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Memes: A Microcosm of Art History
- 1. Memes:A Microcosm of Art History
- 3. physicality of memes ● culture; memorable information; symbolic representation; observable cultural phenomenon; unit of imitation… ● information, idea, behaviour or artifacts? ● informations constitutes ideas ● ideas make up behaviours ● behaviours result in artifacts
- 4. memes as gene analogues ● abiological, evolving replicators ● ‘exists’ informationally and is ‘expressed’ culturally ● filtered by minds--selective pressures of environments
- 5. What makes a good replicator? Longevity: remaining in circulation long enough for selective pressures to act Fidelity: accuracy of copying process Fecundity: the rate at which a thing is copied (good memes are all three to various degrees)
- 7. Memes as viruses ● competition to infect minds or mindlike environments ● replication via hosts ● representations from one brain to another
- 12. Art History ● each era is influenced by its environment ● reaction, quotation, criticism, and expansion of previous era’s styles, ideas, and techniques
- 13. Pre-modernism ● rigid style ● rigid conventions ● rigid themes ● rigid genres ● aesthetically pleasing ● technical prowess
- 14. Modernism ● rebellion against tradition ● “Make it new!” ● reason, individualism, innovation, progress ● avant-garde vs kitsch
- 15. Postmodernism ● reaction to modernism ● conceptualism, deconstruction ● pastiche, eclecticism, remix ● cynicism, irreverence
- 16. Metamodernism ● reaction to postmodernism ● new sincerity ● reconstruction ● oscillation ● desire for sense and depth
- 17. preserving building breaking rebuilding -_-
- 18. “Post-Internet” Post-Internet art and aesthetics are shaped by the normalization of the social and technological infrastructures on the internet. Unlike ‘Internet art’, it is not about the Internet as a novel object but the Internet itself as the mere medium.
- 20. Pre-Ironic ● rigid format and usage ● impact font, top text/bottom text ● prescriptivist - “you’re using that meme wrong!” ● simple - meme as viral objects
- 21. Pre-Ironic ● rigid format and usage ● impact font, top text/bottom text ● prescriptivist - “you’re using that meme wrong!” ● simple - meme as viral objects
- 22. Pre-ironics transition to facebook, twitter Comic Old-style New-style image, caption top text + bottom text superimposed on image caption, image italics, times new roman impact, b/w stroke helvetica Sentence case. CAPS lowercase
- 23. Platforms 1. imageboards - conversation, dynamic, 2. aggregators - lots of exposure, static 3. blogs - curation, exhibition, chronological archive 4. facebook - synthesis of all three
- 24. reaction to cringy, kitsch normie pages
- 25. Ironic Memes ● irony of posting intent, irony of style & narrative ● subversive ● intentionally ugly, bad graphics ● dark themes ● memepage as organic art entity ● “normie” memes as found art
- 27. Jpeg ArtifactDistortion Watermarked Stock Imagery
- 28. Visible Brush Stroke Glitch, compression
- 29. The Death of Pepe
- 32. Meta-Ironic ● structural irony ● conceptual ● meta-criticism directed at ironic memers ● meme-concept/medium as found art
- 36. Post-Ironic ● clear meaning ● is it a meme? ● context & usage ● complex ● new sincerity ● descriptivist
- 38. preserving building breaking rebuilding
- 44. Mainstream Meme germline ● Traditionalist to Neo-Traditionalist: from extremely simple, viral content to more complex reference humor ● birth of Pre-Ironic memes: from reference humor and viral content to self-contained linguistic systems ● reactionary Ironic meme culture: subversion of linguistic systems established as linguistic subculture
- 46. Underground meme germline ● from Traditionalist to Proto-Ironic: simple demand for greater novelty results in accumulation of new traits between generations/iterations ● generational turnover: continued demand for novelty means continued demand for the subversion of the norm; Ironic and Meta-Ironic memes arise organically as the result of boredom with the old
- 50. reference Dawkins, 1976. The Selfish Gene Mauricio & Diaz, 2013. Defining and characterizing the concept of Internet Meme Tamariz & Kirby, 2015. Culture: Copying, Compression, Conventionality Weng & Menczer, and Yong-Yeol Ahn, 2013. Virality Prediction and Community Structure GCF, accessed Dec 2015. http://www.gcflearnfree.org/internet101/1.3 Eberly College of Science, accessed Dec 2015. https://online.science.psu.edu/biol011_sandbox_7239/node/7359 MRG Science, accessed Dec 2015. http://www.mrgscience.com/yr-8-topic-5-materials.html Bioteaching, accessed Dec 2015. http://bioteaching.com/natural-selection/
- 51. reference The Philosopher’s Meme, 2015 https://www.facebook.com/thephilosophersmouth/?fref=ts PIMCC, 2015 https://www.facebook.com/PIMCCII/?fref=ts Shitpostbot5000, 2015 https://www.facebook.com/shitpostbot/?fref=ts Parallel Universe Memes, 2015 https://www.facebook.com/Parallel-Universe-Memes- 920229471371578/?fref=ts Know Your Meme, 2015 http://knowyourmeme.com/
Editor's Notes
- This search for memes and meme equivalents has been the atomization of culture. Very useful--we can basically use this as the source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics#History There are ridiculous amounts of definitions that arose over the years. We’ll show you which ones are the most plausible. The word “meme” will be used to describe both “Internet Memes” which are the popular 1976: Unit of cultural transmission (Dawkins) 1995: Distinct memorable units (Dennet) 1996: Cultural-representational replicators (Sperber) 1998: An observable cultural phenomenon (Gatherer) 1999: Unit of imitation (Blackmore) 2001: An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, especially imitation (Oxford English Dictionary)
- One thing is certain: that which we are attempting to explain via memes exist--it is a matter of An information is data stored in brains or brain-substitutes. An idea is a mental representation of an object. (chemicals and molecules) A behaviour in this case is the cultural expression of ideas. An artifact in this case is what is created through behaviour. (genotypes and phenotypes)
- The meme-gene analogy was Dawkins’ initial position in his Selfish Gene; its emphasis was that culture is made up of ideas, which are what is being evolutionarily selected rather than cultural praxes or artifacts themselves. The foundation was the gene-centred evolution he presented in his book: that genes or biological replicators are what is being selected in evolution, rather than organisms or species. The importance of this shift of focus is an attack on the misconception that organisms are the locus of selection; genes are selfish insofar as they are selected according to their ability to better propagate, even at the cost of their vessels. Dawkins uses memes to act as a similar unit of ‘selfish replicators’ within the organism of a person or the population of brains in which memes reside. Regardless of the consequences on the ‘meme machines’ which carry them, memes are selected for according to their ability to propagate better.
- traits of a successful (memes are seen to have all three; our point is that the three vary depending on their kind) replicator (various, inherited and selected informations) Longevity: remaining in circulation long enough for selective pressures to act Fidelity: accuracy of copying process Fecundity: the rate at which a thing is copied Keep these concepts in mind for now; we shall see near the end of the lecture just how they vary depending on the environments.
- Internet memes exist cybernetically as art: this simply means they exist as aural, visual or linguistic objects in a system of people connected by machines. It is tempting to classify Internet Memes as simply a bizarre form of art, but Internet Memes are not just art; they are art-concepts, necessarily materialized cybernetically. This means their analysis must always be two-tiered: firstly, memetic; secondly, aesthetic.
- The description of what memes are becomes more nuanced as the theory develops over the years, presumably as the result of the Internet providing numerous examples for the theorists to work off of. Dan Sperber’s concept of the epidemiology of representations posits that memes indeed are units of culture, but that it is not copies of the objects (artifacts or cultural praxes) which memes represent. Rather, they are reconstruction of particular objects as ideas within a brain; the image of a meme, which is the image of the cultural object it has created, is perceieved and then encoded into the brain of the recipient as information. This is how memes reproduce: like viruses, they need hosts to reproduce. According to Dawkins decades after his first edition of the Selfish Gene, memes spread ‘like’ computer viruses, from one brain to another. We might go so far as to say that Internet Memes are literally a new form of computer viruses.
- Here’s an experiment by Tamariz and Kirby that showed the way Sperber’s ‘attractors’ assert normalizing influence on objects. They basically played Chinese Whispers with random squiggles, making participants ‘pass on’ the information by reproducing each participant’s drawing prior to their own after briefly looking at it. The entire series of each drawing is analogous to THIS is our most promising candidate for the explanation of Internet Memes, since it makes use of informations as a base unit rather than speculations of cultural atoms.
- for Sperber, representations are equivalent to Dawkins’ memes, except they spread and move around in a much more fluid manner. They are not merely copied off of templates like genes but, like any other shared information, are decoded into understandable form and then ideated later at the point of re-production, to be encoded into a message, sent to another, and then decoded by that receiver. Here then is a deviation from the analogy of generations and Darwinian evolution: memes increased exponentially in fecundity with the number of participants in Internet culture, unlike genes which would have seen a more linear increase towards a plateau with the number of survival machines which reproduce them. Among many factors is the increased speed of the Internet and the demand for increasing novelty. Reproduction has no immediate cost for memes; only opportunity cost. For instance, a meme might become boring if it becomes too popular too quickly: everyone hates one hit wonders after the first month. Steadysellers with high longevity are generally much more gradual. Vertical transmission (i.e. the iterations of a meme as it evolves in Lamarckian fashion through edits or other mutations) What this dissolution of true generations
- This is what we end up with--we can see how the rise of the Internet Meme accelerated the development of memetic theory. The evolution of Internet Memes is both Darwinian and Lamarckian--bad memes, especially impotent specimen such as corrupted files or glitched pictures will generally not be reproduced in most niches. Acquired traits are passed on with very high fidelity through save and repost; the constance of this memetic allele selection means selective pressures are not limited to ? memes are closest to viruses in the need for a host in their reproduction, but their behaviour as Internet Memes resembles bacteria--culture is selected and engineered between reproductions.
- Internet Memes, or the organismic equivalent to their constituent memes, are therefore less like viruses or genes than they are like bacteria: within the Internet of computers, they act as if they were organisms, not incomplete bits of genetic information passed on between ACTUAL organisms (i.e. humans). The interesting thing about a meme is that it can spread independently of other memes; just as bacteria may exchange snippets of their overall gene materials, an Internet Meme may swap and trade constituent memetic materials among each other. Even the simplest organism yet known, Mycoplasma genitalium, has at least 256 essential genes considered essential for its survival.
- The best thing about this is that it’s also a great example of a post-postironic meme. If this were a static image it would get parodied by changing the words on top or quick photoshop and spread around for a week or so then die out
- The prototypical imageboard platform deters public exhibition but encourages intimate interpersonal conversation--the root of creativity, ingenuity, parody, and reinvention. Aggregators, on the other hand, engage in mass circulation whilst missing the intimate conversational aspect, which is where new ideas are actually developed. Hence, both stagnate as a result of their respective formats lacking an appropriate balance of mutability and exposure. The two platforms are antithetical in structure--both lie on the extremes, which make them inhospitable for memes to function as a dynamic artistic movement. Curation is arguably the most important aspect of a developing movement, since the artist-curator provides the intellectual analysis/synthesis and therefore the artistic vision of what is good and relevant, and also where everything should go next. Blogs also offer a valuable format of exhibition--the way that posts are presented to the public is simultaneously novelty-oriented, so the public can follow/participate in the current trends, yet also provides access to archived content in chronological order, so that the trajectory and origins can be understood by new audiences or looked back upon for inspiration. Facebook presents as the synthesis of the three types of platforms mentioned above
- Top half Premodern (traditional) art was about the celebration and mimicry of God-figures or perfection; modernism was focused on the perfectability of humanity; postmodernism Bottom half The paradigmatic shift from premodern art through modernism and postmodernism into metamodernism is analogous to the process of stylistic progression in memes from pre-ironic through to post-ironic.
- Pre-Ironic to Ironic: memes are subverted by the Underground through the subversion of
- the four stages of the theories: simple historical progression paralleling modern art history simple darwinian evolution simple lamarckian cultural evolution hybridic meme-organism evolution
- Everyone who took biology in high school has heard of Lamarck: he is the laughing stock against whom Darwin triumphs. Bodybuilders’ children aren’t born additionally muscular! Giraffes straining their necks during their lifetime has no effect on their offsprings’ genetic makeup either. However, epigenetics suggests some Lamarckian evolution does take place, in which the makeup of germ cells are affected by what happens during the organism’s life. Further, in cultural or sociological contexts the kind of additive, rather than emetic evolution is Lamarckian. She also says we can neither know the mechanism of meme-storage nor specify a unit of meme. Here is where we disagree: we believe that Darwinian and Lamarckian selection intertwine in an operationalizable manner on the Internet as Internet Memes ‘act out’ or simulate virtual meme-organisms. Some like to think of the Internet as either entirely metaphorically or quite literally a big brain, but we will posit there is a third way of looking: that it simulates such a brain, providing an ideal environment for the also simulated meme-organisms.
- Here’s the full model we ended up with for the evolution of IMs since their conception. For now, let us look at what I’ve marked in capitals.
- Pre-Ironic to Ironic: memes are subverted by the Underground through the subversion of
- As we saw in the Underground, the much stronger requirement for novelty meant that the subversive development of memes advanced further in the same time compared to the Mainstream.
- Watch as the organically formed meta-ironic memes from the converge with the inorganically formed Ironic memes from the