In January 2014, LaBeouf stated that his Twitter account was "meta-modernist performance art”, following a sequence of appropriated Twitter apologies and skywriting messages in response to revelations he had plagiarized the work of graphic novelist Daniel Clowes. Collaborating with British artist Luke Turner and Finnish performance artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö, LaBeouf embarked upon a series of actions described by Dazed as "a multi-platform meditation on celebrity and vulnerability".
On February 9, 2014, LaBeouf caused controversy at the Berlin Film Festival by walking out of the press conference for Nymphomaniac, quoting the famous "seagulls" statement made by French footballer Eric Cantona: "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea." Later that night, he arrived at the red carpet wearing a brown paper bag over his head emblazoned with the words "I am not famous anymore".
Two days later, LaBeouf, Rönkkö, and Turner staged a six-day performance in a Los Angeles gallery entitled #IAMSORRY, in which LaBeouf sat wearing a tuxedo and the paper bag, silently crying in front of visitors. Attendees were allowed to enter one at a time, and invited to choose an item from a table of "implements" to take in with them, including a Transformers toy, an Indiana Jones whip, a bottle of Jack Daniel's, a pair of pliers, a ukulele, a bowl full of hateful tweets directed at LaBeouf, and a copy of Clowes' book The Death-Ray. Time columnist Joel Stein, who spent three days waiting in line to see the performance, observed that LaBeouf "was immensely present" and that "he was whatever was projected upon him", while Kate Knibbs of The Daily Dot found the experience "genuinely disturbing" and "felt like I was further dehumanizing someone whose humanity I'd discounted". The Daily Beast's....... Andrew Romano opined, "There was more going on in those few seconds than in a lot of contemporary art. LaBeouf's look-at-me Internet penance ritual had become an actual moment between actual people." The following November, in an email interview with Dazed Digital, LaBeouf said that a woman "stripped [his] clothing and proceeded to rape [him]" during the February performance.