Cat on a Keyboard in Space

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About

Cat on a Keyboard in Space (also known as Space Cat or Astro Cat) is a photoshopped image of a cat posing on a musical keyboard on top of a photo of outer space. Due to the nonsensical yet amusing nature of the artwork, it became a template for image macros and video remixes, particularly on the image-sharing community YTMND.

Origin

The image was published on the synthesizer blog MatrixSynth^[2] in a post titled "Space ARP" on June 13th, 2006, which credited Andy Squirrel as the creator of the picture. The post also revealed that the keyboard used in the image was a 1972 ARP Odyssey^[1] analog synthesizer released.

On September 18th, YTMND user napalmnabuco created a page titled "catonakeyboardinspace"^[3] under the subdomain "whatyouseewhenyoudie.ytmnd.com", which included the original Space ARP image accompanied by the song "Brazilian Flower"^[4] by the electronic musician Jean-Jacques Perrey.^[13] As of April 4th, 2012, the page has accumulated over 915,000 views.

Spread

On September 22nd, MatrixSynth^[6] posted a follow-up blog article linking to the original YTMND site and pointed out the odd subdomain. In February of 2007, the YTMND site was picked up by sites like Digg^[7] and StumbleUpon.^[8] On March 4th, a YouTube^[14] version of the YTMND page was uploaded by user BSDorn, which received over 100,000 views within five years.

Months later on September 23rd 2007, the first Urban Dictionary^[9] definition for "Cat on a Keyboard in Space" was submitted by user BDizzunn, which referenced the YTMND sub domain (shown above). On September 29th, 2008, the cat was featured in a xkcd comic titled "Height", which compared the relative distance of various objects in the universe from Earth.

On May 22nd, 2009, a Facebook^[11] page was created for "Cat on a Keyboard in Space" in the "musician/band" category with the description "people say I look like Wilford Brimley." On February 8th, 2010, an image macro featuring the space cat and the caption "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this!" was submitted as a t-shirt design on the online retailer SpreadShirt.^[15]

On May 19th, 2011, the image was posted to media sharing website Flvrd^[16] and received a comment from user PewPewPew saying "This picture has pretty much summed up the Internet." The meme has spread on the microblogging site Tumblr^[17] under the tag "#cat on a keyboard in space."

Notable YTMNDs

The influx of YTMND "Cat on a Keyboard in Space" sites continued with pop culture-related mash ups, such as the Harry Potter Sees The End of Book 7 site posted by user quacx. Eventually, it spawned more than 110 YTMND sites^[12] under the tag "catonakeyboardinspace" and an additional 20 sites under the initialized tag "coakis." Other notable examples include: