The early internet evolved from a military experiment, to an academic publishing platform, to a cozy global village of like-minded explorers. As it's ranks swelled from hundreds of thousands to billions, corporations and countries vied for control of this new territory .
While corporations sought the ultimate panopticon, trolls multiplied in the noise of Twitter and Facebook comments, their voices amplified and accelerated by the low-information high-emotion medium.
Is it any surprise that a king would rise from this noise? From the Mordor of Twitter a troll rises to Sauron-esque heights, bringing a forced unity to those who choose to follow. He appoints himself as the best, the greatest, the one true leader of the United States. The King. Not content to simply lord over the US, his wrath spreads round the world, to the farthest reaches of North Korea, in the milliseconds it takes to send 140 characters over fiber optic cable.
As it is traditional to paint a portrait of great kings, to immortalize the Henrys of history, I feel compelled to follow in the footsteps of Holbein and Velasquez and do my best to render the likeness of our king.
Here then is a portrait of the King, Donald Trump. Itself a product of the internet, the portrait is a coagulation of images of the Donald that constantly adorn nearly every publication online, skimmed, as it were, from the boiling froth or our everyday media, and re-formed into a true likeness of the man himself.
Mark Napier, November 4 2018