The internet has become highly predictable.  We are funneled from one virtual place to next, consuming information, regurgitating content, and depositing it back across the same troweled landscape.  Like the steady compressions of a heart, this process continues unnoticed and unobstructed, pumping us through a series of tubes to continuously show us things that look like other things: information that confirms our beliefs, targeted ads that court our shadow profiles, and LLMs that think we're doing great — genuinely.  

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Enter the humble chumbox.  Rapidly becoming an artifact of internets past, the chumbox confronts our silken and chrome experience and appeals to our most primal nature.  Fleshy, textured, and somewhat vulgar, these images stand in stark contrast to the sterile and disembodied internet in which they exist.  This of course is part of the appeal;  the chumbox aims to captivate and disturb by being grossly out of place.  It presents a dysphoric reality where things seem familiar but are ultimately unrecognizable.  While we might feel discomfort at these images, that unease is what lures us in and away — pulling us out of pleasant abstraction and into the world of our own living, breathing, oozing bodies. 

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This project explores how chumboxes might function in the physical rather than digital space.  Using a collection of found chumbox images, I created 3D pop-up inserts and placed them in books for people to discover.  By creating these material analogs to digital chumboxes, I hope to facilitate encounters with the unexpected and examine the dis/embodied experience of being online.  Is it possible to still discover and encounter something unexpected in the current surveilled internet landscape?  And as we merge further technology, does the body become something longed for, or something grotesque?

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