Tag Archives: art

Project HyperEssay I: We are One and Many

“A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Who are we? And why do we exist? I often question whether each of us is truly unique. We define ourselves through the way we dress, the actions we perform, the friends we make, or the way we think. Yet how much of this self-definition actually caught on to the people around us? A criminal who is a loving family desperate to make ends meet. A hero who is secretly a tyrant. A girl who is actually a guy. There are always two sides on a coin. But only one side can be visible at any one time. Whatever goes on behind the scene is hidden to us. It is impossible to define everyone for who they truly are. Thus, we define people around us with what we know about them and vice-versa. In other words, our very own existence define by memes.

Internet meme is one of the most popular term in Third Space. Internet memes tend to be cheeky images or catchphrases that serve to only entertain. When we discuss internet meme we thought of Nyan Cat or the Forever Alone Guy. But memes can also refer to the concepts of subliminal messages, open sources scripts, shareware, adverts, or personal avatar. Memes practically define what the internet is. As long as we are using the internet, we can never escape from exposure to memes. Memes are what help us identify the websites we are visiting, the people we met online, the program we use, etc.


You know this video is going to waste your time thanks to meme.

Without meme, the internet will be a blank dimension. Without meme, each of us will be walking without faces.

My idea for the collaborative project is for everyone in the class to define each other using memes.  We will use images, videos, codes — anything we can find in the internet to define our peers. Each of us is going to be cyber Da Vinci. Our canvas is the internet, and our paint brushes the memes. The product of this project will be a gallery of portraits in the Third Space.


Some artist choose to use rap music and abstract ideas to identity themselves.

Some uses abstract grafitti.

Research 04: HUE HUE HUE!

A glitch is a fault. A fault that reveals the vulnerabilities within the program. Therein lies the fundamental of the “peep culture” — a pervasive yet subconscious voyeuristic attempt in discovery the forbidden zone. The glitch is also the blueprint for “dirty new media”. A medium glorifying the raw yet spontaneous  flux within the cyberspace.

Shredder 1.0 (1997) by Mark Napier is a simple browser game as much as it is a net art. This free source browser allows us to “shred” a given website to pieces. By unscrambling the code of the site (with no direct consequences to the victim site) and rearranging them in random patterns, we have what we can considered the Jackson Pollock of the internet. Thus, creating an intentional glitch.

That is what glitch is all about, revealing the naked skin of a program. When a glitch happens, we the audience gain a peep into said private space, albeit not the most saucy nor interesting one.

Shredder 1.0 (1997) is a peephole. A boring peephole (unless someone feels excited about seeing messed up codes instead of hidden sensational messages), but an interesting piece of toy. And as Jon Cate said, glitch is attractive because it is functioning even if it is broken. It reveals to us that any intricate, complex website are made up of nothing but strings of words, numbers and symbols regardless of what they are. The fundamental of the cyberspace is that it is nothing but a repetition of patterns. It is a “dirty new media” — a product of raw automatism. Just like how an individual humans are, a repetition of genetic codes. In essence, we are not so different than the computer program we dissect everyday.

The concept of glitch has turn up constantly in the pop culture.

An episode from Adventure Time dedicated to glitch.

An sensation subculture due to the video games.

Why do people love glitch so much? Because it can turns an otherwise conformed subject matter into something utterly ridiculous and hilarious.

At the end of the day, we human simply love to destroy take things apart and mock the resulting mess.