[1] The entire lawsuit is available here.

[2] Andrew Trendell, “Poppy and Collaborator Titanic Sinclair Settle Lawsuit with Mars Argo,” NME, January 8, 2019, para. 8.

[3] Hey, Beauti, Official Interview with Singer That POPPY, YouTube video, 2015.

[4] Eliza Brooke, “Parsing the Aesthetics of That Poppy, Pop Singer and Internet Enigma,” Racked, April 11, 2016, para. 8.

[5] Helen Warner, “Fashion and Celebrity Culture, by Pamela Church Gibson,” Celebrity Studies 4, no. 2 (July 1, 2013): 258.

[6] Patrick ST Michel, “The Queen of Kawaii: Kyary Pamyu Pamyu Reflects on Her Reign,” The Japan Times, November 15, 2018, para. 19.

[7] Karen de Perthuis and Rosie Findlay, “How Fashion Travels: The Fashionable Ideal in the Age of Instagram,” Fashion Theory 0, no. 0 (February 14, 2019): 1.

[8] Susie Khamis, Lawrence Ang, and Raymond Welling, “Self-Branding, ‘Micro-Celebrity’ and the Rise of Social Media Influencers,” Celebrity Studies 8, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 9.

[9] Khamis, Ang, and Welling, 4.

[10] Gita Jackson, “Pop Star YouTuber Captures The Hell That Is Being Online,” Kotaku, April 18, 2017, para. 3.

[11] Khamis, Ang, and Welling, “Self-Branding, ‘Micro-Celebrity’ and the Rise of Social Media Influencers,” 7.

[12] Khamis, Ang, and Welling, 6.

[13] Poppy, She Is Lying!, accessed June 16, 2019.

[14] Michael Dimock, “Where Millennials End and Generation Z Begins,” Pew Research Center, January 17, 2019, para. 5.

[15] Slacktivism is the practice of supporting a cause by means involving little effort or commitment, for instance, through social media and online petitions. Stylus Pub LLC and UNAIDS, UNAIDS Outlook Report July 2010 (World Health Organization, 2010), 142–43.

[16] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2007), 10.

[17] FBE, KIDS REACT TO POPPY, YouTube video, REACT, 2016.

[18] FBE, POPPY REACTS TO KIDS REACT TO POPPY, accessed March 5, 2019.

[19] FBE, KIDS REACT TO POPPY REACTS TO KIDS REACT TO POPPY, 2017.

[20] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 271.

[21] Culture and Technology: A Primer (New York: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2014), 22.

[22] Slack and Wise, 24.

[23] Mark Milian, “Apple Triggers ‘religious’ Reaction in Fans’ Brains, Report Says,” Digital Biz (blog), May 19, 2011, paras. 2-3.

[24] Khamis, Ang, and Welling, “Self-Branding, ‘Micro-Celebrity’ and the Rise of Social Media Influencers,” 6.

[25] Raining, Is Poppy Acting? Interview with Poppy & Titanic, YouTube video, 2017.  

[26] Khamis, Ang, and Welling, “Self-Branding, ‘Micro-Celebrity’ and the Rise of Social Media Influencers,” 13.

[27] Paddy Johnson, “Finally, a Semi-Definitive Definition of Post-Internet Art,” Art F City, October 14, 2014, para. 3.

[28] Michael Goldhaber, “The Mentality of Homo Interneticus: Some Ongian Postulates,” First Monday 9, no. 6 (June 7, 2004); Molly Milton, “Homo Interneticus?,” 16:9 HDTV 1080i, The Virtual Revolution (BBC, February 20, 2010).

[29] Khamis, Ang, and Welling, “Self-Branding, ‘Micro-Celebrity’ and the Rise of Social Media Influencers,” 7.

[30] Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995), 21.

[31] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 2.

[32] Peter Haff, “Humans and Technology in the Anthropocene: Six Rules,” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 2 (August 1, 2014): 127.

[33] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 255.

[34] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2010).

Poppy (Moriah Rose Pereira, b. 1995) is an American singer and YouTube celebrity based in Los Angeles who, in collaboration with director Titanic Sinclair (Corey Michael Mixter, b. 1987), produced a series of short promotional videos for the thatPoppyTV channel until their split in late 2019. Their first video, uploaded on November 4, 2014, shows Poppy eating cotton candy for one minute and 22 seconds, evoking Andy Warhol’s 1963 experimental films (Sleep, Kiss, Eat). [Videos 1 & 2] In most videos, Poppy, with long platinum blonde hair and huge brown eyes, speaks to viewers in a sweet voice as she stares expressionlessly at the camera, framed by white backgrounds and a soundtrack of ethereal yet ominous synthesizers. Some videos feature special effects, introducing magically appearing and disappearing objects, small animations, or distorted voices parodying the slanders of Internet haters (They Say Mean Things, June 18, 2017). The basic Poppy formula was lifted from Grocerybag.TV and Computer Show, a website and web series (respectively) by Mixter and his former partner, Mars Argo (Britanny Sheets). The degree to which Poppy’s videos and persona infringe on Mars Argo’s intellectual property was the subject of a notorious lawsuit, filed in April 2018 by Sheets, that also accused Mixter of abusive beahvior.[1]

Although the case ended with a settlement,[2] the incident impacted Poppy’s reputation (which eventually led to her splitting with Mixter) and originated a wave of backlash on her YouTube channel, including negative comments and hashtags like #imcoppy, #justiceformars, and #sinkthetitanic. The Mars Argo lawsuit sheds a sinister light on how the qualities that draw us to artworks can reflect their creators’ darkest side. For instance, the idea that Poppy was being held captive against her will by Titanic had been a recurring joke in thatPoppyTV, with some of her videos’ descriptions containing hidden messages (e.g., “HELP ME”). Moreover, it is ironic that the deconstruction of “authenticity” is a recurring theme in Poppy’s videos and that now, in the eyes of many netizens, she has herself become a mockup of the original Mars Argo.

Poppy’s brand has been perfected over time from its amateurish early stages in Poppy Eats Cotton Candy to its current more consistent and professionalized form. Presently, Poppy’s “media franchise” includes three studio albums, two of which are pop albums, Poppy.Computer (2017) and Am I a Girl? (2018), and one an ambient album made in 2016 with Sinclair and a crew of polysomnographic technicians from the Washington University School of Medicine, 3:36 (Music to Sleep To). Beyond these, Poppy has spawned a YouTube Premium web television series, I’m Poppy (2018), the website Poppy.Church (https://poppy.church/), and a graphic novel titled Genesis 1, about Poppy’s origin story, published in 2019 by Z2 Comics. Additionally, Poppy has become the face of Japanese company Sanrio’s “Hello Sanrio” collection.

Despite her popularity, thatPoppyTV remains faithful to its original spirit: short clips of post-Internet video art, expressing a technological “stuplime” (Sianne Ngai) full of physical and mental fatigues. Like Warhol, Poppy seems to want to be a machine, but this girl who calls herself a “kawaii Barbie child”[3] is cuter, but also more sinister, than the guru of Pop Art. Currently, Poppy has over 400 videos available on her YouTube channel, millions of views, and a dedicated fan base that searches her videos for overarching meanings and hidden messages. The influence of Andy Warhol, David Lynch, and Tim Burton[4] is felt in Poppy’s fascination with the strangeness of consumer society, in all the splendor of its lustrous, sometimes surreal, comical or chilling banality. [Figure 1] Moreover, the Internet culture of self-branding and micro-celebrity with its dehumanizing effects on the body (notably, female bodies) is represented through Poppy’s repetition of a limited set of actions and words, collapsing the human into the commodity, and identity into the brand. For example, in I’m Poppy (January 6, 2015), one of thatPoppyTV’s most popular videos (over 12 million views), Poppy repeats the phrase “I’m Poppy” for 10 minutes and two seconds, standing in different positions. [Video 4] The shots range from a close-up of her mouth to Poppy kneeling on the floor, in a stance reminiscent of Britney Spears’s iconic Baby One More Time cover. The obsessive quality of this video is representative of the biopower at work in Poppy’s videos, i.e., an invisible hand that seems to regulate and control her body, actions, and words.

Another defining aspect of Poppy’s videos is their engagement with the pacifying but oppressive speech of religions. The idea that Poppy and Sinclair belong to a cult under the Illuminati is fueled by fans and themselves in multiple videos and complementary products, such as the website and online game Poppy.Church (with the tagline “Are you ready for your salvation?”) and the fanzine Gospel of Poppy, composed of passages from the Bible in which the word “God” is replaced by “Poppy.” [Video 5] In I Am Not In A Cult (February 27, 2017), Poppy assures her viewers that she is not in a cult while holding her hands in a praying position and bowing before a giant logo with a triangle and a “P” held by mysterious figures in white spandex bodysuits. [Video 6] Poppy’s insistent denials throughout the video that neither she nor Titanic are in a cult, despite the visible cultish activities going on around her, align with the eeriness of religious and state propaganda, in its deadpan “post-truth” handling of the real. 

Just as crucial to Poppy’s videos is the kawaii aesthetic of Japanese aidoru, and the pervasive and “symbiotic relationship between fashion and celebrity”[5] they embody. Poppy and Sinclair have not only affirmed their interest in Japanese popular culture on multiple occasions but have traveled to Japan to record Poppy’s second studio album, Am I a Girl? (2018). In particular, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is a significant influence on Poppy,[6] [Figure 2] the quirky Japanese aidoru who has conquered an international audience through her viral videos and attention-grabbing clothes inspired by Harajuku street fashion. Fashion is also one of Poppy’s most distinctive features, exhibited in her impeccably coordinated, pastel-colored outfits, including avant-garde dresses and hats with strange shapes and bold patterns. These range from hipster and vintage clothes to haute couture and Japanese street fashion styles, like lolita, decora or Cult Party kei.  [Figure 3] But there is an uncanny impression that Poppy is being dressed, like a doll, by an ulterior force that controls her (They” or “Them,” in Poppy’s universe), and that the variability of her clothes is inversely proportional to the changelessness of her body, poses, and expressions. Indeed, as Karen de Perthuis and Rosie Findlay put it, concerning the phenomena of fashion influencers on social media, “the body is subject to the authority of fashion, limitations to the autonomy of the body such as gravity or aging are absent, and the figure is imbued with possibility and mutability, even as it freezes a momentary state of perfection.”[7] Poppy’s videos reflect this—in I Am Up Here (June 20, 2017), Poppy literally hangs in the air, with only her legs visible, and repeatedly asks if anyone can help her get down (“I'm stuck up here! Can someone come get me down?” she asks, “I don't want this”). [Video 7] The “empowered” gravity- and age-defying body of neoliberal feminism is staged as something being done to Poppy against her will, as if she was a guinea pig or experimental prototype.

Poppy’s body, thus managed through fashion, is embedded with an Internet identity in which “good looks, good living and conspicuous consumption (through artfully composed images of outfits, makeup, meals, holiday resorts, etc.) warrant adoration and emulation”[8] but bear little relationship to everyday human experiences. According to Susie Khamis, Lawrence Ang, and Raymond Welling, the promise of wealth and fame that social media holds for ordinary people[9] is at the core of such self-branding practices, requiring a constant inflow of “contents” in the form of communication and interaction with a target audience of potential consumers. Indeed, many Poppy videos are YouTube videos about YouTube videos,[10] parodying the phatic quality of “contents” whose primary goal is to harvest likes, shares, followers, and comments.[11] For instance, Poppy insistently utters sentimental social media stock phrases like “I’ve learned a lot of things this year” and “I’m having a lot of fun in my life” (I’m Glad You Understand Me, March 6, 2017), or tells us that “I love my fans” and “Thank you for encouraging me to believe in myself” (I Love My Fans, March 30, 2016; Thank You For Encouraging Me, January 4, 2017). These videos mock the “the concerted and strategic cultivation of an audience through social media with a view to attaining celebrity status”[12] by bloggers and influencers. Poppy also addresses issues like politics (Poppy Loves Politics, Famous Politician), apologies (My Apology), her past or accomplishments (My Past, I Have Such Good News), while avoiding to express her political opinions, what she is apologizing for, her life story, or what the good news is. In other videos, Poppy says that “I look at myself while I apply the make-up” while applying make-up, or that “I’m wearing a pink suit” while wearing a pink suit. All these exemplify the tautological logic of instagramable lifestyles and the hollowness of its categories.

At the height of tautology is Hey YouTube (April 16, 2017), in which Poppy utters nothing but standard vlogger greetings—“Hi YouTube!” “Hi guys!” “How’s it going, guys?” “How are you, YouTube?”—until these overlap in an indescribable, continuous echo. [Video 8] On other occasions, Poppy fills her videos with onomatopoeias like ehhhhhhhhhhhhh, hmmmmmm, ooh! and oh, that seem to function as abstract intensity points devoid of real emotion. Sometimes, Poppy asks her viewers questions à la out-of-context Buzzfeed questionnaire (“What percentage are you?”), [Figure 4] or silently performs everyday actions like blinking, taking a selfie, painting a picture, crawling, or tying the laces of her high boots for five minutes. Is this the Internet (December 26, 2016) [Video 9] consists of a single close shot of Poppy’s face, delivering a speech mixing YouTube medium specificity with a diffuse appeal to an intimate exchange, as often happens between influencers and their followers:

In other videos, Poppy encourages viewers to join in on her performance through YouTube’s comment system, as vloggers often do to grab their audience’s interest within a fierce attention economy. In I’m on the Floor (December 10, 2016), she tells us, “Hello. Today I’m on the floor. If you want me to stay on the floor, leave a comment that says ‘floor.’” [Figure 5] Or, more absurdly, in I Can’t See Your Comments (April 8, 2017), “Leave a comment below that says ‘I can see this’ if you can see your comment. Leave a comment below that says, ‘I cannot see this’ if you cannot see your comment.”

Poppy also draws from topics and practices dear to her millennial target audience (i.e., people entering adulthood in the 2000s[14]), namely identity politics and outrage culture. In No More Genders (May 7, 2017), Poppy tells us that “In the future, there are a lot more computers and no more genders,” while You're Racist! (June 28, 2017) is a six-second clip in which Poppy in points at the camera and says, “You’re racist!” [Video 10 & 11] There is an absurdist quality to both these videos, highlighted by Poppy’s poses and elaborate dresses—reclining on the floor in glamorous loungewear and standing in a floral dress with a transparent umbrella with a butterfly pattern, respectively. In Famous Politician (January 15, 2017), Poppy mocks the moral gratification obtained from slacktivism[15]: “I’m offended by something a famous politician said. I’ve chosen to use the internet to express my opinion about it. My beliefs were challenged, and I will stand up for myself. I will mock the famous politician that I do not agree with on Twitter.” [Figure 6] In Outrage (January 16, 2019), Poppy commands the viewer to argue on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, stating that “My favorite thing about the internet is the arguments” and wondering about “What should I be outraged at today?” These videos suggest that there is a ritualistic ecstasy at play in the experience of calling out a celebrity (“We’re having fun on the internet and I’m outraged”), a subsemiotic jouissance which flattens even the more “vehement passions”[16] to Internet mannerisms and buzzwords.

Poppy’s videos arise irritation, discomfort, and impatience, but also boredom. One can see this in Poppy’s appearances in several mise en abyme-esque episodes from the popular React series on YouTube: KIDS REACT TO POPPY, POPPY REACTS TO KIDS REACT TO POPPY, KIDS REACT TO POPPY REACTS TO KIDS REACT TO POPPY, and Kids React Cast MEETS Poppy For The First Time. [Videos 12, 13, 14 & 15 ] In KIDS REACT TO POPPY, the children complain, among other things, that “You don’t wanna listen to the same thing over and over, it gets so annoying,” that Poppy sends “chills down my spine,” and that her videos resemble a “murder scene.”[17] In POPPY REACTS TO KIDS REACT TO POPPY, Poppy does not react at all but stares at the screen or the camera with a straight face, and mimics her own words, finally leaving the studio when the lights go out, and ominous music begins to play.[18] In the next episode, KIDS REACT TO POPPY REACTS TO KIDS REACT TO POPPY, 8-year-old Lucas and Dominick ask, “Did you allow her to go into this studio or something?” and “She came here? And sat on this chair?” while 9-year-old Gabe protests, they do not want to get “Poppy-itis.”[19] These reactions call to mind literary critic Sianne Ngai’s formulation of the “stuplime” ( “stupor” + “sublime”), i.e., “a concatenation of boredom and astonishment—a bringing together of what ‘dulls’ and what ‘irritates’ or agitates.”[20] The children’s despair at Poppy’s prolonged reactionlessness (“No! Stop saying the exact same thing! Actually react!” cries 9-year-old Sydney) and the suspicion that she is somehow contagious (Poppy-itis) perfectly encapsulates the crux of Ngai’s stuplimity.

More specifically, Poppy’s videos seem to capture a technological “stuplime,” to pun on Jennifer Slack and John Wise’s definition of “the technological sublime… [that] refers to the almost religious-like reverence paid to machines.”[21] Unlike the awe at mechanical power emerging from the Industrial Revolution, however, Slack and Wise argue that nowadays the “mini-sublime”[22] of cool gadgets, often triggering a cultish behavior in consumers,[23] has replaced the grand narrative of civilizational “progress.” Poppy’s videos capture the entanglement of mini-sublime and micro-celebrity in twenty-first-century mediaspheres, namely, new forms of emotional labor driven by the compulsion to “post, share and like [that] effectively creates a highly curated and often abridged snapshot”[24] of the humans behind the technology. Indeed, Poppy’s unwillingness to break the character in public appearances—for instance, replying to an interviewer asking “You’re from Nashville?” she answers “I’m from the Internet”; when asked “How is Poppy different from Moriah Rose Pereira?” she replies that “I don’t know who that is”[25]—creates the uncanny impression of an “always-on work mode”[26] that transforms and masters the body through techno-affective authoritarianism. In this sense, Poppy’s videos may fit into the movement of post-Internet art—which, unlike Internet art emerging in the late 1990s, post-internet art is not medium-specific—referring to art whose design, production, dissemination, and reception reflect an “Internet-esque state of mind.”[27] [Figure 7]

In Poppy’s videos, the “homo interneticus”[28] arises from the recognition that the social media has originated not only a redistribution of cultural power,[29] but an entanglement of human, social, mechanical, and digital agencies that both gnaws at the “human” as a stable category and impacts the environments which we inhabit. Significantly, in addition to Poppy, the cast of thatPoppyTV includes solely nonhuman characters: among others, the plastic mannequin Charlotte with a text-to-speech voice, a cynical Skeleton, and a speaking basil Plant. The latter first appears on A plant (August 1, 2016), being interviewed by Poppy in a confessional style. [Video 16] The Plant tells Poppy that “I often get down on myself because of the way I look. I find myself wish I was born a human,” to which Poppy—in a cheery disavowal of human exceptionalism—replies that “plants and human beings aren’t that different!” Moreover, the nonhuman agencies in Poppy’s world are far from harmonious. As hinted above, the Plant sometimes suffers from (physical, psychological) depression and is bullied and manipulated by the other characters. Moreover, even as it defends Poppy from Skeleton’s insinuations that she has changed since becoming “one of those Hollywood people” (Poppy Changed, December 1, 2016), the Plant reluctantly confesses to Charlotte that it has been neglected by Poppy, as she is “very busy” since becoming famous (I Am Your True Friend, January 21, 2017).

Charlotte, [Figure 8] in turn, is a morally ambiguous character whose interactions with Poppy get increasingly strained and confusing over time, as she confronts Poppy, telling her that “You’re just a puppet of them” and “You're as fake and plastic as all Hollywood girls.” Charlotte is also the protagonist of some videos on thatPoppyTV, including a series of clips in which she imitates Poppy’s videos, mimicking her clothes, poses, words, and shots. In the last video of this series, I Am Not (October 19, 2017), Charlotte emulates Poppy’s video Sports (October 4, 2017) as she repeatedly insists, “I am not copying Poppy.” [Video 17] In newer videos (She Is Lying!, December 8, 2018), Charlotte discusses her career as a DJ with Poppy, stating that “deep down I am an authentic artist and being authentic is very important.” [Video 18] Charlotte performs a subversive inversion of her relationship of alterity to Poppy, her resolute denials of the obvious fact that she is “fake,” i.e., a Poppy copy, manifesting Charlotte’s drive to usurp the originality of the human referent. Ironically, although as Hal Foster puts it, “the mannequin is the very image of capitalist reification,”[30] Charlotte does not come off as less human than Poppy. If anything, Charlotte’s “ugly feelings” (Ngai) of envy, irritation, anxiety, and paranoia,[31] compensate for Poppy’s lack of real emotion. Likewise, Charlotte’s unkempt hair and appearance, as well as her history of drug addiction (more on this shortly), contrast with Poppy’s perfect image as the product of the Hollywood dream factory, whose body serves as a mannequin for beautiful clothes. Charlotte and the Plant thus seem to be as traumatized by humans as their uncanniness alienates humans. They are victims of anthropocentric biopolitics, leading to the internalized speciesism of nonhumans and infecting them with the same petty-bourgeois neuroses of the homo interneticus.

It is important to note, however, that Poppy’s belonging to humankind is likewise all too dubious. Because Poppy is an ideal personification of social media’s affective labor, she evokes the eroticized (but not necessarily sexualized) gynoid tradition, i.e., the robot in female form. While Poppy’s robotic nature is mostly implicit, it can become explicit in videos such as Me Getting Ready (May 14, 2017), in which Poppy performs machinelike movements with superimposed creaking sounds. [Video 19] In other videos, such as The Poppy VR180 Experience (June 23, 2017, using the YouTube VR180 format), a nebulous and stereoscopic Poppy asks viewers if they will “Stay with me in this new dimension?” presenting herself as the native inhabitant of a dreamlike, techno-playscape. [Video 20] Alluding to humanity’s vaporization in the online “cloud” from which it is increasingly difficult to detach ourselves, Poppy’s videos align with Peter Haff’s “technosphere” hypothesis. According to Haff, large-scale communication, financial, bureaucratic, etc. systems that serve as an interface between humanity and the planet, have reached a state of autonomy that it escapes human control.[32] The idea is portrayed, for example, in I Have Ideas (September 2, 2015), where Poppy states that “I breathe new life into my telephone with every charge. My telephone defines me. When it is dead, so am I.” [Video 21] This authoritarian technosphere suggests a post-human imaginary, one in which humans have become a mere gear in a technospheric apparatus, and takes a toll on the body and mind of Poppy and those around her.

Indeed, while the Internet’s entropy but an impression of emotional unrest in Poppy’s cute, decluttered world—a white cube where nothing gets in or out—there is a recurring suggestion that Poppy is sick or broken. In Am I okay?, Poppy recites reassuring phrases like “It’s going to be okay” and “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” until she eventually bleeds from the nose at the end of the video. [Video 22] As we have seen, nonhumans suffer, too. In I Am Not Sick (April 1, 2017), [Video 23] Poppy tells Charlotte that the mannequin is very sick and needs help after she develops a pill addiction over a series of disturbing videos (Mommy Are You Okay, March 2, 2017; These Are Mommy’s, March 11, 2017; I Need to Buy More, March 25, 2017). The unwellness extends to the cinematographic device itself, like in Why Is It This (January 24, 2017), in which the camera gets sick, refusing to focus on Poppy’s face, who asks in an anguished voice “Can you see me?” “What’s happening?” and “Why is it like this?” [Video 24] Oh (April 10, 2017), in turn, is a video composed of failed beginnings, in which Poppy gets systematically stuck at “Hi. I’m-” without ever being able to pronounce her name. [Video 25] This video is exemplary of Poppy’s engagement with “constative exhaustions.”[33]

Such plays on vitality and devitalization, fleshing out and defleshing, bring forth the complex “political ecology of things”[34] at the heart of Poppy’s videos. In The Return of Plant, after a long absence from Poppy’s videos, the Plant tells her that it has been busy developing itself, and Poppy, complimenting its healthy-looking leaves, asks if she can have one. The Plant awkwardly agrees, and Poppy, chewing on a leave, states that “Sometimes it’s ok to eat your friends.” [Video 26] In I’m Out Of Here (January 6, 2019), the Skeleton contemptuously tells Poppy that “I’m dead and there’s nothing you can do to change that.” [Video 27] In these videos, Poppy is seemingly unaware of the Plant’s and the Skeleton’s self-consciousness towards their nonhuman (or no longer human, in the Skeleton’s case) condition—perhaps because, for Poppy, one’s self-brand, not one’s physical existence, is the common denominator of intersubjective and interobjective relationships. Poppy’s world is mediated by an increasingly vaporized and decentralized experience of the Internet and social media, in which creative contents function within a logic of indexation, rather than as “authentic” or “genuine” self-expression. The kawaii aesthetics of her videos are paradoxically disconcerting and sinister in their representation of twenty-first-century mini-stuplime and the cultish appeal of micro-celebrities, exploiting their hazardous repercussions on the human psyche. The introduction of characters like Plant, Charlotte, the mannequin, or Skeleton, as well as the recurring suggestion that Poppy is a robot or clone controlled by invisible forces, negotiate playful biopolitics that obscures the limits of the human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, individual and collective.

In short, it threatens us with the terrifying possibility that we are all Poppy.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Grimes, Nokia, Yolandi, Hiro Universe & Pastel Turn.

See in PORTFOLIO – G, Erro 404 & Loot Box.

REFERENCES in Poppy.

CONTENT NOTICE

This entry is potentially disturbing or unsuited for some readers.

Mentions or depictions of abuse, drugs, mental illness, and and self-harm.