Rolling Saxophones and Lindsay Lohan in a Lake: A Chat with Keelay, Maker of Good Vines

Out of all the possible jams, from Space to strawberry, KeelayJams is definitely my favorite. Over the last year Keelay, or Kyle M.F. Williams, has been prolific and relentless in creating thing after thing I want to look at and tell everyone about.

Keelay is originally from Dartmouth, Mass.a, and during the day is a designer for a clothing brand making “accessories for teenagers.” He’s married, lives in NYC, and seems set to conquer seemingly every art form from sculpture, to music, to writing books, to fashion, to Vine.

His first viral breakthrough came last November when BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos reported on his "Razrs" project, in which he posted “lost images” from old Motorola Razr phones he had purchased on Ebay. The project reached over 300,000 people, and earned him much press coverage—and later, a cease and desist letter when he tried to turn these images into a book (apparently publishing the detritus from discarded phones is a potential privacy or copyright violation).

In the last few months you may have noticed Kyle slowly taking over Twitter’s video app Vine, with brilliant films like “Saxophone rolling down the sidewalk,” which is self-explanatory; “Jesus Fish (welcome back, bro),” which was posted on Easter and depicted him spray-painting the word “Jesus” on a fish in orange paint; and his “Self Portrait From Ceiling Fan” which, thanks to a nod from the Vine editors, has been favorited by over 50,000 people.

The effort and dedication Keelay puts into his Vines might seem excessive, but it echoes the work of comedians like Rob Delaney, who made a name for himself with short bursts on Twitter well before many comedians got wise to the format.

I first encountered Keelay last year thanks to Shirley Braha's music-centered web series, "Weird Vibes," where she featured his music video for “Sports.” In the video he wears a Michael Jordan jersey and pours gatorade on himself.

Bobby Finger, senior copywriter for VH1, commented, “I never find myself asking, 'How?' or 'Why?' or 'What does it all mean?' to any of Kyle's art because, regardless of the medium, I'm far too busy enjoying it.”

I was lucky enough to have Shirley end up introducing me to Keelay for a potential event earlier this year so when his latest Vine, “Taking a lil snooze,” especially impressed me and many others, I figured this was a particularly good time to reach out to him to find out what he was working on and how he manages to do it all.

What first attracted you to Vine? Why'd you decide to start using it so seriously?

I've always loved video and even in art school (I graduated in 2003) I would shoot these short, minute-long videos and present them instead of a painting or drawing or whatever class I was taking. A few months before the launch of Vine I created a YouTube account solely for the purpose of sharing short videos (keelayminivids). When I first read about Vine I thought it would be a perfect platform to create these and share them more effectively.

Behind the scenes of that last Vine: twitter.com/keelayjams/sta…

— Keelayjams (@keelayjams) April 20, 2013

How much time do you spend setting up a Vine like "Taking a lil snooze" or "pizza parachute"?

As I get more and more serious about these videos the setup time and supply purchasing has gotten a bit out of control. "Taking a lil snooze" took about an hour to set up and was less planned then a lot of others. "Pizzas Parachuting" took a week (ordering supplies, crafting parachutable pizza slices) but was done in one take. Others like "A Juggalo in bed with the cast of Sex And The City" took about 20 takes and was a nightmare to set up and shoot.

Where do you get your inspiration? Do you find time to sit down and just brainstorm these elaborate Vines?

I go to this sports bar across the street from me, order a couple drinks, and just start typing notes on my phone. I kind of let my mind go and type everything I think of. Conception and planning usually happens on the weekends.

Do you have any sense of your reach right now? Who's your audience?

At first it was primarily just people I knew on Twitter, which was great because they are all very smart and funny and understood what I was doing. With the increased exposure, the audience and commenters are getting younger and less filtered, but for every hundred comments that are either "your dumb," "follow for a follow," or "fake," there is an account by one incredible young kid doing amazing things.

In a broad sense, how do you feel about the Internet-driven art scene that seems to be rapidly growing? 

I don't really follow it much. I love what I see of it, but I don't interact with it. I use Tumblr as a site to show my personal work, or to make single-serving sites. I don't reblog or "like" things. I usually pull the tumblrs that I really like into Google Reader and consume them that way. Same with Vine kind of. I usually just make a Vine, check out out the people I follow, and then put my phone down for a while.

Do you think Vine is here to stay and will continue to grow at least in the near future?

I think so. Especially with its tight integration with Twitter, Facebook, and its embedding feature. I think the six second time limit is perfect and the lack of control forces people to creatively solve to that. And those are my favorite Vines to watch. The tweens, minor-league boy-bands, and companies are hogging up the "Popular Now" category with some pretty boring shit, but other than that I'd love to see this thing stick around for a while and see more people push it to the limit and up the production value.

Do you have any particular inspirations? Is there anything that's particularly exciting to you right now?

I like Brad Troemel and the other contributors' work on The Jogging. I love the seriousness they present these weirdo combinations of objects with. They're funny but shown very professionally and I like that. Dora Budor and Maja Cule (NSFW) are incredible too. They made this video of these dudes destroying fake expensive Chinese vases made out of paper with a basketball. It's great. Stephanie Davidson's Rising Tensions art blog is very good too.

The Visual Storage section at The Met is one of my favorite places. It's just silent hallways of thousands of pieces of art behind glass that aren't displayed in the main museum, jammed together. There is one part that's all George Washington stuff, like George Washington paintings next to George Washington busts next to George Washington plates, coins, postcards. It's like scrolling a category page on eBay. I like repeated things. There's one little nook where it's just huge sculptural heads of ancient dudes mixed with modern dudes, just tucked into a corner.

I also love screen-capping all those old magazines that Google Books has scanned in. Pictures of the music industry in Billboard Magazine from the 70s are insane. Old Backpacker Magazine has great nature photography and pictures of cool looking people camping.

And Stanley Kubrick movies.

Do you have any other projects in the works? Do you have a system of when you're focusing on your various pursuits (book, sculpture, music, vines, etc.) or is it hard to say what's next?

The main upcoming project is my prog rock movie and soundtrack. I've been listening to 70s prog for the last year and I love it so much. I want to write a 40 minute suite of music and film a long video for it. A 40 minute collage of Vines essentially. It's not going to be very accessible, but it's something I've been wanting to do forever so I'm just going to do it.

I also want to have an art show in a sports bar, and replace all the bar's sports-themed wall art with my pictures and sculpture and hi-jack the TVs to play my videos, invite everyone for a party. I think that'd be fun.

My system is pretty loose. I have a list of things in my phone that I want to make and usually just let the ideas marinate for a week and then decide if I should put the effort into completing them. Projects usually fall into themes and influence each other across mediums. For example I was making a song and music video about black metal, creating t-shirts of the cast of the show F•R•I•E•N•D•S in black metal make-up, and selling custom hand-drawn black metal logos over the internet during the same time. Something just clicks and then I'm all about that thing for a of couple weeks and apply it to whatever fits.

You sell a “Michael Jodran” shirt. How's the merchandise business going?

Slow, but there's something interesting happening. I've gotten a few email requests to sell some of the actual items that appear in the Vines (like the "KATE MOSS AND SOME PIZZA SLICES" denim jacket and the actual "MICHAEL JODRAN" sweater. I'd love to start producing these things as real limited-edition art pieces and make them available for purchase.

Tell me about your books.

My first book was called Poopsidents and it was mainly to test out the self-publishing process via Amazon's print-on-demand company CreateSpace. Poopsidents was an idea I had years ago and just threw it together over a couple months, sent it off to the printer and I had a book.

My second book Razrs was an accident. I bought 44 "broken" Motorola Razr cellphones on eBay to make a sculpture but when I received them the majority of them had tons of pictures and texts, so I downloaded everything, took photographs of the phones, and created another book.

Razrs went viral for a week and I was interviewed by a bunch of news stations that spun it into a story about invasion of privacy. A few days later I was contacted by a lawyer representing someone whose content from their Razr was in the book and I got a cease and desist letter. My latest book Work (2012) is a compilation of art and writing that I did in 2012 and it's pretty funny.

Did your pictures of the "Sex & The City" cutouts mean they're now completely destroyed or do you have more of those?

They're gone. Samantha, Carrie, and Charlotte are in the East River and Miranda is on the shoulder of the FDR under a bunch of garbage.

Where do you shoot most of your photos and Vines? Where'd the "Poking Lindsay Lohan With A Stick In A Pond" take place, for instance?

I like shooting in my apartment because its a very controllable space and I can get weird without embarrassing myself. But "Poking Lindsay Lohan With A Stick In A Pond" was shot at the lake in Central Park. I love shooting in the park. As the weather gets nicer in New York City I plan to shoot more Vines outside.

I live on the Upper East Side and get very little public attention when making Vines up here, which is great. No one batted an eye when I taped a Kurt Cobain poster to a Citibank or sent a saxophone on wheels down a sidewalk. An old woman stopped to talk to me about the fish that I spray painted "JESUS" onto, but she was really sweet. I hear a lot of people mutter "only in New York" when they walk by.