They Don't Know

A majority of my art is dedicated to researching and elevating the aesthetics of digital virality. Memes produce patterns that engrain themselves into our ever-expanding cultural matrix. As coordinate points of the social conditions of a specific point in time, memes function both as missionaries and mirror houses. Though they may fade as fast as they spread, the often simple and humorous visual interface of a meme allows for robust and accessible storage in our memory. Comedy is not universal and a meme is only funny to the people it is relevant to. Jokes we share with our friends may not translate in the workplace, similarly, stand-up comics find success and rejection performing the same routine in different locations. While "views" or "likes" function as metrics of success, things like time, location, gender, age, etc. can be altered as independent variables and filtered to determine correlations. While some memes speak to a generalized psychological climate, others find popularity within smaller marginalized groups and experiences. Ultimately I believe that memes are indicative of a major shift in humanity's collective ethos. While the commercial machine has typically taken on an egocentric model that values binary and its asymmetries, the spawn of memes indicates that there is a growing affinity for allocentricism and the desire to be seen as part of the narrative.