Strindberg & Helium
Fans
In addition to the joy of producing these videos, one of the most unexpected and delightful things about Strindberg & Helium is how deeply the videos resonated with so many people. We often get photos of people dressed as the duo for Halloween, Helium birthday cakes, and special dolls of the characters made by incredibly talented people.
The musician Amanda Palmer remixed parts of Strindberg & Helium’s voices into a song on her album Who Killed Amanda Palmer (I later met and worked with Amanda and she could not have been nicer). The band Mercurine also sampled SandH into a song and the two were visually plugged into an episode of a Canadian children’s program, The Orphanage.
Strindberg and Helium was featured in the Comedy Central television show, Jump Cuts; named to the Top 25 videos of the YouTube Play Biennial at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC; and was included in the 2003 Sundance Film Festival New Frontiers.
Strindberg & Helium
The original four episodes of Strindberg & Helium were released into the world during the early days of the internet back in 2001. They quickly became a viral sensation, before that was even really a thing. Eun-Ha Paek animated the adventures of the morose playwright August Strindberg and his relentlessly upbeat pal, Helium. Using text from Strindberg’s own Inferno (used with permission) the project was based on an idea by Erin Bradley, Brian Perkins, and myself. I provided the voice of Strindberg and Erin provided the voice of Helium.
A fifth episode was completed nine years after the first four, and just in time to be included in the first (and only) YouTube Play Biennial at the Guggenheim Museum. The project was named one of the top 25 videos of the 2010 competition. The awards ceremony was broadcast live from the Guggenheim’s central rotunda and the work was on view in the galleries.
The five completed episodes continue to circulate and reach new audiences. For the past several years, I have also maintained the duo’s bleak/happy twitter account, @miseryyyy.
Screenings(partial list):
Episode 5
YouTube Play Guggenheim Biennial of Creative Video, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Bilbao, Berlin, and Venice. 2010
Episode 1-4
Sundance Online Film Festival 2003
Comedy Central’s “Jump Cuts” 2004
Williamstown Film Festival 2004
Florida Film Festival 2007
Press:
New York Times “Reverberations”, May 28, 2004
Entertainment Weekly “The Must List”, Oct 10, 2003
USA Today Online, Oct 22, 2003