In “Mom and Pop Art,” one of the episodes from The Simpsons’ tenth season, Homer becomes an outsider artist and meets painter Jasper Johns. In “Realigning My Thoughts On Jasper Johns,” a video piece by experimental artist JK Keller, he becomes an eerie cubist figure in a nearly silent landscape. Keller took apart each frame of the 20-minute episode, turned them into vector shapes, and ran them through a battery of Adobe Illustrator auto-alignment tools, then ran the audio through a similar filtering system. With every tweak, pieces of color break apart or are magnetically drawn together. Shapes disintegrate, landscapes are crushed into a tiny ball, eyeballs float in space. Faces and sounds are somehow familiar and incredibly foreign at the same time. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t work on anything less absolutely iconic, where you couldn’t pick out hints of Marge’s voice or Moe’s scowl. They’re all in there, somewhere. You just have to find them.
‘The Simpsons’ deconstructed, reconstructed, and turned into pop art
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
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