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Remastering Goes Wrong in These Trippy 'Seinfeld' and 'The Simpsons' Remixes

Viewer indiscretion advised.
Screencaps and GIFs by the author

Somebody call @Seinfeld2000.

If the Golden Age of TV was simultaneously thrown in a blender and sent through a wormhole, it probably wouldn’t even look as delightfully distorted as JK Keller’s four new videos, which feature obliquely edited episodes from Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Star Trek, and The X-Files. Using an as-of-yet-undisclosed technique, the artist mutates four of TV’s most prolific programs into a maddening funhouse of stretched protagonists, anatomical incorrectness, and brain-meltingly scrambled audio.

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Taking exception to the videos' equally distorted titles—which allege that they are “RemaStered,” “rEdrawn,” "VERTicAL," or “LEaKeD” versions of their original selves—the works seem to defy description, including Keller's own (Keller declined to comment on his methods for the project). The minds over Kottke, who wrote about the videos yesterday, suggest that he's digitally-widened the episodes in a playful critique of HD’s unforgiving 16:9 aspect ratio, which would make sense, compared to the original series' 4:3 encoding.

But whatever the tool, and no matter the technique, we're partial to the sublime feeling we get from Keller's work, especially if it amplifies Marge's gravity-defying 'do, parodies The X-Files' freakiness, and finally renders Seinfeld's rambling parlance into what is, truly, a show about nothing.

Check out some of the results below, head over to YouTube to watch the rest, and click here to read our 2012 "User Preferences" interview with JK Keller.

For more of JK Keller's work, check out his website.

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