Ringtone Dancer

Ah, the ringtone dancer. A shooting star, a bright comet. He graced our humdrum lives for a moment, with his joyous disruptions of public semiotic norms, and then he disappeared as suddenly as he'd arrived. Whence he came, and whence he went away again, to remain a mystery....

The ringtone dancer is assumed to have been a human male, but who can say for sure? He was never seen without his mask--if indeed it was a mask--and his behavior was bizarre enough, and particular enough, to invite speculation as to his homo sapiens (or not) nature. He appeared in the summer of 2005, dancing on screens across the world, in a series of five videos. Each of the videos was a little over a minute in length, and each featured the ringtone dancer in a different public location--a pet store, a grocery store, another grocery store, a starbucks, and a snowy field. Each video featured the ringtone dancer dancing to

the same song--or rather the same ringtone--emanating from the cell phone seen in the upper-right corner of each video. The ringtone is a ringtone-version of a song from the Tchaikovsky ballet Swan Lake; possibly that provenance had some influence on the ringtone dancer--his unitard-based outfit, his somewhat balletic, wild gyrations--but probably not. More probably he was unaware of the ringtone's origins, and the ringtone dancer's link to the most famous ballet of all time is just one of those interesting coincidences of history.

The ringtone dancer's next public appearance--later in the summer of 2005--was at the awards ceremony for the Contagious Media Showdown, a contest run by the Eyebeam Arts Group that was intended to serve as an (early) experiment in viral media. The ringtone dancer was featured on the CBS Evening News with Bob Schieffer, and his videos collected over 200,000 unique views; not enough to win the contest, but an Honorable Mention award was created specifically for the Ringtone Dancer, in order to possibly entice him into attending the ceremony; which he in fact did, dancing onstage to accept his award, and dancing offstage and away directly following, while the ubiquitous ringtone played on the stereo system.

Following that, the ringtone dancer disappeared from public view, only to reappear a year later, in the summer of 2006. This second appearance was in a commercial of sorts--properly speaking, a PSA--sponsored by Rocketboom and the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Collective. The ringtone dancer's function was to serve as a spokesdancer: promoting awareness of the toxic chemicals in rechargeable batteries, and advertising the presence of a collection site (at Radio Shack) for proper disposal, in order to keep those chemicals from making their insidious way into the environment.

Within this final on-camera appearance of the ringtone dancer, a bit more can be gleaned as to his possible nature. He displays a further range of emotion--confusion, and possibly anger, when he is unable to make his cellphone produce his dancing music--and he appears to possess at least a rudimentary human intelligence, as he does seem to learn that simply throwing away rechargeable batteries is "bad", and disposing of them properly is "good". Indeed, this process of learning seems to provoke in him a kind of joy, as seen in the exuberance with which he communicates his newfound knowledge, and subsequently celebrates by again dancing.

After this episode, the ringtone dancer once again disappears from public view entirely, only to resurface a year and a half later, in the winter of 2008; this time in an obscure fishing village in Mexico, somewhere along the Pacific coast. At least, it appears to be the ringtone dancer. But the record of this time consists of only a few somewhat cryptic photographs, in which his appearance and manner are clearly different. One of the photos seems to show him being attacked by, or perhaps wrestling with, what appears to possibly be a tiny ringtone dancer. The other photos indicate that he was perhaps changing, undergoing some unknown process of evolution.

Subsequent to these final few photographs, the ringtone dancer disappears from the public record, leaving us to ponder where he came from, and why he ever appeared in the first place. Never a word did he speak, or at least if he did, none of those words were ever recorded. All we know is that he loved dancing in public places, and that he only ever danced to one specific ringtone. Why a ringtone? Why only that one ringtone? Beyond that, we can see that he was in fact capable of learning, and of communicating--after a fashion--and that he seems to have carried some interest in acting for the public good. Perhaps it was that initial process of learning, that led him to that obscure Mexican fishing village, not located on any map, and towards that process of evolution that seems to be evinced--possibly--in those photos. "Perhaps", is indeed the most we can say. By and large, the ringtone dancer remains shrouded in mystery, his joyous whirlygig public dancing the only communication he ever gave. And indeed, perhaps that is all he wanted to say. His body of work is collected below, in all its dead-horse-beating glory.