Halloween Special (not for the faint-heartened!): The Cursed Image (Patreon)

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else, another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”

- Samuel Beckett

What is a cursed image, and what latent power can the collection of pixels in a digital image contain? Cursed images are an internet phenomenon, collectively made popular through clicking the ‘like’ button, holding a repulsive allure in which it can be difficult to discern precisely why they are even likeable at all. Characterised through an enduring and recognisable aesthetic, these photos are poorly lit, grainy and artlessly composed. Often antiquated film photographs of a bygone era, cursed images contain eerie and unsettling content; a cloven hoof sticking out of a toilet bowl, an octopus stuffed inside a chicken corpse, cheese on poptarts or noodles boiling in a pot of green fizzy liquid. Often sourceless, these unnerving images leave you questioning what bizarre set of circumstances or ritualistic actions led up to their creation. The viewer is left with the uneasy sense that they witnessed something that they weren’t supposed to, their allure is that same thing that causes people to slow down whilst driving past a car accident. Cursed images contain unholy juxtapositions but herein lies their appeal, they are disgusting, but in the best possible way,

Bonfire 

Where can one find cursed images? If you are feeling brave, there are dedicated instagram pages such as  @cursedimage @scarytoilet @darkstockphotos or alternatively a simple google image search will do the trick. Occasionally a cursed image goes viral and is re-appropriated into something it was never intended to be, as in the case of the ‘Momo’ phenomenon. Japanese artist Keisuke Aiso made ‘The Mother Bird’ sculpture, later nicknamed ‘Momo’, the photograph of his sculpture became that of internet urban legend - a terrifying image allegedly hidden in Peppa Pig videos on youtube to scare children. The artist himself was surprised by its viral success, saying ‘it was not my masterpiece, so I’ve been surprised that it’s known around the world.’ The idea that a viewer, having simply laid eyes on a picture, is now cursed is that of popular internet urban legend. Online, the bogeyman lurks just one click away - we can’t look but we also can’t look away.

Hairy Stairs

Why is it that we can’t look away? Psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan argues that the cursed is such because it is a limbo where we cannot distinguish good from bad, pleasure from displeasure, and since we are unable to reconcile with what is in front of us, we linger and our attention is held, causing us to look for longer. Cursed images contain a horror which is paradoxical, they have a simultaneous repulsive allure, and offer a perverse enjoyment which is captivating. They contain a broader and more existential threat, the horror genre may contain elements of the supernatural, but the true horror is the nature of existence itself. The popular theory that the most likely cause of our existence is that we are living in a simulation is a cursed existence indeed, and the cursed energy of digital photos as well as our uncanny relationship with technology leaves us with an uneasy feeling that the simulation is glitching, and that something terrible and inconceivably horrific is emerging from the breach.

Toilet With Threatening Aura

As artists we find beauty in the strangest of places - even the most mundane of objects and scenes can be rendered beautiful and the act of looking and of witnessing is an event which brings about a fresh art work. To draw and paint from cursed images is to make beautiful, through the act of drawing, that which is cursed and horrendous. It is to subvert that which is conventionally beautiful, by purposely selecting something so ugly it is cursed, and to re appropriate that content as a cursed drawing, and perhaps to bring about a fresh horror, the horror that these cursed pixels have become artworks. Cursed images invite an existential questioning, of ourselves and what it is to enjoy and engage with the cursed aesthetic, and of the wider existential concept of a cursed species, the only consciousness which questions its own existence. In my illustrations for this article it has been enjoyable to engage with aesthetic fetishization of disturbing scenes, and the grainy and compressed quality of the sources has allowed me to work impressionistically and to make marks which do not seek to be beautiful.

Sunday Lunch

In Freud’s Theory of the Uncanny even mundane everyday objects can be uncanny and cause a sense of unease - screens are arguably the most uncanny of all man made tools, we look so long at them that they eventually look back at us too. In the film The Ring a cursed videotape causes viewers to die after seven days, and the vengeful ghost and central protagonist Samara crawls quite literally out of a television screen, a nightmarish scene where the horror is no longer confined behind a screen and indeed the screen acts as the vessel to birth her into the same realm as her living prey. Not only do screens feature in the narratives of horror films but in the case of the film The Exorcist, the film itself is considered to be cursed, due to a series of unfortunate events surrounding the filming including the set burning down and key actors dying shortly after its’ release.

Bathtime

The appeal of the horror genre is that existential horrors are sublimated into something cathartic and manageable, curses are contained within a film narrative and we can experience the horror vicariously. It is interesting to consider to what extent pixels and moving scenes can be cursed, and perhaps they really are, given our addiction to screens and the content within. Their appeal could be that cursed images contain only mildly threatening scenes, they are somewhat laughable and therefore easy to manage, whereas it is much harder to grasp the truth of a much broader existential threat - that we are a cursed species, living in cursed times, the threat of extinction through climate change is ever present and escapism into the cathartic horrors of a digital realm is understandable in its appeal.

--

This blog is a special edition post by artist and Draw tutor Laura Ryan as part of our ongoing blog series - you can find over 100 blog posts and video interviews HERE on the Draw Navigator.