Paper Rad

American art collective

Paper Rad was an art collective from approx. 2000 until 2008, based on the East Coast in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Providence, Rhode Island in the United States. Known for creating comics, zines, video art, net art, MIDI files, paintings, installations, and music with a distinct "lo fi" aesthetic often associated with underground culture or 1990s "retro tech", juxtaposed images and featuring bright colors.

The three primary members were Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci, but additionally included many others such as Paul Bright, David Wightman, Sonja Radovancevic, Extreme Animals, and others. Prior to Paper Rad, Ben Jones and Christopher Forgues (C. F.) were students at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and created a zine project called "Paper Radio". Jacob and his sister Jessica became active in Paper Rad after moving to Boston and hanging out with Joe Grillo, Ben Jones, and Christopher Forgues. The collective published a book in late 2005, Paper Rad, BJ and da Dogs and a DVD in 2006 on Load Records (Trash Talking). Paper Rad's video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.

Paper Rad calls its style "Dogman 99", a play on the Danish filmmaking movement Dogme 95. According to one of its project websites, the rules of Dogman 99 are: "No Wacom tablet, no scanning, pure RGB colors only, only fake tweening, and as many alpha tricks as possible". The piece consisted of a hacked Nintendo Entertainment System video game cartridge where the backgrounds and scenarios were altered and rearranged into a narrative story about the game world becoming corrupted and Mario's existential crises about being a video game character. The movie debuted at Deitch Projects in New York in 2005. Wyld File is a commercial entity that makes lo fi music videos for artists like Islands, The Gossip ("Standing in the Way of Control"), and Beck ("Gameboy Homeboy").