The Jon Mud Interview

Mastermind Josh Clancy On The Alamo, AI And Folk Art

By O.A. CARRY FOR: 65,000〡PUBLISHED: October 24th, 2025

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At the end of a dirt road in between cornfields, there’s an apartment that looks like a factory. It’s basically Pee-wee’s Playhouse, except all of the furniture is from IKEA, and in the corner of your eye, at all times, a small entity is peeking from around the corner. Everything is alive. Suddenly, you realize that the ceiling has a face. It’s moving down the wall, and now it’s holding out its hand. There’s a bird perched on its finger. It has the same human face as the wall, and a fried egg on its head. Hooray! It’s beatboxing for you.

Splat!

The sound effect interrupts your trance and the apartment melts around you. You scroll on to the next video; you’re curled up in bed, now watching a Kai Cenat clip with a gambling website’s logo on top. That apartment at the end of the dirt road calls to you. Luckily, its coordinates are easily accessible.

Jon Mud, its gracious host, opens the door for you.

It’s supposed to sound silly. Jon Mud is the name of a TikTok and Instagram account meant to confuse. But the viewer is also supposed to bore into it, get lost in it, and accept its rules at face value.

Walking propane tanks, “chopped” rotating potatoes, a sweatshirt-headed bunny-man going on about his “brand new ripped jeans”… These all converge in the Jon Mud realm as a onesie-skinned tetrapod backs away from the intruder.

Technically speaking, Jon Mud videos are a mix of AI generation, 3D animation and homemade recorded clips filmed by the man behind the Mud persona, Josh Clancy. He uses personal AI systems to bind his likeness into a playable medium.

He’s admittedly been on social media since its earliest for(u)ms, all the way up to the “bloated and floated” mega-sites of today that more and more young people join every hour, slowly becoming one-to-one with the general population. He has his qualms with it, and with AI tech in general—his opinions on the matter flip-flop from doomed to idealist—but the current internet landscape is where he grew Jon Mud, his favorite project out of everything he’s ever worked on (and there are many). It’s folk art through and through, and Clancy is hypnotized by the journey his face is taking.

We got on a call with him the other week to find out if he was real.

At one point, early on, he thought someone was at the door. “Never mind,” he said.

“Do you remember the Alamo?”

“I mean, I never forget,” he replied.

The question poked at Jon Mud’s most viral video (arguably). It’s twenty-eight seconds long but compiles seven vignettes from different “entities” (as they’re called on the Jon Mud wiki): anthropomorphic creatures, all donning the same face as their creator.

The second character is a Humpty Dumpty freakazoid who’s ringing a bell on a sidewalk (like the Salvation Army) and beckoning, “Does anybody remember the Alamo?” The dummy became a fan favorite, as he inspired fan art and memes.

“What's weird about that one is, the idea for it came from a vivid, specific memory of mine,” Clancy said. "There’s this kid, about 14 years old. He is sticking his head out a bus window. We were detasseling corn. That was my job when I was younger. It was on a lunch break or something, and we were just sitting around at lunch, and this kid just pokes his head out the window and starts screaming, ‘Remember the Alamo? Remember the Alamo?’

“It just was one of those things, like, ‘Who are you? Who is this kid? And why is this stuck in my head?’”

I, personally, always thought that the character’s line was a Pee-wee Herman reference.

“Well, right!” Clancy said. “That’s it. The Alamo’s just one of those things. It wasn’t a Pee-wee reference, specifically. I just reached into my past and grabbed one of those things that rings in your head, quite literally.

“There’s this kind of historic bell that rings whenever you hear ‘Remember the Alamo.’ I'm trying to test those cultural soft spots with the stuff that I do. History, cultural appropriation, advertising… A lot of these themes I like to explore are twofold or lateral.

“And it seems that the more true I am to those bells and chimes and voices that stick—that are in my head, from my life—the more it resonates with people as art.”

When Clancy and I began speaking, he rambled about “weird time binding exercises” that he was doing in his free time, “where you take memories and then you just attach 'em to art.”

For example, he told me that Jon Mud, the nickname, was something that his grandpa called him when he was a kid.

“It's got an Alamo quality to it,” he said. “I grew up with all that old-timey shit, ‘cause I’m from the Midwest. It's such an old world still despite it being modernized in my lifetime. There are still remnants of those potatoes.”

The visuals and dreams of Clancy’s past fuel the Jon Mud project. Clancy told me that it all started when he wanted to rebuild one of his memories. It went like this: he was sitting in a basement, with the family dog, and he was looking at a clock blinking 12. “I realized that time didn't actually exist or whatever, you know what I mean?”

I tried to understand.

“Are you familiar with the memory palace?” He asked.

It sounded magical.

He explained the exercise. Basically, to remember things like a grocery list, one imagines a “palace” (which is a setting from your life that you know inside and out; a home, an office, or a school, etc.). If it’s a grocery list, the person mentally places an apple on the table, a cereal box on the counter, and so forth. Then, when they want to remember the list, they mentally walk through the “palace” to recall everything.

When I asked Clancy to remember his first memory and tell it, he built it outwards like so, starting with “crib stuff,” then his grandma, who he lived with, and his mom, and his grandma’s roommate, Gary, who was also in the picture.

“We grew up pretty humble,” he said, not elaborating on Gary, “but my mom always had a computer, which was kind of rare. A lot of memory is from there. I’m in my late 30s, and most kids from my generation didn’t grow up with a computer their whole lives.

“I think that has an impact on your brain. There are people with brains that were shaped by that technology versus people who weren’t.”

Clancy has seen the internet. Its vines have grown around his body.

“I grew up with people from all over the world,” he said. “I would talk to people from Japan and I would talk to people from London, and it was always a network culture to me, my whole life.

“I think that has an effect. I was always more interested in connecting that way than in the local world that I lived in because I literally lived between cornfields. So, I was like, of course I want to go make abstract, 3D geometry with my homie in the weeds or whatever [laughs].”

Clancy ran through the social internet’s evolution, evolving with it, from “rate yourself” message boards like Hot or Not, to MySpace, Facebook, and then PureVolume, a music sharing website that brought up the “scene” community for emo and pop punk. That’s where Clancy first found work, designing T-shirts for bands on the site when he was 15.

He’d later pivot his passion into making shirts for Skrillex, Drake, and other big acts. But before that, it led to his friendship with Jaime Brooks, a prominent figure in Josh Clancy’s lore. The two formed the Pitchfork-acclaimed, cult classic duo Elite Gymnastics during the blog era.

“We combined like the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack with break beats and ethereal Japanese music,” Clancy said. “It just felt really new. This was before any of that stuff now, like break-beatcore and heavy anime-drenched stuff, like Machine Girl. That bedroom DIY, punk, rough-around-the-edges, really sample-rich and just a collage of mixed media.”

The two went to high school together. “We both moved to this small town, I think because both our moms were with a new man,” Clancy told me, but they didn’t really know each other until they bumped into each other at a club in Minneapolis. Clancy approached Brooks because she was wearing a self-made “Ask-ask Paul McCartney" “Int’l Players Anthem” shirt.

“That was the first time I ever met somebody who had spent a lot of time in their own mind, figuring out their own solutions to things,” Clancy said about Brooks.

They decided to smash their heads together and form Elite Gymnastics. Old interviews frame Brooks as the musical genius, while Clancy was lauded for the project’s visuals.

One of their 2012 remixes of Korallreven’s "Sa Sa Samoa” has a stand-out video. Early CGI presents don multiple shades, while Sephiroth and Cloud speak, their souls trapped in jellyfish. Languages of all kinds spell out “ecstasy,” leading to my favorite part, when the word is underlined in a brief moment between the nonchalant seizure warnings.

After sharing their stuff on the Pitchfork forums, Elite Gymnastics gained a cult following. They got management, started playing shows, and while their sound resonated with the internet then, its translation to the real world was obtuse.

“Our shows were terrible,” Clancy said, laughing, “because people definitely didn't know what the fuck we were doing back then. We would just get blackout drunk. We didn't know how else to handle it.

“We tried, we tried,” Clancy continued, further living the odd nights he spent onstage in 2011. “We were caught in between two worlds. We were in these old rock venues, and we're playing off a laptop and singing with autotune.

“Now, that doesn’t seem so crazy. But the world at large is still not ready for whatever Elite Gymnastics was. It’s a little bit too internet. That stuff can't quite cross over yet. It wants to, but it can’t.”

Clancy left Elite Gymnastics in 2012. Disputes with Brooks on tour caused a rift in their friendship. He described it as “standard two crabby people on the road trying to get by.” They didn’t touch base for many years after. Brooks’ relationship with Grimes was one factor.

“Whatever future was created with those decisions—‘We can either do Elite Gymnastics with Josh or you can go this way with Grimes’—whatever was created there was the wrong choice. It’s hard. I think the result of that was not good.”

He wanted intensely to make the music industry work, but he found out that there wasn’t a living to be made. So, in the decade after Elite Gymnastics dissolved, Clancy joined the world of advertising: a move he doesn’t regret but still grapples with.

His portfolio is extensive. He’s worked for major brands and events, like Nike and the Super Bowl, but it’s not what makes him proud.

“I kind of despise and loathe advertising,” he said, “but I can't really make money as an artist. I had to adapt my sensibilities. Advertising… I don't want to do that. I don't think anybody does. It’s a dehumanizing thing from the get go, but it's a lot of people's only option. You know? That LinkedIn world… That LinkedIn world is a scary world.”

When I asked him what he was proud of, he was quick to respond. “Oh, it’s Jon Mud. This is the coolest evolution of anything I've done so far, because I think my goal was always to get to a point where I can sort of experiment with… I call it the fourth dimension,” he laughed. “Whatever, it’s just shorthand for playing around with network culture, where the emergent properties, the memes people make with the characters, playing in that field, is the goal of the work.

“And so, just having that ability is something that I've never had before, and I think that’s really exciting. That’s a cool new thing that's never happened before in my time.”

Clancy had become an escapist artist. If his laptop music didn’t translate to the real world (a concert stage), then why not make a new world, contained in the digital, playing in the new social landscape and with emergent tech to pair?

Jon Mud, the puppeteer, has his hands on the keyboard: a custom one, with glowing under-lights, that wraps around a sphere of an undetermined, massive size. Each of his fingers (of which there are infinite) clicks its keys with his eyes closed, as if from memory but with the same motion as a cat walking across them. The result, put into videos not words, reads as a reaction against the modern internet’s social media, bogged down by platforms trying to eliminate the web’s long tail.

“The internet lately seems to want to be one-to-one with the real world. People have been pushing and trying to align it that way,” Clancy said. “And maybe that's not its strength and, in fact, it can be quite more liberating to not be that.”

A screaming cube is a good example from Jon Mud’s world.

“That's really taken on a life of its own,” Clancy said about the creature, dubbed Squeaky Blockhead or AA in Jon Mud lore. It’s a little white cube thing with an off-center face that shrieks; its mouth makes a perfect O shape when it does, quickly.

Its simplistic form and memorable sonic blast have earned it cult status, as many have drawn it or made small sculptures of it, manifesting in a keychain or a printable paper template that one folds up like origami.

“It’s a box,” Clancy said, laughing, thinking about its simplicity. “They can print it out and put it into different contexts. And in a way, that was another goal of the project; people will get creative and print it out on paper and cut it and do stuff like that. To me, that is the art of the project.

“To me, that's four-dimensional art.

“Like, the moment you've got me creating this avatar of my mythical character and then somebody seeing that and then making art of it… That’s the art. It’s collecting all this stuff that the community is creating and then assembling it as part of the whole thing.”

“It seems to me, also,” he continued, twirling the imaginary phone cord, “that that’s kind of integral to kids’ lives these days, is that culture of drawing and just… boredom [laughs]. I think that’s kind of happening right now because nothing else is going on.

“Jon Mud and I exist in this period where everyone else is getting squeezed [creatively] and I’m just like, well, how ‘bout this [laughs]?

“The community aspect of the project is so beautiful to me. My general gut is to let it be this organic folk art movement kind of thing, and if there does become this culture of people creating the characters and artifacts from the universe, well, that could be a cool aftermarket. Or if people wanted to sell 'em themselves, that's fine.

“I don't want to make any money off of Jon Mud, though,” he clarified, “just more or less because there's not really any money to be made. And if this project is not about money or merchandising, or these things that usually everything is kind of about, then maybe it can finally be something else.

“If I sacrifice this notion of ‘I'm just going to sell you T-shirts and merch’ and just have it be more about, I don't know how else to call it, but the organic, ‘do it yourself’ folk kind of approach, there’s more potential in that.”

Part of continuing the folk art vibe, for Clancy, is reintroducing characters, which he’s done in recent videos with Screaming Blockhead, for instance. In one recent clip, Blockhead is mashed with the Brand New Ripped Jeans beatboxer, another fan favorite, which created a new character fueled by the public’s emotions for both.

“I’m like a crackpot bedroom Walt Disney,” Clancy texted me after the interview. “Or Matt Groening or something but [my followers and I] are making The Simpsons sort of haphazardly together.”

But the Jon Mud project wouldn’t exist without AI. Admittedly, the new tech has helped Clancy fully realize the project, largely due to its efficiency, which allows him to churn out entities like he has a direct portal to another dimension that he controls with a clicker.

It’s the reason why his earliest Jon Mud videos look so different from his new ones, as they were created when Clancy was hunched over at his computer all day, working tirelessly on the 3D animations.

“Once AI arrived,” he said, "I was able to just get 'em out because I could synthesize so many more things at once to demo an idea. And I think that's what I'm really interested in, is just sort of showcasing ideas and feelings.

"With AI, I'm able to generate tons. I'm able to generate custom images for people in the comments. And what that does is that it opens up a new dimension of engagement you can have with people.

“You’re allowed to work more symbolically, less bogged down by language and ideologies,” meaning the vignettes of singing, dancing, screaming ne’er do wells on the Jon Mud page communicate instinctual feelings and reactions outside of traditional language. “It’s the domain of iconography,” Clancy said.

But AI art has baggage. Its social, environmental and economic ramifications are not totally lost on Clancy.

“On the other side, it's completely dehumanizing,” he said about the AI event horizon that society is nearing. “It's completely problematic, it's completely resource heavy,” he continued, and he told me that Jon Mud, the project, really started when he realized that the world of advertising, his career, was about to turn a corner, a nasty one. He saw a glimpse at what the modern Mad Men were about to swing with the newest, robotic intelligence, and he wanted out.

Because what does the post-AI career void entail? Clancy drew a parallel.

“The streamer is a new type of person,” he said. “That type of person didn’t exist.”

I thought of all the kids growing up now, trying to become the next Adin Ross.

I shivered.

“And now, literally everyone puts their money into AI. It’s using all of us and… we’re all just kind of… waiting… [laughs]. But there’s no industry on the other side of it,” he said. “So, it's like, ‘Okay, what are we going to do with it?’ And in some ways, Jon Mud is like, ‘Okay, well here's one idea’ [laughs].”

“I mean, it's remarkable,” he continued. “I truly think it is insane technology. It's truly incredible. And I agree with everyone else, too, that it has a swath of ethical implications that are huge…

“But, it's like, yeah, what else is new? The world is very unethical. It’s fucked up. I dunno what to tell you. It's only going to get worse unless we step up and try to understand it and take accountability for it.”

Clancy isn’t alone in grappling with the contentions surrounding AI art. In 2023, artist and AI proponent Claire Silver debuted one of the first solo exhibitions of the form in NYC at SuperRare. “I do not make statements on whether AI is good or bad. I’m a caveman painting fire,” she said.

“I want to show people that this technology is incredible and it can be humanized,” Clancy said of his own work. “If it can make room for mythical forms of self-expression, where we can literally re-atomize anything in the virtual dimension, I think that's worth considering.”

Then Clancy went off on another tangent, going deeper into the supercomputers that have our data stacked up in a heap, like a trash barge, but it’s precious materials on there; it’s material that we should own.

“We’re inevitably going to have to cross a bridge at some point,” he said, “of talking about what our unalienable rights are. Like, for one, my face is now going to be all over the internet in all sorts of different weird forms. And I obviously knew that when I did it [laughs], but what will it mean when everyone can do that?

“And I think that leads to a very cool and creative world, right? But if that cool, creative world can’t be sustained off of creativity…

“In other words, I think it’s very clear to me that all we want to do is just hang out and be creative. On the internet, there are millions of people who just want to sit on their phone all day and scroll and make videos. And I think that’s cool, but if that's how the world's going to be, at least a large portion of it, we should make that a bit more equitable.”

The idea was big and perhaps possible. But since I spoke with Clancy and when this interview was published, OpenAI launched Sora 2, popping the champagne bottle with a fake video of its founder, Sam Altman, getting arrested. The person who generated it is an OpenAI employee who bragged about it in a tweet. Even Altman found it funny, along with his other mini-me’s that are seen in the project’s recent launch video.

Sora 2 has already had to “pause” the use of Martin Luther King Jr.’s face by others, but their founder’s willy-nilly approach to his likeness being used looms heavily.

How would Clancy, in a new AI creator economy, make our likenesses more equitable?

“Well, you’d have to pay me,” he laughed. “I just know that the [AI] wave is going to hit. People are just going to generate stuff and I think we're about to head to a more creative time…

"And AI won't really be mainstream for a while. I think that's where it gets fun and exciting; that’s where Jon Mud lives, down to the mud, really sitting on the bottom of the floor with it all.”

I thought he sounded optimistic about the future.

“Well, I guess this is the test,” he said when I asked. “I think if Jon Mud can exist, then I can’t be too pessimistic about the world because there’s something there that is a part of me that has worked with it.

“I’m pessimistic about the companies and the behemoth that is just the industries of the world colliding with it. It doesn’t seem to be going well [laughs]. They’re just going to sell it out, burn out. They don’t care. They don’t give a shit.

“But it is precious. It's important stuff. It's our humanity. And I put myself into birds and shit to show that it's both horrific and cute. And that's its problem, it's got so much power, and I just hope that that resonates with people. I think it's more or less my ultimate aim, to have fun with it in the meantime.”