REDACTED: Slime Sunday's War on the Algorithm

By @JustinWetch

The name came from Eminem. Slime was listening to Howard Stern interview him, had his Instagram username field open at the same time, and caught the moment Stern announced the rapper into the room. Slim Shady's here. As Slime tells it, Eminem answered with two words that made a perfect handle.

"Slime Sunday."

He thought it was a sick name, typed it in, hit send. "That's been my name ever since." He marks that exact keystroke as the moment Slime Sunday was created, which tells you something about how he works. The identity that would become one of the most recognized in digital art was an impulse decision built on a stray line from a radio interview.

People have been taking him at face value ever since, and face value is the thing he's spent his entire career fighting. They see provocative images and call it shock art. It isn't, or it isn't only that. Underneath the breasts and the gore and the redaction bars is an argument about who gets to decide what you're allowed to see, and a years-long performance designed to test exactly that. 

The engine is obsession, and he's clear-eyed about where it comes from. Around age ten he developed OCD severe enough that he "could not function as a human." It cuts both ways. Sometimes it wrecks him. But it's also the reason he can sit for hours, alone, grinding a single image until it does what he wants.

"There's no chill mode," he says. "It's either all in or not at all."

Music came first. His dad has been in a band his whole life, so Slime picked up piano and guitar young and moved into music software in high school. The problem was that he could never finish anything. He'd get obsessed with the granular texture of how a sound sat, not with building a song that had a beginning and an end, and so everything stayed perpetually unfinished, and it gnawed at him.

Then a thought redirected his whole life. Maybe visual art would be easier to finish.

The kid who couldn't complete a song went looking for a medium he could complete. It turned out the same obsessiveness that left songs in pieces was exactly the trait that could push a single image all the way to done. He just needed the right surface to point it at.

He found it on his phone. This was when Instagram was brand new and art apps were just appearing, so he downloaded every one of them, took a photo of something, and fed it through six apps in a row to see what came out the other side. There was no plan. "I don't even think at the time that I made a conscious decision to become an artist," he says. He took a picture, edited it, and thought, "oh shit, this is fun."

That spiraled into Photoshop, then Cinema 4D, then total obsession. He had no influences and no training, which he considers a quiet advantage. No external input, nothing referenced, "the most basic form of expressing art."

The leap into doing it for real was not glamorous. He'd gotten a psychology degree aimed at physician's assistant school, which required a thousand hours working on an ambulance. He pulled night shifts, eight at night to eight in the morning, on beds so bad he never slept, alarms going off every couple hours, sometimes every fifteen minutes. Between emergency calls he made art on his laptop while coworkers told him he was nuts. He banked the hours and quit the instant he had them, not for grad school but for art, with no backup plan and an income around twenty grand a year that put him, officially, below the poverty line.

"This better work," he remembers thinking.

It worked, and what it became was a fight with a machine. Strip away the labels and Slime Sunday is a performance about algorithmic censorship, the automated systems social platforms use to detect and ban whatever they've decided you shouldn't see. His whole question is whether he can beat them.

"Can I get around it?"

The method is sleight of hand. Take a hypersexualized image and replace the part that would trip the filter with something mundane, an everyday object, a piece of fruit. A breast becomes a mango. Any human who looks knows instantly what they're seeing. The algorithm, scanning for skin, sees produce and waves it through.

"Everyone who sees the image knows exactly what it is," he says, "but you've replaced it with something that is mundane."

The look of the work makes the fight visible. His images are covered in the apparatus of suppression, blur boxes, pixel blocks, black redaction bars, warning labels, torn and taped paper, so that each piece appears to have survived an attack by the platform hosting it. The censorship isn't only the subject. It's the texture. The art wears the marks of the system that tried to take it down, which is the most direct way of saying the thing he wants to say. He's not smuggling provocation past the censors for its own sake. He's documenting the chase.

The conviction under the method is plain. He objects to other people deciding what's right or wrong for everyone else, "especially when big tech is the one making all the decisions." Regular people, in his view, don't need a corporation or an automated system curating reality on their behalf. If you see something you don't like, you can choose not to look again.

"Most people are inherently good," he says, "and don't need all these restrictions in place."

He reaches for the old panic about violent video games making kids violent, which never panned out, as proof that the instinct to ban is usually wrong. Push him further and the root shows. He's an atheist, and he sees a lot of online censorship descending from religious moral frameworks, the puritanical reflex that certain parts of being human are shameful. When his work goes after that directly, the pushback is fiercest. People get genuinely offended, which he finds more interesting than upsetting.

"It's easy to make art about safe things," he says. He'd rather make something that makes you stop and ask why an image bothers you so much. The provocation isn't the point. The question is.

He built all of this before superintelligent AI and a handful of tech companies were quietly deciding what billions of people get to see. The fight he picked years ago has only gotten bigger and harder, and he's still in it.

The Slime Sunday of today isn't the one from four years ago, and he knows it. He's moved into physical art, glad to make big things instead of work that lives tiny on a screen. He's trying to build more meaning into the pieces themselves rather than relying on face-value shock. He says, without drama, that he's maturing a bit.

He's also been mostly offline for half a year, partly because he had a kid and the time for personal work evaporated. So he's in an exploratory phase, obsessed lately with vibe coding, using tools like Claude Code to build his own apps. He can't quite see the shape of it yet, but he's certain the knowledge will fold back into art in a couple years and turn into something he hasn't made before.

There's a fitting irony in where the obsession landed. The kid who could never finish a song now uses AI to generate music for fun, calls it "completely cheating," and enjoys it precisely because it finishes things for him. The thing that once tormented him, the inability to call anything done, has been quietly outsourced.

He proved, before most people believed it, that a phone and an app and a stubborn streak could be a real artistic practice. Now he's between chapters in Salem, the same obsessive engine running as always, pointed at whatever comes next.