Eva & Franco Mattes have been investigating the internet’s effects on society since the 1990s, reflecting on how networked images and online communication reshape our private and social behaviour. Their artworks have been exhibited internationally in major museums, galleries and festivals all over the world. In this last installment of the MemesteticA online program, introduced by art historian and curator Valentina Tanni, they will deliver a lecture on their most recent work.
Can we consider internet memes a proper art form? And which tools can we use to better understand their hidden meanings? In this conversation, Valentina Tanni, author of the book “MemesteticA – The Eternal September of Art”, and the Clusterduck collective, whose intensive research on memes is internationally renowned, work toward answering these questions while also presenting a few case studies from their recent work.
Is it possible to transform ugliness and mediocrity into something beautiful? This is the difficult goal pursued by Smetnjak, an anonymous collective from Slovenia that has been mixing memes with theory and art for over a decade. In this conversation with art historian and curator Valentina Tanni, a member of the collective comments on their meme production and also presents their first exhibition Everything Must Go, installed at Aksioma in Ljubljana.
Joshua Citarella is an artist researching online political subcultures. In this conversation with art historian and curator Valentina Tanni he describes the aesthetics of Gen Z memes – referring to the content of his famous essay “Politigram & the Post-left” – and he also comments on the troubled relationship between online creative communities and the institutional artworld.
Marc Tuters is an assistant professor in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and studies online subcultures within a research group called OILab. In this conversation with art historian and curator Valentina Tanni he comments on the role of weirdness, nonsense and obscurity in the context of the “deep vernacular web”, also in relation to the activity of alt-right political groups and to the development of conspiracy theories.
Installation 22 May 2021 Central market, Ljubljana
Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists
In the current stage of the so-called platform economy, targeted advertising has become the main source of income for social networking platforms. User data are collected, their preferences and interests analized and turned into information that can be sold to the companies willing to reach them. This advertising mostly takes the form of moving or still images, but they are not pictures to be looked at: they are rather made to be clicked on. They are “operational images” (Harun Farocki), meant not to represent anything, but to trigger an action. Paradoxically, really looking at them can thus turn into a critical, subversive gesture in itself. Selected in the framework of the U30+ initiative, Tina Umer’s project Gone dives deep into this pool of images, selecting them, magnifying them, manipulating them by means of embroidery and textiles, and turning them into objects of aesthetic contemplation and critical thinking again.
THE AUTHOR
Tina Umer (1991) lives and works in Gothenburg (SE). She finished BA in Visual Communication at Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, and in 2019 MfA in Photography at Valand Academy, Gothenburg (SE). In her work she explores themes like personal symbolism, materiality, layers of the photographic medium and material culture, as well as the ways the online and offline realities meet. She uses digital and analogue photography, textile and installation. She participated in several group and solo exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. Her dummy book Danish Mountains was shortlisted for the Nordic Dummy Award 2018. She was the Artist in Residence at Witte Rook in Breda, the Netherlands, 2020. She received grants from the Hasselblad foundation, Adlerbertrska foundation, AAA foundation and Municipality of Koper.
CREDITS
Author: Tina Umer
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2021
Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana
This book is not only a guide to Clusterduck Collective’s latest work, “The Detective Wall”. It is also your key to the unsettling, nonsensical, but ultimately liberating parallel universe called the memesphere.
How does one make sense of a senseless world? How can one represent the unrepresentable? How would one map the unmappable?
Part of Clusterduck Collective’s new participative transmedia project, Meme Manifesto, the Wall is loaded with meanings, symbols, paintings and memetic fossils – joined together by a plot, but difficult to decipher. This book will guide you in the process, giving you precious hints.
Get ready to explore another dimension. Get ready to get paranoid. Get ready to get lost.
While opening and reading these pages, Clusterduck recommends great care and to proceed at your own risk. As Marc Tuters points out in his introduction to the Guide: “The cleverness of Clusterduck lies in the seriousness with which they approach an object that refuses to be taken seriously. It is this attitude that has permitted them to stare into the abyss on our behalf, and not to become monsters themselves.”
Let’s hope that his words are true. Let’s hope it’s not a trap. Let’s find out.
EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 180 pp | colour | soft cover | 2021 ISBN 978-961-95064-7-9
Supported by IMPAKT as part of Clusterduck’s EMAP 2020 residency, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana
Valentina Tanni’s lecture is a comprehensive introduction to the topics in her book MemesteticA – The Eternal September of Art, originally published in Italian by Nero Editions and just released in Slovenian by Aksioma. In this presentation, the author delves into the wild and aesthetically challenging universe of memetic imagery and viral content, analyzing its specific language and building connections with the history of modern and contemporary visual art.
Series of talks Curated by Valentina Tanni 20 May–23 June 2021 Online
This series of online conversations that accompanies the launch of the Slovenian edition of Valentina Tanni’s book MemesteticA explores the world of memes and participatory culture by focusing on its relationship with modern and contemporary visual art. The goal is to discuss meme aesthetics and to investigate the role that this unregulated cultural system – characterized by an unprecedented level of participation – will have in reshaping our concept of art and its role in society.
We are told that memes are the language of advertising – so what? Smetnjak has no problem with its jollity. You don’t have to be sad to do politics, declares Foucault, even if the thing you’re fighting is abominable. Except that the repugnant is not what we’re up against (it’s the mediocre!), and we’re not fighting it either (it’s tricks, not conflicts). Smetnjak’s memes don’t judge; they scramble the tired binary oppositions. To scramble is to complexify, to stuff with meanings, to weave a network of connections. Scrambling is the movement of schizophrenia but also of the capitalist market, which ceaselessly breaks up the continuity of any tradition. When it comes to culture, the market is the argument of our conscientious right-wingers, but isn’t it really just a smokescreen for more paranoid folklorisms? The leftist virtuousness, which refuses to compromise with the commercial, doesn’t vibe with us either. It’s a drag. We prefer to entertain, to disrupt, to sell. In this spirit, Smetnjak’s exhibition delivers its memes in every possible commercial format and puts them all on sale. Everything must go, we shout, if only for a moment!
AUTHOR
Smetnjak is an anonymous collective from Slovenia that has been mixing memes with theory and art for over a decade now. Its memes seek to redirect the reality of everyday politics, where shit and mediocracy abound, toward something kinder and funnier. With a knack for going viral, Smetnjak’s work has been featured in countless feeds and sites like critical-theory.com, versobooks.com, adsoftheworld.com and artribune.com. Everything Must Go is its first solo exhibition.
► Originally published in Italian language by NERO Editions. ► The Slovenian edition is available HERE.
In the 21st century, art has become a weird thing, weirder, even, than it was before. The Internet, new technologies and social media have stormed our visual universe with gifs, photoshopping and all kinds of appropriation practices. Trolls, YouTubers and Instagrammers are leaving an aesthetic legacy that recalls the precepts of the historical avant-gardes, cheerfully distorted in a bizarre and wild way. How do the arts that we find in museums react to such retaliation? What if the art history books of the future would list not only works of art made by those formally recognised artist-geniuses, but also all memesmade by anonymous users hidden behind all those absurd pseudonyms? This book is the first to draft a comprehensive cartography of the relationship between visual arts and digital culture from the early 2000s–on, where Valentina Tanni traces back the path “from Duchamp to TikTok”, defining the contours of one of the most interesting landscapes of our present.
SI | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 272 pp | B/W | soft cover | 2021 ISBN 978-961-95064-8-6
Colophon
Valentina Tanni: MemesteticA – The Eternal September of Art Published by: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Published in the framework of Tactics & Practice #11: MemesteticA
Highways, antennas, containers, storehouses, pipes, submarine cables, sensors: the word infrastructure usually refers to “matter that enables the movement of other matter”, the underlying organized structures and mediators that support human exchanges and the value people associate with them. However, simple observation suggests that something increasingly valuable is happening not simply “above”, but both within and outside, as well as in-between our so-called infra-structures while humans design and inhabit them in ever more convoluted ways, investing their emotions in them and using them to measure, automate and build world visions and expectations about the future. This essay is an introduction to artistic methodologies that map, tour, stage, dissect, tell, visualize, tear open, restitch and embody the composite networked structure that we sometimes call our Society, sometimes the Internet, and sometimes Planet Earth. Finding alternative ways to inhabit it, perform or run it allows us to discover more about these infrastructures and ourselves within them.
EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 180 pp | colour | soft cover | 2021 ISBN: 978-961-95064-3-1
Colophon
Bani Brusadin: The Fog of Systems. Art as Reorientation and Resistance in a Planetary-Scale System Disposed Towards Invisibility SPECIAL EDITION PostScriptUM #37 Series edited by Janez Fakin Janša
Publisher: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana Represented by: Marcela Okretič
Poofreading: Sunčan Stone Mechanical Editing: Miha Šuštar Design and layout: Luka Umek
(c) Aksioma | All text and image rights reserved by the author | Ljubljana 2021
Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Ljubljana and the Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) through the Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture (PICE).
This essay is the result of a research funded by a grant of the Oficina de Suport a la Iniciativa Cultural of the Generalitat of Catalonia in the year 2020.
Aimed at: academics, scholars of political science, sociology and anthropology, web lovers, technology lovers, individual researchers in the political and social field, CCRU fans and occultists and l/accel curious
We all have experienced from our point of view the ugly consequences of what meme and social media propaganda can bear. Recall the incessant online propaganda made by the neo-Nazi and white supremacist media apparatus (the so called alt-right) for which Donald Trump himself has repeatedly shown support: from his infamous tweet of 2015 at the beginning of the electoral campaign, which depicted him in the guise of Pepe the Frog, up to explicit declarations in support of white supremacism, to the devastating consequences that the cult of Qanon has had in dividing friends and families by bringing the most unexpected internet users (from your yoga teacher, to your concerned mum, to a psychedelic shaman) to the verge of conspiracy theories.
What can we learn from this mess? Can a meme change the reality we live in? Which were the most influential or maybe even magical memes in the history of the web? Can we subvert those mediatic strategies from a grassroots standpoint?
During Memes as Hyperstitional Technology, Clusterduck will introduce the tools and practices which the members of the collective rely on to explore the world of memeology and subcultural internet studies. Clusterduck will then assist the participants during a session of field research into the depths of the social media web. The goal of this session would be to unravel the relationship between Internet memes and hyperstitional technologies.
We will split the participants into groups to delve further into the research and examine the same object from multiple points of view. We will use Telegram chats and other messaging platforms to share inputs, findings and contributions while drawing connections and producing analyses of the phenomena we encounter. The final part of the workshop will involve mutual work on a digital collage, inspired by the work of Aby Warburg, to resume your research and thus include it in the “Detective Walls” panels of Meme Manifesto.
The workshop is part of Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project about Internet Memes that explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology, where Clusterduck is investigating different aspects of meme culture through various media: an art book, an interactive website, a physical installation and a participative workshop. The results from Memes as Hyperstitional Technology will be included in the compilation work of Meme Manifesto.
THE AUTHORS
Clusterduckis an interdisciplinary collective working in the fields of new media studies, design and transmedia, investigating processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-based content. It curated the online exhibition #MEMEPROPAGANDA, hosted by Greencube Gallery, which was presented at The Influencers Festival (Barcelona), Tentacular Festival (Madrid), IFFR (Rotterdam), Urgent Publishing (Amsterdam, Arnheim), Radical Networks (Berlin) and others. Clusterduck is currently developing Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project that collectively explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology. The first stage of the project has been developed at IMPAKT (NL) during this year’s EMAP/EMARE residency programme and presented at ARS ELECTRONICA 2020. Clusterduck also created the participative exhibition #MEMERSFORFUTURE, investigating the role of memetics in the global climate justice movement. The exhibition has been shown at re:publica 2020 and IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2020.
In the framework of: konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art The project konS:: Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
According to the original definition first proposed by biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, memes are ideas that travel and spread faster than others by means of reproduction and evolution. In a mass media environment, memes can be anything from popular images to short scenes from movies and television series, sketches or music from advertisements. Since the late nineties, memes have found an ideal ground to flourish in the “spreadable media” (Henry Jenkins) environment provided by the internet. Viral videos, weird pictures and insider jokes spread quickly within a medium that allows instant manipulation and sharing. Since its founding, interdisciplinary collective Clusterduck has been increasingly concentrating its research efforts on memes, resulting in the creation of several transnational chats on various online platforms and leading to a thorough investigation of the processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-related content. While their online exhibition #MEMEPROPAGANDA explored the potential of memes for political activism, the transmedia projectMEME MANIFESTO(2018–ongoing) explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology. Based on the aesthetics of online conspiracy theories, ancient grimoires and cutting edge contemporary digital design, MEME MANIFESTO strives to be a manual for memetic production, a highly refined documentation of the contemporary memetic landscape and a collective investigation about the hidden sides of the Internet. MEME MANIFESTO explores different aspects of meme culture through various media: a website installation and a participative archive called “Safari”, the physical installation “Detective Wall” and a series of workshops entitled “The Meme Manifesto Protocols” where participants are called on to contribute content, images and discussions to the implementation of MEME MANIFESTO. The project was implemented during the Emap/Emare residency 2020 at Impakt and is now starting to travel the world. During its visit to Aksioma, Clusterduck is bringing a preview of “Detective Wall”. Taking inspiration from Aby Warburg’s famous “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” and with a nod to the so-called “Crazy Wall” shown in the “Pepe Silvia” meme, the ten panels composing “Detective Wall” are an investigation around ten different themes and moments of memecultural history, spanning the period from 2006 to the present day. The visitor is invited to explore the crazy wall – and the research behind it – with the help of “The Detective Wall Guide” co-published by Aksioma and Impakt. And to give a closer look into the digital version of the panels, through a series of attributions and links Clusterduck is inviting visitors to go down an almost infinite series of rabbit holes. In doing so, Clusterduck recommends caution and to proceed at your own risk. As Marc Tuters points out in the introductory text of the Guide: “Seen through the parallax perspective of totality (Jameson) and of [the] micropolitical (Deleuze and Guattarri), Clusterduck’s impossible project to map meme culture has something of the qualities of subcultural vaccine, inoculating ourselves through controlled exposure. Like the Coronavirus we know that chan culture will never go away — no matter how much some might wish it would. As per the Accelerationists, there is thus no way out but through. The cleverness of Clusterduck lies in the seriousness with which they approach an object that refuses to be taken seriously. It is this attitude that has permitted them to stare into the abyss on our behalf, and not to become monsters themselves.”
THE AUTHORS
Clusterduck is an interdisciplinary collective working in the fields of new media studies, design and transmedia, investigating processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-based content. It curated the online exhibition #MEMEPROPAGANDA, hosted by Greencube Gallery, which was presented at The Influencers Festival (Barcelona), Tentacular Festival (Madrid), IFFR (Rotterdam), Urgent Publishing (Amsterdam, Arnheim), Radical Networks (Berlin) and others. Clusterduck is currently developing Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project that collectively explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology. The first stage of the project has been developed at IMPAKT (NL) during this year’s EMAP/EMARE residency programme and presented at ARS ELECTRONICA 2020. Clusterduck also created the participative exhibition #MEMERSFORFUTURE, investigating the role of memetics in the global climate justice movement. The exhibition has been shown at re:publica 2020 and IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2020.
Clusterduck An Investigation of Memes as Art and Art as Memes
Workshop WED, 19 May 2021 3:30 pm–6:30 pm Online
The workshop is full! The registration is not available anymore.
Language: English Max. number of participants: 15
Aimed at: academics, activists, art historians, designers, web lovers, visual cultures scholars and whomever may be oriented to an unorthodox approach to internet memes studies.
The workshop is part of Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project about Internet Memes that explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology, where Clusterduck is investigating different aspects of meme culture through various media: an art book, an interactive website, a physical installation and a participative workshop.
Clusterduck will introduce the ubiquitous tools and practices used by the members of the collective to explore the world of memeology and subcultural internet studies. Clusterduck will then assist the participants during a session of field research into the depths of the social media web. The goal of this session would be to unravel the relationship between Internet memes and contemporary Art. Can a meme be considered art? What do memetic forms and art forms have in common? Are some types of memes influenced by artistic movements such as Dadaism, Cubism, Minimalism and Abstractionism?
During our three-hour meeting, we will split the participants into groups to delve further into the research and examine the same object from multiple points of view. We will use Telegram chats and other messaging platforms to share inputs, findings and contributions while drawing connections and producing analyses of the phenomena we encounter. The final part of the workshop will involve mutual work on a digital collage, inspired by the work of Aby Warburg, to resume your research and thus include it in the “Detective Walls” panels of Meme Manifesto.
THE AUTHORS
Clusterduckis an interdisciplinary collective working in the fields of new media studies, design and transmedia, investigating processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-based content. It curated the online exhibition #MEMEPROPAGANDA, hosted by Greencube Gallery, which was presented at The Influencers Festival (Barcelona), Tentacular Festival (Madrid), IFFR (Rotterdam), Urgent Publishing (Amsterdam, Arnheim), Radical Networks (Berlin) and others. Clusterduck is currently developing Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project that collectively explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology. The first stage of the project has been developed at IMPAKT (NL) during this year’s EMAP/EMARE residency programme and presented at ARS ELECTRONICA 2020. Clusterduck also created the participative exhibition #MEMERSFORFUTURE, investigating the role of memetics in the global climate justice movement. The exhibition has been shown at re:publica 2020 and IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2020.
