Cat Frazier (1991–2026) approached digital art with curiosity, humor, and a healthy resistance to the discipline’s demand for restraint. Her animated texts captured the energy of the early web's visual culture: bright colors, glowing effects, elaborate type, nostalgic software, and images that often zoomed around the page.
Beginning with her Tumblr project AnimatedText, Cat built a large, welcoming audience for work that spanned memes, graphic design, and internet folklore. She was equally interested in the lifecycle of an image after it left her hands. Remixes, reposts, and variations were not seen as threats to her authorship but as part of the work’s ongoing journey through online communities.
The piece included in the exhibition Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film, titled Self care is officially over… We’re doing drugs again (2022), showcases her talent for blending raw humor with vivid imagery. Like much of her work, it transforms a simple phrase into a lively, fast-moving loop of delight.
We were privileged to collaborate with Cat and to feature her work in the exhibition and catalogue. She brought warmth and playfulness to digital culture, which at times can become overly polished, predictable, and impersonal. Her creations encouraged people to be expressive, silly, nostalgic, and sincere all at once. We will remember her fondly and with great admiration.