Exploring Mouchette Creepy Website

The video starts with as a browser recording of a Google page using a black background and a female voice welcomes the viewers and introduces the theme that will follow, mouchette.org.
Around 00:23 the user types on the browser bar the URL of mouchette.org and immediately sees the homepage. Her voice at this point is lost behind the volume of the piano but in the transcript provided by youtube the words are more or less clear.

The user opens the dropdown menu of mouchette, says that there is a lot to see in there, and moves away the cursor to the profile picture of mouchette, top left corner, where, while hovering on it, we can see the bubble with text popping up. Then the user clicks on the red arrows that follow up the text, and this is a link to a part of the ‘Suicide Kit’, namely the answers page (http://www.mouchette.org/suicide/answers.php?id=28128)
The voice reads out loud the main question of the suicide kit, “what is the best way to kill yourself when you are under thirteen”, and then asks What and… Why?
Then the user hovers over hyperlinks on the top of the page which are actually the tags of the subjective taxonomy of the suicide kit and the links to them, but she does not follow up to click on the links. She scrolls down through some user responses in 2017 and then goes back to the homepage.

(01:21) From there she clicks on the animated gif of a fly in the middle of the homepage which is a link to ‘The Fly’ (http://mouchette.org/nom/fly.html) and this is where she navigates now.
She finds herself in a white page with a fly in the middle (http://mouchette.org/nom/fly.html), she clicks again on that fly and this brings her to the page with a plate of food and a button ‘it’s me’ flying around (http://mouchette.org/fly/index.html). She’s now wondering about the fingers on the screen and if the ‘it’s me’ button will do something, and she decides to click on it, and now (1:45) she gets at a black page with green text appearing letter by letter at (http://mouchette.org/fly/dead.html?). She now reads loud the text, while we hear the piano sounds.
Please note, no sound whatsoever coming from mouchette’s website has been heard so far, the sound recording function (of Screencast O Matic) is on mute.
When the green text and her reading are over, she is asked to click on the “tell me” button, in order to reply to the new question ‘How can I write these since I am dead?’
She clicks on it, comes to the response page (http://mouchette.org/fly/dead.html?) but after some second she closes the window that popped up without submitting any entry. (2:42)
With a couple of back movements in the browser, using the ‘back’ arrow, she goes back step by step, she reads a sentence from a page (my name means little fly in french) and is again in the homepage. (02:58)

Now she reads the identity list of mouchette (My name is.. I live in. I am 13…). but decides to move her cursor to the top right and click on the moving ant, which holds the secret link to ‘Blind’ (http://mouchette.org/blind/index.html). A black page appears in the browser with tiny images following the movement of the cursor. She moves the cursor a bit in the page, but does not comment or react at all, and goes back to the homepage.(03:20)

She opens the dropdown and goes to ‘Striped Penis’ wondering what this is about without pronouncing the words… She selects it and comes to ‘Plush’ (http://mouchette.org/touch/plush.html).
Not many reactions here, she goes back to the homepage and from the dropdown menu, asking out loud ‘What is the least frightening thing here?’ she picks ‘Birthday’ and visits that page (http://mouchette.org/birthday/index.html) (04:11).
She reads out loud some of the names of the artists on the right side of the screen, that are in the CDRom of ‘Birthday party’, (which I have!!) and clicks on ‘Candy Factory’, which originally is this link (http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/i/ga2750/) but it brings her to a 404 error page (http://error.gmo.jp/?id=bekkne). As her next step the user hovers over the artists names and they become red, she picks ‘Hello’ (http://www.hellobook.org/) and clicks on it, but the page does not work any more, an empty page appears in her browser and then again an error page with text in english. She reads some of the error message and goes back to mouchette.org homepage using the ‘back arrow'(05:04).

In the homepage, from the identity list on the top, she clicks on the word ‘artist’, which is a link to the ‘Eye’ (http://mouchette.org/nom/eye.html) (05:23).
Again,  she reads out loud the text and then clicks on the eye gif which brings her to to the homepage again (http://mouchette.org/index.html) which has now a different background of flowers. In this version of the homepage she wanders a bit around with the cursor, and although it becomes a small hand, indicating there are hidden links, she does not click on any, or doesn’t care to, and goes to the identity list again and hits the number 13 in ‘I am 13 years old’. This is a link to the ‘Fan Page’ of mouchette (http://mouchette.org/fan/fanpage.html) with lots of empty text fields meant for asking questions to Mouchette. After a short scrolling up and down she goes back to the homepage (06:50), saying that “she is just about done with this website…”

This is the ending of the video, which comes while the voice invites viewers to follow the link in the video description in order to explore mouchette.org by themselves.

Additional comments by Nikos:
I find nice the combo of her narration with piano sounds.

Please have a look at the screenshot 2. You can see reactions by other youtube users, on the video of Spook Factor. The user Weeberry Lemon says they wanna communicate and research together with the author-Spook factor on mouchette.org. Someone else says they found out it’s an art project.

Plus, this one does not seem so much connected to the other, russian, videos that sort of form a network to each other. Still, shares many characteristics, but is also a much colder presentation of the site, with not too much emotional depth. Still, this video embeds the work in the same context with other youtubers videos, inside the  context of weird websites.

Martine, do you know this piano track that we hear?

Additional comments by Martine:
I went after the music and I think it’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ by Beethoven, I can’t tell which movement (there are 3 movements, equally soporific). It’s typically a default music background inside many different softwares, and I absolutely hate it, and would switch it off every time I fall upon it, so it really annoys me here instead of soothing me as it should. Why on earth did she choose to add this background music?

I fail to understand what the motivation is for doing this screen-recording video. From the voice of ‘Spook Factor’, the maker, it doesn’t seem funny at all, neither for her or for a viewer, and spooky even less! So what’s the reason?

It seems like a task that she executes by going systematically through a certain number of pages, using the ‘back’ button to land back on the homepage, speaking out the text without caring much for what it says…
What’s the point then? With a Youtube channel called ‘SpookFactor’, why does she choose to visit “the least threatening” pages like she says on 04:04? Why add a soothing music background?
It feels like a task rather than a hobby, so I ask myself what kind of task? And my imagination runs free: it could be a task she gets paid for, like a mechanical turk task, visiting some websites, screen recording and speaking out the text, for a client tracking pedophile crime. So Mouchette could be a website meant to attract kids and make them accessible to pedophiles. There might be a network of people roaming the web searching for pedophile crime and identifying possible pedophile traps. This is what I think when I read these comments like “If mouchette.org is art, no worries…”

The SpookFactor channel could be just a cover for pedophile tracking activity.

metadata->
original url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7-rQJO4xts&ab_channel=SpookFactor
date published: Mar 18, 2018
username: Spook Factor
other info about user, other channels online: https://blurndag.wixsite.com/spookfactor, blurndag@gmail.com, https://www.instagram.com/spookfactor_official/?hl=en
account url: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs5F_n-Lyxg3PNMdXbRocNg
duration: 06.50
tags by user: –
language: english [canada]

saved video information->
Format:MP4 File (.mp4)
size: 16.0 MB
downloaded:‎Sunday, ‎May ‎30, ‎2021, ‏‎6:35:24 PM
frame width: 1280
frame height: 720

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The Youtube transcripts

00:00
[Music]
00:01
hello YouTube once again I am back
00:05
continuing my series on strange or
00:09
disturbing website
00:12
I haven’t uploaded to this series and a
00:16
while so I decided I would make another
00:19
one today
00:23
the the website I’m going to be looking
00:27
at today is called Lucia org
00:33
[Music]
00:37
they there’s apparently a lot of things
00:39
to click on this I’ve seen like somebody
00:42
go through this for like a minute but I
00:44
haven’t seen much okay um
00:51
what why
00:55
[Music]
00:58
what is the best way to clear yourself
01:00
on your honor
01:02
[Music]
01:09
jumping up
01:16
this is quite bad actually you looking
01:19
at
01:20
[Music]
01:31
but that guy but as he fingered
01:36
[Music]
01:42
I some I know that if you click this
01:44
it’ll bring you something
01:47
maybe what happened
01:50
I think I’m good
01:53
you killed me you click Barney why do
02:00
you have click on buttons before you
02:04
know what behind you are in clear oh my
02:12
god I’m so sad to beat it it’s a
02:16
dreadful for only and let ago I was
02:22
happily flying all very good I might I
02:28
don’t think this end I didn’t see
02:30
[Music]
02:43
I’ve never disrespected
02:48
[Music]
02:53
my name meet little fly
02:59
my name is Lucia I live in Amsterdam I’m
03:02
nearly 13 years old I’m an artist may I
03:05
invite you
03:06
[Music]
03:12
you
03:12
[Music]
03:31
I’m going
03:36
what what is with this boat you oh geez
03:42
my laptop so I didn’t mean to click on
03:44
that okay I’m gonna leave this
03:50
[Music]
04:04
what’s the least threatening thing on
04:07
here birthday my last birthday party is
04:14
Annette what took Boyd am preparing
04:19
candy factory
04:22
[Music]
04:28
what about
04:29
[Music]
04:37
hello test page
04:41
[Music]
04:56
okay um I don’t seem to be able to
05:00
access I took these websites I don’t
05:04
want to look too far
05:05
through this stuff okay so I come across
05:07
anything you know a bit watch and don’t
05:12
really feel like editing this right now
05:16
to be honest
05:17
so I’ll click through a few more things
05:21
and
05:25
yes here is a tip I heard that the only
05:28
way to become an artist is to say you
05:29
are one and then you can call art
05:31
everything right
05:34
which lie in my eye and you’ll find it
05:43
you
05:49
duh
05:59
you
06:04
okay just going for the email again
06:13
okay I think I’m just about done with
06:18
this website if you guys would like to
06:22
exploit yourself I’ll have a link put in
06:26
the description so yeah I continued by
06:29
strange websites seriously and thank you
06:32
for watching this video I once again if
06:36
you would like to see this book for
06:38
yourself and click through more than I
06:40
did you can go down to the description
06:42
of this video and find Apple so hey
06:45
thank you for watching and that’ll be
06:48
all