From my Photography II portfolio at Allegheny College.
Project Statement
Becoming John Pork is a series of photos about the fusion between non-human animals and humans in digital storytelling. The series is specifically inspired by the online meme series called "John Pork". The meme is a collaborative effort between people across the internet creating a dramatic story including murder, infidelity, heartbreak, and betrayal. The meme features AI animal human hybrids as their characters and inserts them into different storylines. These memes now infamously referred to as "brain rot" and are so engrossing you can find yourself researching the stories for hours. The John Pork like many other memes has evolved over time and keeping yourself up to date with the most recent "lore" updates can be time consuming. This series also takes inspiration from the "Animorph" book series where child transform into these animals.
These conversations about the anthropomorphic go much deeper and actually reach into our entanglements with non-human entities. Oftentimes humans personify and anthropomorphize the non-human to better understand them. The John Pork meme exemplifies this factor and goes as far to tie in real life humans like Agent 5.5 to the story to make these stories feel even more connected to reality.
The images in this series use a human subject and an AI generated pig face (similar to the john pork memes). The bars along the face play with the idea of merging the two faces. This creates an interesting illusion when you squint your eyes. This transformation of identity references the human and non-human merging in these stories and how through these technologies and digital stories we become a part of the John Pork lore.
Throughout this project I played a lot with how lines can change the image. This process was inspired by lenticular printing but goes a step further and merges the two photos to be viewed simultaneously. The opacity, line thickness, and direction of the lines drastically change the effects of the illusion. I especially love that in the merged photos the human eyes and pig noses are the most defined creating this effect that merges the most prominent features and creates a new face entirely.
The tone of this piece is more mysterious and entertaining like the meme series. They were taken in an everyday setting to give the impression that these anthropomorphic people are among us. The goal of this series was to give the illusion of a state between human and non-human and to reflect on our fascination with anthropomorphic characters within media.
References
Reference photo used for the pig faces: https://unsplash.com/photos/pig-lies-on-ground-CP9GGy_LkIY
John Pork Wiki: https://loraxian.fandom.com/wiki/John_Pork
Animorphs Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animorphs