Surf & Turf

Surf & Turf is centred around a poem that was written in the Notes app on a phone. Its title does not point to a fixed narrative, but to a state of mind: drifting, scrolling, multitasking, moving through the web while attention splits and reforms. It also suggests a field of dualities: surface and depth, body and screen, humor and toxicity, fiction and belief. The work emerges from this mental landscape, and the poem reacts to Pepe the Frog as both a figure and a symptom of networked image culture. Created by Matt Furie in Boys Club (2005), Pepe circulated across forums and platforms through endless copying, compression, and remixing. In this movement, the character became more than a cartoon. Detached from its author and absorbed into participatory online culture, Pepe turned into a collective artifact shaped by circulation itself. What first appears playful or absurd gradually reveals another story: how images mutate as they travel, how authorship dissolves, and how meaning becomes unstable in the hands of the network. The video approaches Pepe not simply as a meme, but as a mythological container for the emotional, political, and hallucinatory textures of internet life. It reflects on the frog’s transformation from casual comic figure into a politicized and contaminated symbol, tracing how digital vernaculars can slide from humor into ideology. In this sense, Surf & Turf is concerned with the fragile boundary between irony and belief, fiction and infrastructure, play and manipulation. Rather than offering a linear narrative, the work operates through poetic association. It treats the internet as a space where reality is continuously edited through repetition, circulation, and affect. Here, falsification is not only deception, but also revelation: a way of exposing how networked realities are fabricated, mythologized, and emotionally inhabited. Surf & Turf invites viewers into this unstable terrain, where the meme becomes a lens for seeing how contemporary truths are made, fractured, and lived.