Shia LaBeouf's wacky art antics rarely pique my interest—maybe I'm just distrustful of actors, but like James Franco on General Hospital, every new project of his seems, to me, like another ploy to showcase "range." His recent half-hour-long video performance—entitled #INTRODUCTIONS, and produced in collaboration with British artist Luke Turner, Finnish artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö, and a number of students from Central Saint Martins—is therefore not something I ever plan on sitting through. But like Kendrick Lamar coming to a New Jersey classroom, it was clearly a cool gesture.
It was also a really smartly executed meme: 36 Instagram-video-length scenes filmed on green screen and released under a remix-ready Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. Now his work can become about promoting someone else's creativity. Enter Erik Taheri, a developer at New York's Stinkdigital. He took the most viral scene—of Shia shouting "JUST DO IT!"—and turned it into a Google Chrome extension. Sort of like how those spyware strippers used to traipse out onto the corner of your Windows 98 taskbar, so too will Shia materialize from the ether to give your workday a brief little boost.
Look at my inbox in that GIF up there. An avalanche of unreads. Will I respond to all these premiere requests? I will try. Maybe in writing this I've just wasted another half hour procrastinating. Maybe Shia LaBeouf can help.
