Q+A With the Creators of 'Quell,' a Photo Series of Kids Choking Themselves and Their Friends on YouTube

Remember all that silly shit you did as a kid? You know: doorbell ditching, throwing toilet paper over houses, sneaking cigarettes, choking yourself to get a quick high. It was hilarious at the time (hell, it probably still is) but after awhile and enough weekends spent grounded, you probably grew up and forgot about it.

Now imagine being a youngster in the Internet age. All the cool kids are showing off their exploits on Facebook and YouTube, which are then recreated and re-uploaded by scores of others. Call it viral troublemaking if you want. But for all the hundreds of how-to’s describing the perfect toilet roll throwing technique, there’s also a whole lot of kids strangling themselves and their friends on camera to try out the whole euphoria-from-asphyxiation thing. It points to an incredible shift in childhood away from rumor, boasting and private experimentation into a full-blown show-me culture in which everyone else is showing what they’ve pulled off and expect you to do the same.

Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky, a pair of award-winning artists that produce the always-brilliant Pigeon Projects, took the phenomenon of YouTube choke videos and addressed it head on. In their work, titled Quell, the duo distilled hundreds of hours of YouTube video into a series of stills that highlight the incredibly personal experiences that are now normal fodder for the Internet. It’s alternately haunting, amusing and flashback-inducing.

Cassidy and Shatzky are currently in Prague, working on their next projects, so I emailed them to talk about Quell and to get a quick update on Pigeon Projects.

Motherboard: How did you guys come up with the concept for Quell?

Melanie: The concept came about while we were doing research for our forthcoming film, Francine. We had written a scene involving the pass out game, and started researching YouTube videos to get a sense of how we might pull realistic performances from our actors. While researching these videos, we felt as though there was something very dangerous and meaningful within the countless hours of footage that the participants themselves were posting online to an anonymous public.

Brian: I played the game a couple of times when I was a kid. Until I came across these videos, I thought me and my friends were the only ones who had tried it. It’s such a stupid thing to do, yet I think it comes from a deeper teenage impulse, consciously or not, to escape the confines of one’s immediate surroundings and limitations. It’s like a brief, disorienting state of euphoria—and somehow teenagers all over the world figure out that it can be done and start experimenting with it. It’s reckless and kids have died while doing it. How did you pick the videos you took stills from? Brian and Melanie: We combed through hours and hours of YouTube videos looking for the most evocative images. It would get really depressing at times. But occasionally we would find an image that had a kind of complexity to it—something that showed not just the extreme results of the game, but that somehow felt simultaneously violent and tender and painterly. And when we found frames that were nuanced in this way, we felt we had something.

Why and how did you start using YouTube as a medium? Brian and Melanie: One of the many things about the pass out game that struck us is the popular impulse to videotape the results, which typically involve seizure-like convulsions, followed by uncomfortable laughter from onlookers. It’s a disturbing ritual that an artist/photographer could never ethically film first hand. So, using this vast growing archive of videos that kids were posting themselves, we were able to use their source material as a starting point for the project.

What’s next for Pigeon Projects and what’s going on in Prague? Brian and Melanie: We’ve just finished a documentary called The Patron Saints, which will be premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. From the festival’s official catalog: “Laced with black humor, The Patron Saints is an unorthodox documentary about a home for the aged and disabled. By turns lyrical and unsettling, the directors eschew more traditional approaches to the subject, opting for a mesmerizing atmospheric treatment and turning narration over to the home's youngest patient and his candid confessions.”

We are also finishing a narrative feature called Francine, starring Academy Award winner, Melissa Leo. From our official synopsis: Academy Award winner Melissa Leo gives a fierce and restrained performance as Francine, a woman struggling to find her place in a downtrodden lakeside town after leaving behind a life in prison. Taking a series of jobs working with animals, Francine turns away those who take an interest in her and instead seeks intimacy in the most unlikely of places. Gritty, elliptical, and voyeuristic, Francine is a portrait of a near-silent misfit and her fragile first steps in an unfamiliar world.

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