“Live. Laugh. Lube.” is a painting and video series about social media, made by Mieke Marple in collaboration with clowns, comedians, and fools. A comedian gives the artist a phrase, she turns it into a painting, they make a video, she gives them the painting, and they pass the project on.

It’s an anti-algorithm algorithm. A social experiment in human collaboration. Honoring the funny people carrying us through these dark times.

For "Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution: Live Laugh Lube Chapter II," a selection of ten paintings and nine videos from this project, made over the past two years, will be exhibited along a stand-up set by three participating comedians: Janelle draper, Kevin Turner, and Shivani Dave.

Accompanying the exhibition is a commissioned essay by writer Sarah Lehrer Graiwer.  Below  are the first two paragraphs of Lehrer Graiwer’s essay.

Click here to read the full essay.

I don’t even want to but I do. I check it again, tapping the icon. After setting my alarm for thenext day and turning on do-not-disturb for the night, I might as well take one last look, I’m already there. Even though I don’t want to. There’s that schizophrenic split. I’m in bed and it’s late and I know all about those studies showing how it fucks up sleep and brain function, and fucked up sleep translates into all sorts of other health issues. Still, my stupid finger taps the stupid icon because it’s so easy to do. Stupid lizard brain. Court cases and a bevy of articles have laid out how social media is, for all intents and purposes, operating like big tobacco and big pharma, exploiting neurological mechanisms to maximize their product’s addictiveness. We can no longer claim ignorance about how much these devices and platforms we hold in our hands are radicalizing, isolating, alienating, and dividing millions of us, hundreds of millions of people with detriment effects on a broad societal level as well as local familial level. Save the children! But also the grandparent boomers who seem to get sucked in as deep as anyone.

While checking the gram or even just browsing the internet, I see myself from someone else’s (my family’s) perspective and feel terribly guilty, trying to hide it. If someone walks in and catches me, I close it up fast and make like I wasn’t scrolling. I know better, and still. I’m starting to actually hate it because the algorithm sucks ass now and is getting worse, this last update has really ruined it for me. It’s mostly just slop now being spoon-fed to me and the feed isn’t even people I follow anymore; I don’t know who or what all these accounts are that I have to wade through to see the ones I actually recognize. It’s barely worth it for the few relevant tidbits, usually some announcement of a local community event or targeted news (friends’ opening, a morning standup show, a concert, war updates) I glean from the muck. We each have our reasons for staying in the swamp; it’s difficult to opt out and miss whatever goes on in there. But it has, undeniably, lost its shine at this late-feeling date. I’ve set app time limits for myself. I’m increasingly over it. Something is sunsetting, even as some menacing new thing dawns. Enough already.