For over three decades, Condit served as the professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has been a practicing and respected video artist since 1981 and has worked steadily on the margins of both contemporary art and avant-garde cinema for over 40 years, though her grim subject matter has kept her from the mainstream. Her first video, 1981’s “Beneath the Skin,” serves as an account of an ex-partner of Condit’s who murdered another woman he was romantically involved with at the same time as the artist. He then hid her mummified body in a bedroom closet.

Though she has never had formal New York City gallery representation, her videos have been a consistent presence on film-screening circuits for decades. In 2008, the video and installation artist Mary Lucier curated a solo exhibition of work by the artist at the nonprofit Cue Art Foundation in Manhattan. “People used to go through the halls singing the songs from her videos,” said the lecturer Carl Bogner, who was a longtime colleague of Condit’s at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The artist’s unlikely social media resurrection began in 2015, when a YouTube excerpt from “Possibly in Michigan” started getting passed around on the news aggregation and discussion website Reddit, where the video found a home on select subgroups of the page, known as subreddits. Forums including r/Creepy and r/NotTimAndEric — the latter of which refers to work that recalls the comedy duo of the same name — started sharing “Possibly in Michigan,” which led to the video being featured in a number of YouTube compilations. It was on one of these supercuts that the piece caught the eye of the 17-year-old TikTok user @vrisrezi, who uploaded select audio from “Possibly in Michigan” onto the platform. After that, the video gained popularity among many of the surreal makeup and costume-play subcommunities that populate the app. At the time of writing, the #PossiblyInMichigan hashtag on TikTok had over 12 million views. The video’s YouTube upload had over 750,000 views, while another recently deleted excerpt had around 875,000. “This is a wild time in my life — you couldn’t predict it,” Condit said. “It’s funny, I don’t have a gallery, I don’t have those things, but the internet has been,”— and here she interrupted herself — “I get so many hits,” she concluded.

THIS ISN’T THE FIRST time “Possibly in Michigan” has popped up on the fringes of popular culture: In 1985, it was broadcast on the Christian program “The 700 Club.” As the final images of the video play — a garbage truck crushing bags of human remains — the phrase “Funded by Grants From: The National Endowment for the Arts & the Ohio Arts Council” appears onscreen. This was at the height of a moral panic around provocative art and culture, and Condit’s video — like the work of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe — was a prime example of the apparent amorality of art being made with the assistance of government funds.