The Shaye Saint John Archive: How a VHS Character Became an Internet Art Landmark

Transmission 376: Interview with Empty Socket Productions

Andrew Mayer and Eric Fournier began collaborating in Bloomington, Indiana in 1979, initially making Super8 zombie films and playing in a punk band called Blood Farmers before relocating to Chicago in the early 1990s. There, alongside Barbara, Mayer’s partner, they formed Shytown Productions, working across art films, documentaries and music video production in a building that also housed Invisible Records.

The trio moved to Los Angeles in 1999, founding Empty Socket Productions and beginning the work that would produce Shaye Saint John, a character built from prosthetics, mannequin parts and found objects whose short video pieces, known as Triggers, circulated first on VHS before migrating online. Empty Socket Productions relaunched the archive in 2023.

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Shaye started circulating on VHS in 1998, years before the internet made underground art accessible. What was the original impulse that brought her into existence?

It goes back to a childhood collaboration. I met my friend Eric in seventh grade when he moved to Bloomington Indiana from Los Angeles in 1979. We immediately bonded over horror films, Fangoria magazine, video games and bands like DEVO, Led Zeppelin and Blondie. After seeing Dawn of the Dead at the Indiana University student union we set out to make our own zombie movie Death Walk. Using an 8mm silent film camera we would shoot scenes with our friends on weekends. We used plasticine to make practical gore effects, usually grafting it onto mannequins and beauty salon practice heads. By high school we were into punk and started our own band called Blood Farmers. We released a 7 inch EP that got a nice review in Maximum Rock and Roll. We played local shows with touring bands like Die Kreuzen, 45 Grave, Samhain, 7 Seconds and The Vandals (read our interview with The Vandals). As video cameras were becoming more accessible we started renting them to make shorts and music performance videos. We also shot with a Super8 sound camera but couldn’t always afford film and processing.

I met Barbara, my partner in Empty Socket, at Indiana University, where we both studied film theory/video production and worked in the opera department in stage craft and lighting. Afterwards, we moved to Chicago where I studied film production and optical printing. Barbara was working as a projectionist for Siskel and Ebert and studio film dailies. Eric decided to move up shortly after and began attending Columbia College where I was studying.

I had started working at the screening room part time as well. One evening Roger Ebert hosted a screening of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and invited Russ Meyer to speak. I called Eric saying “you’ve got to get down here now to meet Russ Meyer!”. Meyer’s films were an influence for Shaye later.

The three of us started Shytown Productions for art films, documentaries and music video work. Eric moved to Los Angeles after a semester to take care of his grandmother. In 1994 I began getting commercial editing jobs and Barbara was working as a producer for a music video company called H-Gun Labs. It was on the top floor of a South side art deco building that also housed Invisible Records run by Martin Atkins (read our interview with Martin Atkins) who was recently interviewed here. We both started traveling for work, me to Oklahoma while working on visual content for The Flaming Lips and Barbara to Los Angeles. While in Los Angeles on our work trips we would get together with Eric and continue to collaborate long distance mailing master tapes back and forth. In 1999 we made the move to LA and that is when we started Empty Socket Productions.

The character defines herself as holding the world record for “the most problems.” How did that self-definition shape the creative logic of the project?

Tragedy and comedy play equal parts. The tragic element originates from a large exposure to educational safety films like Scared Straight and trash tv talk shows from the 80s like Phil Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael and Maury Povich. In the late 90s Shaye mimicked the hype of celebrities jockeying for attention in the media with their problems. It was the beginning of that particular ridiculousness that had reached a peak by the early 2000s, when the Triggers were being made.

The Triggers first played in nightclubs in Los Angeles and Chicago. What were those early audience reactions like, and what did they tell you about what you had created?

Definitely mixed reactions from laughter to horror and everything in between but people were paying attention. In Chicago the first Triggers played were, Strange Dolly and Happy Turkey Day. Crash Palace (now Delilah’s) was a bar in Lincoln Park, home of the Chicago Psychotronic Film Society. The bartenders were cool film and music nerds and VJ’d as they worked. We would go there after work and hand the bartender a VHS tape and they would eventually play it on the monitors behind the bar. It was great having an organic focus group right there.

In Los Angeles there was an underground club called CIA in North Hollywood. It drew creative types from local club kids to tourists. The Shaye shorts always got a good reaction there. The owner Carl desperately wanted to be a part of it. He often tried to associate the club’s maximalist circus sideshow freak theme which didn’t always mesh with the art. It was a transactional relationship at best since the club did lend a colorful backdrop for the videos. He begged us to shoot at the club but would then threaten to not play the shorts there on weekends unless we showed up as bodies.

The quote “my art is a flowery rejection of a child’s past, future, and present” is deliberately opaque. How much of Shaye’s world is autobiographical, even obliquely, and how much is pure invention?

There is a lot of autobiographical history there. Eric and I had paper routes when we were 11 years old where we would walk each other’s routes and brainstorm as we went. There are references and ideas that go back that far and all the way up until the recent past. The dolls represent childhood experiences at times but they are also able to add a more fantastical element. Many of the off screen characters and their situations are references to real life drama that was happening around us.

What was the most difficult Trigger to make, either technically or emotionally?

Technically, I would say Starboard since we had the brilliant idea to start shooting on green screen in our garage making twice the work for ourselves in post production.

Emotionally, Strange Dolly the story of when Shaye discovers Kiki anonymously dropped on her doorstep and her reaction. The Kiki character was an internal homage to a character named Chelsea that I played in an earlier short. The character was a ‘space crack’ cook who burned his face on a hot oven causing one side to be a charred mess. He later donned a black and white venetian style mask similar to Kiki’s face. When Kiki is on the screen it is difficult to differentiate her from Chelsea.

Shaye’s visual language, the prosthetics, the mannequin limbs, the distorted femininity, draws on a very specific and unsettling aesthetic vocabulary. What were the visual references, conscious or unconscious, that fed into her physical construction?

It began with a face and wig and evolved over time into a full body affair, that is what gives the character her own unique personality. The challenge of that routine can be a metaphor for everyday struggles. Mannequin parts, found objects, wigs, and make-up are all a part of Shaye’s everyday apparel. For example, Shaye’s legs were dumpstered from studio garbage after the production of the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

The plasticity of it enabled her to channel personalities from the past whether public figures or relations closer to home. Through experimentation, our motto began to be if it makes us laugh, cry, or cringe it might be working.

The SAD (Save Abused Dolls) foundation and the adoption of Kiki introduce a layer of institutional satire into the project. What were you commenting on with that structure, and do you see Shaye as a social critic?

Yes, Shaye is very much a social critic to this day, especially in her actions.

Shaye saw herself as a celebrity early on and naturally wanted to do all of the things celebrities do. She remembered the days of FDR with the March of Dimes and was a Jerry’s kid herself. As Shaye would say ‘a very good program’. Many of our mutual friends grew up with divorced parents creating a generation of latchkey kids left to raise themselves. That experience fed a lot of post punk commentary cutting against the repressed Reagan era happy talk of the eighties. If Shaye had driven a car it would definitely have had a ‘Have you hugged your kid today?’ bumper sticker on it.

The LiveJournal era gave Shaye a voice in text as well as image. How did writing the character’s inner life change your relationship to her, and did anything surprise you in what she had to say?

It was a great place for her to interact with people. It was innocent at first because she didn’t have an agenda, it was just “write to Shaye!”. I think what some of the people writing in had to say was most surprising. It did become a place for her to hear about other people’s problems and tell them about her problems. She got to have fun playing a Dear Abby role while getting to meet people without leaving the house.

YouTube terminated the original channel in 2017. What was that loss like creatively and personally, and what did it clarify for you about the vulnerability of digital preservation?

Around 2004 we had divided our tasks to where Eric was managing the blog and I was managing the website I had coded and launched beginning in 2001. I created the YouTube channel in 2006, and it managed to survive for many years, until it didn’t. It had become difficult to keep the website going after it was hacked, and Eric had already stopped updating the LiveJournal connected to it in 2007. Then Eric passed away in 2010.

Unfortunately, while we and Eric’s close mutual friends were grieving, videos were getting ripped and reuploaded by strangers in a low-res feeding frenzy. Only after Eric’s passing did conspiracy theories begin circulating about the art threatening to unmask the artist. It really degraded the impact and specialness of it. Eric never wanted that and we agreed.

There were many friends that came in and out of the collaborative picture over the years. After Eric’s passing most of them showed little interest in the art. We mourned for quite some time and it was difficult to look at any of the art throughout that period. During the pandemic we noticed a lot of commentary videos with misinformation popping up all over YouTube by people none of us knew. It is disappointing to see so much negative energy put forth in order to defame something they know nothing about. I guess it’s for internet hits “24-7” and not much else. By 2019 it made sense for us to restore back to YouTube since it is still a viable format and there was also a large amount of interest to relaunch the website.

The 2023 relaunch used master files rather than re-uploads. What does preservation mean in the context of a project this unconventional?

In 2002 we had started working on a comprehensive release and entering it into some film festivals. At that time we were already revisiting some of the older pieces to ensure that we had the best quality going forward. VHS, Super8mm, DigiCam of all the raw footage. Eric and I were ready to move on, we had scripts and concepts for new works and were also beginning to concentrate on mastering Shaye’s music under the name Hard Luck Susan.

The project was ultimately derailed by pressure from a third party who wanted to rush the shorts onto physical media. They pestered us relentlessly, sometimes calling 25 times a day leaving repeated messages on our voicemail, while also showing up at our studio when we were trying to work. The final meeting I attended made it clear that our values were not aligned. The owner described himself sexually assaulting Shaye in a proposed short, and that was all I needed to know this was not a fit for the work.

They continued to pressure Eric with deadline timebombs and it became overwhelming, he caved and turned over the material he had. A crappy product was rushed out. In the process, our contract was violated, and the original goals we had for the project came to an abrupt end. Eric made no money from the deal and not long after left Los Angeles. He became increasingly isolated from the friends and creative community who had once surrounded him.

There is a Blu-Ray that never saw the light of day representing the compressive work that Eric and I labored over. That is where most of the restoration material originates from. At this point it becomes a labor of preserving the memory of our friend and giving the art the place we feel it belongs. I am always touched by people who reach out to express that a certain Trigger or character has a place in their heart. I don’t think that is facetious coming from anyone and it makes it worth every effort we take to keep the art genuine.

Physical mediums cost more than our current budget allows but who knows what the future holds. We are grateful to all who have bought merch, it helps supplement our operating costs.

The phrase “consider yourself warned” appears in critical writing about the project. Is Shaye meant to be a warning, a mirror, an escape, or something the viewer has to decide for themselves?

Shaye is a combination of all of those things. Many of the Triggers contain a cautionary or moral message that was often intended. The voiceover acts as a warning, by an observer or doctor. Our friend David added this element and he also contributed creatively including music, camera work and animation.

Shaye is often a mirror, but most definitely an escape. Mainly, the viewer is forced to perceive it for themselves. We are contacted by people from all over the world and it is fascinating to see what aspects pique the interests across all the different cultures. Music being a universal language, is understandable, but Shaye Saint John?

Shaye could be scary to some people sometimes but we like to think if it was brought before the MPA that it would receive a PG rating.

Looking at the landscape of internet art and character-based performance work that came after Shaye, do you see any lineage there, even if uncredited, and how do you feel about that?

Sure, it’s funny to think of her as one of the early influencers or maybe influencer fails. We see many potential references in various places including mainstream media that could be triggered by Shaye but can never totally confirm. The universal reaction is beyond anything we could have expected. We hope that Shaye Saint John encourages people to make their own art and not repress but express. At the same time make sure to laugh while you are at it.

Photos courtesy of © Empty Socket Productions

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others