Salad Fingers: Pre-YouTube digital uncanny and the ‘weird’ future of animation

Abstract

In 2004, artist David Firth launched the lo-fi animation Salad Fingers in the user-generated content sharing platform Newgrounds. The series, focused on a strange, unsettling narrative about a character that acts as a child but commits unhinged violent acts, went on to become viral in the earliest days of YouTube. Created with the software Flash (launched by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe), which generates vector images, Salad Fingers is a significant stylistic and generic contribution to the early period of participatory digital cultures. The series operates as a bridge between analogue and digital artforms that privilege the sensorial over narrative cohesion, while also cultivating a distinctive ‘uncanny-weird’ mode tied to early participatory digital cultures, trends that perdure in contemporary animation. We articulate how Salad Fingers operates in the distinctive ‘digital uncanny’, an aesthetic and cultural mode that would become pervasive in visual media cultures on YouTube and beyond.