies he
received from
international film
festivals over the
years. His film The
External World
alone won fifty-six
awards—much
more than any
single closet shelf
could carry.
I. People
David O’Reilly
Three years is a long time in late capitalism. Since the last time I met with Irish animator David O’Reilly in 2010, the world has witnessed the Arab Spring, Fukushima,
Wikileaks, Gangnam Style, Syria, Occupy-everywhere, a royal wedding, the eurozone
crisis, the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, the death of Osama bin Laden, and a
new pope. Back then we were both living a hand-to-mouth existence in Berlin. Now he’s
working on the next Spike Jonze film in LA, and I’ve just quit being an anchorman in Beijing. Our last meeting was days after he had finished The External World, a riotous mix
of child porn, suicide, and Nazis. No less shocking than the content was the film’s pace,
with multiple narratives and characters spliced together into a chaotic whole. It clocked
in at a total of fifteen minutes, but the majority of vignettes lasted mere seconds. The
short premiered at Venice the same year, and, despite that festival’s reputation for scandal, few films before or since have had such brutal disregard for the censors.
Venice is 9,867 kilometres from LA, and arguably further still in cultural terms,
but O’Reilly’s new home doesn’t seem to have compromised his output. In April, Cartoon
Network broadcast “A Glitch is a Glitch,” O’Reilly’s guest-directed episode of Adventure
Time, an animated series that averages 3.3 million viewers per week. Despite its mainstream context, the episode crams in references to paedophilia, self-harm, drug abuse,
and sadomasochism. It breaks just as many taboos aesthetically, with sections so pixelated they’re barely intelligible, and an interlude both entireEarly bird: Eager to earn his wings, young
O’Reilly began his career working simultanious ly unnecessary and awkwardly long. Just like The External
shifts at two of London’s foremost animation
World, O’Reilly uses violent kawaii characters to ask big quescollectives: STUDIO AKA and Shynola. “I would tions: Are binary data and DNA comparable? Is evolution a
get up at 6am to start at AKA, then work from
form of reincarnation? Are the Cartesian laws of computer op6pm to midnight at Shynola. I did that solidly
erating systems the same as those underpinning the Universe?
for seven months. It was really intense, and I
It’s the animated equivalent of literature’s hysterical realism.
was just nineteen—the youngest person
everywhere. I never went out,” he recalls.
In Berlin, O’Reilly had been almost as intense as his
films. Some interviewees make you wring every phrase out of
Adventure Time: Created by scruffy animation
them, but O’Reilly was like a self-propelled dynamo. I could
oddball Pendleton Ward for the Cartoon
have set my dictaphone to record, left him alone for ten minNetwork (after an initial short went viral on the
utes, and still have had too many quotes for my piece. His reinternet), the 2D animated television series
became an instant hit when it premiered in
lentless flow, perhaps combined with the Teutonic context,
spring 2010. Since then, the quirky quests of
reminded me of a Bismarck quote: “Faust complained about
Finn and Jake, a human boy and his shapehaving two souls in his breast, but I harbour a whole crowd of
shifting dog roaming the magical land of Ooo,
them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.” O’Reilly’s
have won numerous awards and gained a huge
selves seemed to act in concert not competition though, as if
following among kids and adults alike.
Ward, a fan of O’Reilly’s work, wanted to he were an organic matryoshka. I and my dictaphone had again
get him involved with Adventure Time as early
braced for a verbal onslaught, but LA seems to have mellowed
as 2010. “I was working on The External World
O’Reilly from fast-forward to real-time. “I came here just wantat the time, so it didn’t really go anywhere.
ing to sell out. Now I’m living that dream of being a Hollywood
Plus, I was on the other side of the Earth. After I
dickhead,” he gently quips at the start of the interview.
moved to the US we started talking again and
“There’s a quiet desperation here that you’ll make it,” he exhe somehow convinced the network to let me
do the full episode.” Titled A Glitch is a Glitch
pands. “It happens in Berlin but it’s less embarrassing, because
and executed entirely in 3D, O’Reilly’s one-off
fame doesn’t have the same prestige as LA. People take pride
aired on April 1st, 2013 to critical acclaim and
in being non-commercial in Berlin, whereas LA is a town that
delightful confusion (actual tweet: “What the
forces you to say you’re busy even if you’re not.”
hell did I just watch??”).
I ask how the city’s corporate culture has affected
Don’t Kill Yourself! When I first met O'Reilly in
O’Reilly. His earlier work explored the corrosive effect of work
Berlin in 2010, I found his zeal bordering on
and consumption on everyday life, so the world’s foremost immartyrdom codified by two sheets of A4 paper
age factory could be a rich source of inspiration. “The whole
pinned to his studio wall: ”Dedication,
country here—especially LA—is built on capitalism,” he says.
Persistence, Dedication, Perseverance” read
one, and ”Don't Kill Yourself” the other. Stygian “I wanted to try to find projects where I could do my thing but
humour all the way!
make money at it, and hopefully they might reach a wider
62
Right.
Was this artistic
excercise or the
imagery from a
research project?
Even the passing
scientists at the
Max Planck
Institute for Plant
Maximodi
tatendant alibust
fugia iusdam
nulparum nos dite
sequodit, occusae
pa seque aut quam
faccus, sed que
exceatus
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Above. Umbrella Friends is one of currently
eighty-five “incredibly stupid” t-shirts O’Reilly
designed for Dumb Stuff, a line of wearable political incorrectness he started in 2012. Order
online at WeAreDumb.com for only $24.99!
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I. People
David O’Reilly
audience.” O’Reilly’s expectations weren’t misplaced. Following Adventure Time, he was tapped up to animate sequences
for Spike Jonze’s forthcoming film Her, due for worldwide release as HOLO goes to press. Although O’Reilly has worked on
both features and TV shows before, and the combined length
of these projects could be less than fifteen minutes, they could
allow O’Reilly to ‘break America,’ as so many European artists
have previously attempted.
The fact that he has been noticed by establishment producers shows that the nature of pop culture is changing. A
common misconception about LA is that it only fosters dumbed-down pap; in fact, it has a remarkable diversity of output. For every James Cameron
there is a David Lynch, and for every Guns N’ Roses there is a Beck. LA and its media
moguls aren’t averse to creativity, but it has to sell. If something can be both creative
and profitable, all the better. O’Reilly’s work doesn’t emerge from a vacuum, it is born
of the capricious whims of internet audiences from Twitter to 4Chan. LA’s media moguls
are waking up to the fact that “Gangnam Style” is possibly the most-watched music video of all time. If O’Reilly can translate the appetite for viral memes into feature-length
films, his producers will be printing dollars.
Aside from O’Reilly’s understandable scepticism about LA networking, he’s upbeat about the city’s permeability and profitability. “There’s a groundswell of talent in
LA because of the commercial industry, but those same people are figuring out ways to
do their own stuff. People like Spike Jonze are rare individuals in a shark-tank that have
a voice and a vision without compromising. In terms of having a circle of friends doing
creative stuff, it’s been the best city I’ve ever lived in—everyone is just so productive.”
Like driving, perhaps the studio system is a necessary evil that makes LA function. As
the city’s inhabitants navigate its infrastructure and job market, they are funnelled into
modes of thought and routed towards dead ends and opportunity. Perhaps the city
should be thought of as a gigantic motorised roulette wheel, though no doubt Vegas
would claim that moniker for itself.
There is of course a darker underbelly to this pop-cultural utopia. The studios may
support an ecosystem of peripheral creativity, but they are also powerful gatekeepers.
“All the technical talent is sucked up by big studios. The system has made everyone dependent,” O’Reilly explains. As a result, he ended up collaborating with animators in
Berlin on Adventure Time, alongside a team in the Cartoon Network’s own HQ. At times
the studios’ patronage can verge on exploitation, a situation that was highlighted by the
recent bankruptcy of Rhythm & Hues, a visual effects studio responsible for the green
screen wizardry that helped win Life of Pi a clutch of Oscars. When the firm’s insolvency
was referenced during the acceptance speech for one of those awards, the microphone
was swiftly cut, triggering a Facebook and Twitter campaign featuring profile pictures
turned green to show solidarity with the company.
Despite O’Reilly’s comparative proximity to both the protest’s inception and subject, he doesn’t identify with it in the slightest—indeed he initially thinks I’m referring
to the 2009 Iranian election uprising. Once the context has been clarified he’s no more
accommodating to the protesters’ cause or methods. “Changing the colour of your Twitter picture is the digital equivalent of wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. You’re not an agent
of change, you’re just drawing attention to it,” he growls. “Things that happen on the
internet have a perceived influence, but when it comes down to it, they don’t translate
to reality, to policy. The reason that industry is suffering is that it can now be done for
much less money than before. It’s actually a symptom of a more or less good thing: it’s
Some of the many
odd objects
O’Reilly has picked
up over the years:
a tooth sculpted
from a sponge in
Mexico, a crude
wooden Octocat
mask carved by a
friend, and an
creepy 3D-printed
head of Walt
Disney—without
any eyeballs.
65
“In terms
of having
a circle of
friends
doing
creative
stuff, LA
is the best
city I’ve
ever lived
in.”
much easier to learn those skills online, which means more competition and more outsourcing. If people really want to change the system, why not set up your own studio
with your friends and fuck the companies that are shafting you?”
O’Reilly’s broadside against slacktivism might be galling to some in his industry—
to say nothing of trade unionists—but his position is pragmatic and sincere. I’m reminded of a quote by German politician Thomas de Maizière that you can’t stop globalization,
you can only shape it. For all the huff over Rhythm & Hues, few protestors acknowledged
that the studio has subsidiaries in Canada, Malaysia, India, and Taiwan. Multinationals
aren’t in a strong position to criticise outsourcing. It’s sincere too, because O’Reilly has
proven adept at generating his own revenue in ways that improbably manage to combine creativity, profitability, and socio-economic critique. In 2012, he set up
FREE FACTS™ ! (@free_facts), a spoof Twitter account aping commercial accounts that
regurgitate bite-sized knowledge interspersed with advertising. O’Reilly’s facts are absurdly amusing, including the news that “Russians shed their skin every 8 years,” “Eyes
grow back,” and “It’s not against the law to slice off your penis, wrap it in the American
flag and mail it to yourself.”
FREE FACTS™ ! now has upwards of 80,000 followers, four times more than O’Reilly’s personal account. Just like the Twitter accounts he’s satirizing, O’Reilly mixes in adverts. His ads push newly-launched T-shirt label Dumb Stuff, which he claims made him
more money within a month than every special-edition DVD and poster he’s ever produced. O’Reilly is using the proceeds to pay his rent, which puts an interesting twist on
the idea of cultural sector ‘money jobs.’ Anyone wanting to dismiss these as the actions
of a sell-out charlatan would be misreading the consistency of his filmmaking. Some
may have been non-profit, but they too were funded by and spawned further commercial jobs. Moreover, O’Reilly’s commitment to his bank balance is outshone by his dedication to originality. After making the feature-length animation The Agency in just seven days using semi-automatic rendering software, the results were so bad that he bribed
a cinema full of people one dollar each to sit through its premiere. “Take that, Radiohead,” he jokes.
O’Reilly’s interrogation of medium, audience, and labour relations have taken
perhaps their most compelling turn in two minor projects. The
first is a series of adverts on Free Facts’ YouTube offshoot,
FreeFactsVEVO. They feature actors sourced through Fiverr.
com, a website selling various products and services starting
at five US dollars. The site is often used by firms wanting fake
product testimonials, so O’Reilly found a bizarre cross-section
of pieceworkers willing to debase themselves virtually. Participants range from an oddly persuasive all-American WASP to
Neeta Patel, an Indian housewife singing Free Facts’ praises
while stirring an empty pot with a metal ladle. In a similar vein,
O’Reilly’s long-time co-writer Vernon Chatman commissioned
essay writing companies to pen texts on subjects ranging from
bioengineering to a eulogy for his dead grandmother.
South Park creator Matt Stone calls Chatman’s ‘outsourced’ writing project Mindsploitation a “stunning tour
through Marx’s alienation of labor.” Wikipedia tells me this has
something to do with workers becoming estranged from their
own lives, through the production of goods demanded by their
bourgeois paymasters. Are essay writers and ‘amateur’ actors
being exploited by or profiting from the work they have been
contracted for? Is it more problematic to pay an Indian housewife for such work than an American man?
Left. Bel the cat
cozies up to
O’Reilly’s Sapparo
International
Short Film Festival
award. When
activated, it plays
the audio loop
“Congratulations,
David O’Reilly, The
External World”
spoken in a strong
Japanese accent.
“It was given to
me by Haruomi
Hosono, a personal
hero of mine.”
I. People
David O’Reilly
These are urgent questions to be asking in an age when labour can be complex
and globally dispersed—no less urgent than the issues contested through Facebook
campaigns showing solidarity with visual effects artists. To complicate matters further,
O’Reilly also incorporates community-generated content into FreeFactsVEVO. Contributions have included a prototype LED screen displaying the Free Facts Twitter stream
and a fisheye camera tour of a room made from Free Facts stickers, backed by a
soundtrack of Buddhist chanting. Are these clips fan art, adverts, or both? Should they
be entitled to profits from Dumb Stuff? Have they traded places with David O’Reilly as
consumers and producers, or have both parties entered into a symbiotic exchange of
cultural capital?
O’Reilly is as perplexed by these questions as I am, not least because of the aesthetic criteria that seem to govern audience participation. He’s adamant that the more
primitive end of his output generates far more adaptation by internet users. The External World won fifty-six awards and nominations but prompted little fan art, whereas
O’Reilly’s Octocat Adventure series was rejected by various film festivals but spawned
a virtual cottage industry of spin-offs. The five episodes were rolled out in 2008 via YouTube as the work of nine-year-old Chicago boy ‘RANDYPETERS1.’ The first episode went
viral, scoring 250,000 plays (and counting). Viewers were entranced by Randy’s highpitched narration and the series’ odd narrative about an eight-legged cat that had lost
his parents. Octocat spawned countless YouTube video responses and over 1,000 fan
images ranging from graffiti to pornography.
Octocat is interesting not simply because of its aesthetic
Nuts and bolts: O’Reilly couldn’t be less
experimentation, but because it marries innovation with nuanced
interested in talking about tools. “Software is
storytelling and a thematic criticality that interrogates cultural
unimportant and ultimately programs more or
production. By beginning with crude MS Paint drawings and morless do the same thing,” he says. A long-time
user of the 3D modelling and animation
phing into full 3D CGI during the final episode, it unmasks the arsoftware Maya, O’Reilly admits a certain
tifice of film production and the act of consuming that fantasy.
fondness for the program’s character. “It’s an
Similarly, Adventure Time weaves computer mouse cursors and
extremely open ended tool with a load of bugs,
wireframe grids into a plausible narrative that exposes O’Reilly’s
which can be both frustrating and inspiring. A
lot of my pursuit of glitch and harsh aesthetics role as creator, the puppetry of his characters, and our own posiwas a result of things going wrong inside
tion as viewers. What would Bertolt Brecht—another former BerMaya.” Since switching away from Windows
liner—have made of FreeFactsVEVO, I wonder? Are the actors, fan
about eight years ago, O’Reilly now runs his
artists, and audience all forced to consider the futility of their lawhole operation from a single Mac.
bour and lives? Is this benevolent or cruel?
Like Brecht, O’Reilly makes work that is open-ended, posing
Lo-fi solutions: Void of complex shadows, texawkward and intriguing questions about the landscapes of protures, or reflections, O’Reilly’s spartan visuals
allow for relatively short render times, about
duction, distribution, and consumption—and these questions artwenty minutes in the case of The External
en’t limited to his works alone. What is your own position as a readWorld. “I try to find lo-fi solutions to problems
er of this magazine, for instance? Rather than the publishers
in 3D, because I don’t have the patience for inspeculatively creating a product that they hope will sell, you were
tensive rendering,” O’Reilly says. “Every other
process —design, animation, sound, editing—is asked to invest in its launch issue by donating money on Kickstartway more fun to me, more intuitive and import- er. Your investment is currently proportional to your reward, but
ant to storytelling. Also, fuck realism.”
what would happen if an IPO turned HOLO into a billion-dollar
company? As an early backer, would you feel short-changed that
Busted: When O’Reilly created and publicly
you weren’t offered stock, or happy that something you believe in
released a 3D model of Walt Disney’s head in
2009, it soon became a standard test object for had succeeded, irrespective of whether you profited financially?
3D printing (much like the Utah Teapot was for How do you feel about having funded this article? Should I be payrendering). Then, in 2012, he received a giant
ing you to read it, or publicize it via social media? Incidentally, how
bust of his model in the mail. An intern at
do you feel about Facebook and your role in its success?
Instructables.com, a DIY sharing platform, had
3D-printed it, but forgot to include eyeballs.
Creeped out, the staff got rid of it. Today, the
head is the centrepiece on O’Reilly’s shelf.
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(1)
(2)
(3)
(p.24) & (1) Please Say Something
2009 / 10:01 minutes
Premiere: Berlinale 2009
Awards: Berlinale 2009
(Golden Bear, best short), Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2009 (Grand
Prize), DOK Leipzig 2009 (Silver
Dove), Deutscher Kurzfilmpreis
2009, Ottawa Animation Festival
2009 (Best Narrative Film), Prix
Ars Electronica (Special mention)
and many more
(2) The External World
2010 / 17:00 minutes
premiere: 67th Venice Film Festival (World), Sundance (US)
Awards: 25FPS Festival 2011
(Grand Prix), ITFS Stuttgart 2011
(Grand Prix), Melbourne Animation Festival 2011 (Special Mention), Sundance 2011 (Honorary
Mention), Ottawa Animation
Festival 2010 (Grand Prize), Prix
Ars Electronica 2011 (Distinction
Award) and many more
(p.16) & (3) Adventure Time:
A Glitch Is a Glitch
2013 / 11:00 minutes, Season 5,
Episode 15 / broadcast: 01 April
2013, Cartoon Network / the first
episode of Adventure Time to be
written, directed, and animated
by a single person