Joshua Schachter on Turning Frustration into Viral Art with Deliberate Mistakes

Accidental Viral Art

• 💡 Joshua Schachter initially created geometric computer art with plotters, uploading it to social media with little attention.
• 🎨 He experimented with a 3D printer extruder filled with acrylic paint, leading to a messy attempt at making dots.
• 🤖 The program for making dots had errors, resulting in unexpected outputs that garnered strong, often angry, reactions from viewers.

Manufacturing Emotions Through Art

• 🎯 Schachter realized he could intentionally manufacture emotions by programming a robot to make deliberate mistakes in plotter art.
• 🖼️ Projects like "Bad day at the circle factory" and intentionally flawed mazes, where the robot missed the exit, provoked strong viewer responses.
• 🎭 He learned to hide mistakes within the mechanism and often promised "oddly satisfying" art, only to betray expectations with a flawed outcome.

The Power of Constraints and Betrayal

• ⏳ The medium required short videos (12-15 seconds) with quick pacing and a surprising, often traumatic, ending.
• 📈 Some of these intentionally flawed art pieces went viral, accumulating millions of views and significant viewer engagement.
• 🤯 One 17-second video about flawed circles, which viewers mistook for AI, garnered 200,000 hours of watch time, causing his phone to repeatedly die from notifications.

Lessons from Internet Frustration

• 🧩 Schachter notes that while constraints can be beneficial for art creation, relying solely on them can lead to becoming a "crappy cover artist" of one's own work.
• ⚠️ He took a break from this specific type of art but humorously suggests that any annoying internet content might have been his creation.
• 👏 The core idea is turning frustration into creative success through unexpected and quirky art that captivates audiences.