viz.

Image Credit: Breaking Gifs

I simply cannot resist a good topical tumblr. Of course, the orienting rhetorical principle of tumblrs like textsfromhillary (inspired by a single Reuters photo of the Secretary of State checking her smartphone on a C-17) or geraldoinahoodie (created in response to Geraldo Rivera's comments on the Trayvon Martin case) is undoubtedly kairos, and, as we might expect, these sites are often abandoned as quickly as they are generated, leaving nothing but a flurry of self-referential entries that lose their meaning the further they become removed from their rhetorical moment. As the creators of textsfromhillary assert in their final post, "As far as memes go – it has gone as far as it can go. Is it really possible to top a submission from the Secretary herself?"

Image credit: Reuters

Still, the lifespan of many other tumblrs increases considerably as the content within expands its field of references—surisburnbook, for instance, has become a celebrity blog of sorts, and fakecriterions has grown into a community art project that has even been offered its own gallery showings.  Tumblr itself is a more sophisticated iteration of its precursors (like the short-lived Pownce) that, by differentiating itself from social media giant Twitter in terms of the user’s ability to integrate the visual and the audiovisual, has come to occupy a distinct space in the digital world.   

Image Credit: XKCD 

The latter category—those topical tumblrs which expand, rather than exhaust, their own possibilities—are of greater interest to me, particularly because the ways in which such expansion happens are often unpredictable and usually collaborative.  The television actor and comedian Paul Sheer began breakinggifs—gifs inspired by the AMC hit tv show Breaking Bad—in April of 2012 during the long interlude between the fourth and fifth seasons.  Sheer’s 8-bit color palette simultaneously evoked nostalgia for a long-abandoned digital interface and, I’d like to suggest, a show that had been off the air (and perhaps, off of viewer’s minds) for over six months.

Image Credit: Breaking Gifs

The tumblr went viral, and within months Sheer was able to coordinate a further outlet for fan-inspired Breaking Bad art.  Capitalizing on the fan anticipation for the long-awaited fifth season, in May of 2012 Sheer announced the Breaking Bad Art Project via Breaking Bad actor Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring).  The BBAP featured and distributed limited edition prints of Breaking Bad fan art throughout the summer, culminating in a wildly successful art show in Los Angeles last month.  The project was managed through breakinggifs.com, a new website Sheer launched to help a community of artists share in his newfound tumblr fame.

While the website adapts with little variation creator Vince Gilligan’s “dark chemistry” aesthetic, few of the featured pieces take such little creative liberty.  Here is my favorite from the Gallery 1988 showing of all 17 pieces in Los Angeles:

Image Credit: Gallery 1988

What is it about Breaking Bad that inspires this nostalgic return to 8-bit graphics and Saturday morning television? On a very superficial level, it certainly qualifies as simple juxtaposition, that is, that the print represents the (arguably) darkest show on network television translated into the register of childhood. That kind of juxtaposition produces, of course, humor, as artist Ian Glaubinger and Paul Sheer certainly recognize. Part of that we might attribute to an internet audience constantly inundated with information—this creates a disinterested sort of hostility easily dispelled by humor. (To put it simply, funny stuff gets the most hits.) But in examining Glaubinger’s print and Sheer’s tumblr together, perhaps we can read this juxtaposition of childhood and Breaking Bad with a more careful eye—is there something about the show and its disturbing refusal to set limitations on the darkness of its own contents that can be read as a militant stance of the id over the ego? In such terms, might we more closely associate Walter’s role as the anti-hero with the impulses, psychoanalytically speaking, of our own childhoods?