Imp Kerr (born June 6, 1980, Uppsala, Sweden) is a Swedish-French artist living in New York City, mostly known for her fake American Apparel advertisement campaign. She was The New Inquirys creative director, and ran the blog The New Shelton Wet/Dry from 2006 until 2025.on archive.org
Early life and education Kerr spent her childhood and teenage years in Paris, France. She moved to New York in 1999, where she graduated from NYU with a degree in magazine journalism and a minor in philosophy. Kerr has a sister, Rosa, who is three years older than she is.
Some bits of Kerr's life were documented on her blog "stereohell", but most of the content was taken off at the end of 2009. The same content was then reposted, in a fragmented and augmented version, on "shines like gold," an experimental blog she ran for The New Inquiry from 2012 until 2021.
Fake American Apparel ads In 2007, Kerr started a fake American Apparel ad campaign in New York, which was covered on several blogs:
"For the uninitiated, over the past few months, a NYC prankster has created several bawdy two-color parodies of AA ads complete with real ad headlines."Dildo Holding Sex Toy, Animal New York, May 20, 2008 Animalnewyork.com, May 20, 2008
"The artist behind the parody American Apparel advertisements continues to operate in downtown Manhattan, where they are now modifying commercial billboards."
On September 9, 2008, a video posted on Stereohell.com revealed that the fake ads allegedly plastered throughout the city were actually Photoshop mockups, something nobody had suspected for one year.
In a final twist, American Apparel ran a tribute ad on the back cover of Vice (November, 2008), showing a compilation of the fake ads.
Wall Street Casinos In December 2008, Imp Kerr created a set of architectural drawings portraying investment banks as Las Vegas casinos.Imp Kerr, Strip's Classic Designs, Investment Banks and Other Financial Services Firms, Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2009 Instagram.com
Imp Kerr's vision was confirmed by The New York Times, in an editorial titled "Wall Street Casino," published on April 28, 2010: "Banks like Goldman turned the financial system into a casino. Like gambling, the transactions mostly just shifted money around."Wall Street Casino, New York Times, April 27, 2010 NYTimes.com"Central banks are casinos." That is the curt definition the Janus Capital money manager gives them in his monthly outlook letter. "They print money as if they were manufacturing endless numbers of chips that they'll never have to redeem." Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2015 WSJ.com
The drawings were shown in the group exhibition Spacer:One at the Tribeca Grand in New York (2010) and featured in n+1 Occupy #4, April 2012.n+1 Occupy #4, April 2012 (PDF)
Media Critique In the essay New Lows (2012)“From what precedes it necessarily follows that the inescapable future of knowledge is banality, falsehood, and overabundance, which sum is a form of ignorance. New lows, IV, December 29, 2012 Thenewinquiry.com, Kerr articulates an early critique of information saturation and accelerated communication, arguing that the overproduction and rapid circulation of knowledge tend toward banality, falsehood, and a systemic form of ignorance. The text develops these ideas through philosophical propositions, fictionalized research narratives, and reflections on media, anticipating later debates on the epistemic effects of mass media, social networks, and digital platforms. The text treats ignorance not as a lack of information but as the necessary outcome of accelerated communication, saturation, and mediation—a structural result rather than a moral failure. It is sharp in insisting that knowledge degrades not through error alone but through banality, repetition, and loss of thresholds, where speed overtakes comprehension and ordinariness overwhelms significance. Unlike earlier media theorists such as Jean Baudrillard or Guy Debord, who approached epistemic degradation primarily through cultural and critical analysis, Kerr frames the process in quasi-formal terms, presenting ignorance as the necessary outcome of the basic structure of informational growth. The essay is characterized by a cold, almost axiomatic tone that refuses critique or nostalgia and instead stages a fatalistic proof, as if epistemic collapse were a law of physics.
DNA-based prediction of Nietzsche's voice
In 2015, Imp Kerr conceptualized a protocol designed to predict the voice of a deceased person (philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the case study) based on genotype data.Imp Kerr, DNA-based prediction of Nietzsche's voice, The New Inquiry, March 18, 2015 Thenewinquiry.comLeiter Reports, March 21, 2015 Leiter Reports To generate the voice, a vocal tract and larynx were 3D-printed. In 2020, researchers used a similar procedure to recreate the voice of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy—by 3D-printing a replica of his vocal tract.Voice of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy reproduced by 3-D printing a vocal tract CNNSynthesis of a Vocal Sound from the 3,000 year old Mummy, Nesyamun ‘True of Voice’ NatureResearchers recreate what mummy's voice would have sounded like CBS This Morning
Imp Kerr study was covered and presented as real on the Canadian public radio CBC during the show As It Happens on March 20, 2015,"The voice of the german philosopher has been brought back to life by science." CBC Radio, As It Happens, March 20, 2015. [As It Happens Podcast Twitter.com"Nietzsche's voice/music removed online due to copyright." CBC Radio, March 20, 2015. CBC.ca and commented as a "piece of performance art" elsewhere. "Impressed with the scientific imaginativeness and attention to detail — the artist knows the relevant science (and has a terrific ear for the conventions of scientific communication)," wrote Jason Eisner, Professor at Johns Hopkins University.Language Log, March 20, 2015 Upenn.eduOpen Culture, March 23, 2015 OpenCulture.com
In 2016, Kerr followed up on the Nietzsche voice project with Nietzsche’s Shadow, an artwork involving the purported collection of shadow fragments associated with Nietzsche in Èze, France, on a path (locally called “Chemin de Nietzsche”) where the philosopher regularly hiked in the 1880s. Kerr and a team of scientists allegedly gathered residue described as “electromagnetic radiation, nitrogen, and xenon,” dated to 1884–1888, which was subsequently condensed into a so-called “photonic fluid” and bottled in flasks by Imp Kerr Laboratories in Manhattan Archived page for “Nietzsche’s Shadow”.
Crypto Casinos In 2021, Kerr revisited the “Wall Street Casinos“ concept with “Crypto Casinos,” a series of drawings depicting cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin as casinos in downtown Las Vegas, using the same signature red-on-white lines and tongue-in-cheek humor. The work playfully references decentralized finance, corporate sponsorships, and crypto culture in the style of her earlier Wall Street series.Imp Kerr, Crypto Currencies and Other Decentralized Entities, Fremont Street, Downtown Las Vegas, NC, 2021 impkerr.com
References
External links The New Shelton wet/dry Imp Kerr on the New Inquiry Gawker articles about the Fake AA campaign Animal New York articles about the Fake AA campaign Copyranter articles about the Fake AA campaign Impkerr.com Shines Like Gold on Salon.com Imp Kerr, Supermarket of Art, The Daily, 2011