Warning: Post plagued with way too many videos.
Is the purpose of viral campaigns to drive all who fall for them completely nuts? It seems to be the case.
I’m a sucker for strange little mysteries. Put one right in front of me and there’ll be no end to my obsession.
My slow descent into madness began a few days ago when this showed up on my Twitter account:
So I googgled the damn thing, which took me to a youtube account, and with the very first video I was hooked. And how could I not? The videos feature dark and beautiful nature imagery, a recurrence of a mandrake theme and the use of the number 6 in various creepy ways. The videos also contain hidden messages on their numeric titles, as well as links to videos related to animal images that appeared at the end of each video. Since then, I’ve spent three days constantly checking iamamiwhoami´s youtube account hoping for an update.
The latest video was due out this past weekend and many argued that it would be the last. We were expecting a big reveal. Or at least I was hoping for it.
Sunday came along, and at about 9pm, Iamamiwhoami logged into his/her youtube account and posted the latest video that ended up not being a reveal, but more of a change in pace: It was 4:49 long (unlike the previous videos that where a little under or a little over a minute long), with “b” as the title, and a link to a video of a child beauty pageant queen that seems a lot like a pedophile’s horrible wet dream.
And so the mystery continues as all of us trapped by this viral campaign wonder who iamamiwhoami is. I won’t go into the actual decoding of the videos because there are too many blogs out there doing it already. But here are my prime suspects:
I thought it had to be Sneaker Pimps based solely on the music. After all, they stated eons ago that their next album would have a female vocalist. But no one knows if they’ll ever actually release anything again (a shame, really).
Then I remembered this video featuring Karin Dreijer from The Knife) and I thought Royksopp, The Knife, or Karin Dreijer had to be it:
Royksopp has an album coming out in April, so it makes sense they are responsible for iamamiwhoami. Problem is, they’ve also said their next album will be instrumental. And The Knife is involved with another project that’s already out.
So basically I have nothing, just like everybody else. There are many other suspects, the most unusual being Christina Aguilera (already debunked), and the latest being swedish singer Jonna Lee (the closest voice match of all suspects). What everyone agrees on is that it has to be a music artist. Because if it’s not, and it ends up being about something totally lame, I suspect many heads will explode from a sudden burst of rage. But at least we’ll have the beautiful videos as consolation prize.
iamamiwhoami: Who
the hell are you?
Update: It seems that, as deduced by the people at Oh No They Didn’t, iamamiwhoami is Jonna Lee (although her reps have denied it already). I didn’t agree with their assesment at first because Jonna Lee’s music sounds nothing like iamamiwhoami’s (and I’m still not fully convinced), but the evidence in favor of this theory is kind of hard to ignore, as shown by this post, a mesage and two images from Jonna Lee’s twitter account.