Grim Boy

The jumping off point for Grim Boy was online toxic masculine communities and their consequential real life violence. From here it became an exploration of how the self-diagnosed failure solidifies a world view of alienation and hopelessness through the lens of gender theory and radicalization structures. Using Thomas DeGloma’s “Awakenings: Autobiography, Memory, and the Social Logic of Personal Discovery” I looked at the reification of belief and boundary that INCEL and related hate based online communities use as a means of “catharsis” but ultimately lead to an outpouring of violence targeted at the world, but centered around himself. Through repetition, mask work, and quietly borrowed Pop gestures from movies and dating profiles, Grim Boy is a work about technology, virtual behavior, and gender, which purposely resituates from these “realities” into the imagined real world as a means of articulating more succinctly who this person is.