Lewis Chaplin

At 8.05pm on 17th Feb 2011, a 4chan user knocked down the card stand on the corner of 7th Ave and West 46th St, NY. This act, while on the surface a piece of petty vandalism, is emblematic not only of a new form of peer pressure cultivated in fast-moving online communities, but also of the dynamics and paradigms that exist online involving representation, archiving and documentation.

For weeks before Feb 2011, threads on /b/ would appear promising to knock the stand down, tantalisingly and mockingly visible on the Times Square Earthcam. Quickly, the empty promise ‘I’ll Be there in 30 Minutes’ evolved into a barrage of trolling on such threads - to the degree that when the actual event finally happened, no-one was around to see it.

There were no videos on Youtube, no GIFs - only random aftermath screengrabs, organically and simultaneously generated worldwide within the rhizomatic community structure of /b/. This collected series of images, disjointed in narrative and context, highlight the stochastic nature of online communities, but also the often unconscious synchronicity felt globally through the internet. Every image here was ‘made’ by an individual user, entirely unconnected to any other - but yet they were all made in the space of a few minutes, of exactly the same event. The images here are sequenced in the exact order they were posted by various anonymous collaborators.