memes

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Description (in English)

Clickbait is a music project by Talan Memmott. The album CAPTION THIS is a collection of nine pop-punk tunes about various internet memes.
A limited edition CD was made.
The album is also available for streaming on Spotify and for download from iTunes, Amazon Music, and Google Play Music.

Song list:
Duckface
Forever Alone
Confused Travolta
Disaster Girl
She's Still Planking
The Most Interesting Man in the World
Scumbag Steve
Hotdog Legs
Bad Luck Brian

All songs written performed and produced by Talan Memmott

Description in original language
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Lyrics for the song DUCKFACE:
she’s got a new selfie stick
gonna take lots a pictures, gonna make you sick
just look at her instagram
looks like her lips got stuck in a door jamb
she thinks she’s lookin’ hot
but her duck face is all she’s got
pursed lips, raised brow
do that again and you go to the hoosegow

HOPE YOUR FACE GETS STUCK THAT WAY
HOPE YOUR FACE GETS STUCK THAT WAY
HOPE YOUR FACE GETS STUCK THAT WAY
YOU LOOK LIKE A CLOWN ... DUCK FACE

she’s doin’ everything she can
to look like a kardashian
plastic surgery costs too much
put her lips in a shot glass and sucks
lookin’ into her smartphone cam
duck face, she’s her number one fan
raised brow, pursed lips
gotta get her facebook kicks

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By Thor Baukhol Madsen, 12 February, 2015
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This presentation considers the rhetoric and poetics of meme culture and social media
platforms.

Internet memes, in their essence, are methods of expression born from the attention
economy of networked culture. At times they can be epistolary, aphoristic, polemic,
satirical, or parodic; and they may take the form of performative actions and photo fads
such as planking, teapotting and batmanning or iterative processes such as image macros
and advice animals including lolcats, Bad Luck Brian and Condescending Wonka. In either
case they are conditioned by rhetorical formulas with strict grammars and styles.
In the case of image macros, the rhetoric is sustained through correlations between the
image and its caption. If we line-up the thousands of Condescending Wonka memes side
by side, we will find very little difference between them aesthetically – the same image is
repeated, along with captions at the top and bottom of the image. In the captions we find
a specific tone that is also repeated one image to the next.

For the Condescending Wonka meme this tone is sarcastic and snarky, which is a reflection
upon Gene Wilder’s portrayal of the title character in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory. The top caption presents what might be a sincere question, and in the
bottom caption we get a snarky response. The completion of a truncated mock-dialogue
circuit… To understand the context of the Condescending Wonka meme, one must have
a generalized understanding of Wilder’s portrayal of the character to allow for the
attitude of the character to operate as a sublimated vehicle for humorously couched
insolence. In this regard, the meme is not simply an artifact, but a conduit through
which cultural references are conducted.

It could be said that memes are not artifacts at all. As Dawkins defined memes, they can
be "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."
Though we can see how these operate in the Condescending Wonka example – the idea,
style, and rhetorical behavior are clear, where we locate the meme as differentiated from
the artifact is not so plainly defined. If we disregard the meme as any given individual artifact and
start to examine their dialogistic function -- memes as sets of
social relations, they begin to take on the additional aspect of
social gesture, or what Brecht has dubbed the gestic. They
present a framework for attitudes that must be shared, expressed,
distributed, and put into circulation. For, as Brecht has stated,
“…it is what happens between people that provides them with
all the material that they can discuss, criticize, alter.”

Though we maybe tempted to think of meme culture as frivolous and disposable (and
certainly meme constructions can lead rather short lives); that its content is
fundamentally banal, puerile, or adolescent, it is important to consider their function as
frameworks for the communication of human ideas and attitudes, along with their
methods of persuasion.

(Source: Author's introduction)

Description (in English)

Special America: The Movie is a film adaptation of the "Poetry Is Special America" iteration of the ongoing project. The movie was filmed at the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY on April 26-27, 2014. Our crew of 14 included Claire Donato & Jeff T. Johnson (Creators & Writers of Special America), Juana Hodari (Director), Amy Bergstein (Producer), Alejandro Veciana (Assistant Director), Alexander Norelli (Art Director), Edward Pages (Director of Photography), plus grips and electricians TBA. As of July 2014, we are in post-production.

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"Special America is an upstart, outreach, non-partisan organization located at the intersection of poetry, politics, patriotism, digital history and fate."

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From sonnets constructed through Google searches, to decontextualized Wikipedia entries and combinatoric poetry, The Phlegmatic Radio Operator is an exploration of Internet and computationally based writing methods. The performance combines readings of various works with a discussion of the methods and how they connect with digital culture. 

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Description (in English)

This bot mines the Twitter stream for phrases starting with “when,” extracts the clauses, and joins each phrase with a randomly selected animated GIF in a Tumblr. Here’s a more detailed description from Parrish’s blog: A “#whatshouldwecallme-style tumblr” is one in which animated GIFs are paired with a title expressing a circumstance or mood—usually a clause beginning with “when.” I wrote a Python script to make these kinds of posts automatically. Here’s what it does: (1) Search Twitter for tweets containing the word “when.” (2) Extract the “when” clause from such tweets. (3) Use Pattern to identify “when” clauses with suitable syntax (i.e., clauses in which a subject directly follows “when”; plus some other heuristic fudging) (4) Post the “when” clause as the title of a tumblr post, along with an animated GIF randomly chosen from the imgur gallery. This is both a critique and homage of the #whatshouldwecallme tumblr and the meme it inspired. Memes are powerfully infectious prompts for creativity, and they are particularly interesting (from a poetic perspective) when they lead to constraint-based experimentation with language. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

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I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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This cleverly conceptualized poem engages the social media meme as an canvas, cultural construct, and writing constraint. Using a meme generating service to write the texts on the memes and publish them as images, arranging them in the page. As co-author of the webcomic The World According to Geek, Valle Javier could’ve easily arranged the images as panels on a horizontal comic strip, but instead chose to do so vertically. This reinforces a poetic reading of this work as a whole, using each meme as a unit of meaning that is part of a textual flow.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

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I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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Description (in English)

In 2008, in Providence, RI, a strange melancholy pervaded us to which we hesitated to give the grave and beautiful name of SPECIAL AMERICA. It began amorphously. Badges left in a hallway, flash rallies alongside the insinuations of handbill slogans, an ambiguous slideshow. Over the years, SPECIAL AMERICA appeared untroubled, yet in solitude we penned personal, soul-bearing texts, melancholy slogans that made us weep whilst inducing within us a perverse sense of comfort. Composed in corporate network space, our glum poesy set the tone for a new tale of longing and loneliness. In the past, the idea of calling this melancholy SPECIAL AMERICA always appealed to us; now we are almost ashamed of its complete egoism.

SPECIAL AMERICA (Claire Donato & Jeff T. Johnson) is an exercise in and an exorcism of American Exceptionalism, based on the spirit of intellectual play—semiotic, humorous, and performative. Incubated in the electronic literature community and spread to the New York City Poetry Industrial Complex, SPECIAL AMERICA presents itself as an analog hack, a gesture toward embodied viral media. Since 2008, SPECIAL AMERICA has incorporated a variety of topics, including ambiguous political speech, American Exceptionalism, adjunct labor, genre and gender politics, 21st century literature, and e-poetics. SPECIAL AMERICA has been described as "the internet," "always new!" "shouldn’t be necessary, but is," "another freakin’ marathon," "singularly unhelpful," "heavy," "beautiful," and "fucking boring."

On stage, SPECIAL AMERICA consists of multiple digital projections presented alongside musical loops and remixes that propel the performance through various scenes, acts, and interludes. Our script—whose language has been appropriated from sources as wide-ranging as Robert Burton, Jacques Derrida, Andrew Lloyd Weber and Rosmarie Waldrop—is delivered using high-affect character voices inspired by politicians and CEOs, game show announcers, motivational speakers, old- school professors, new-age gurus, angry neighbors, and cocktail banter. Staging, choreography, and costuming embody our theoretical and theatrical concerns. We recently donned all-black evening wear and mounted a “shitty internet disco,” complete with sound art installation, wine tasting, yoga demo, stump speech, PhotoBooth selfies, and various dance routines, including a rendition of the Twin Peaks character Audrey Horne’s infamous solo slow dance. In the future, we plan to pump up this disco mix alongside homemade set pieces and lighting, built from recycled technology like obsolete laptops, telephones, and computer speakers.

SPECIAL AMERICA aims to imbue humor and play into academic conferences and other historically wearisome spaces, without sacrificing the rigorous exploration of its theoretical framework. We enact what Florian Cramer refers to as the “post-digital,” or the cultural circumstance in which “digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life.” We engage remix and social network culture, elaborating Kenneth Goldsmith’s concept of the writer as meme machine. Over the course of a site-specific installation, the phrase “Special America” accumulates significance just as Internet memes do. For example, at the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) conference, attendees alluded to SPECIAL AMERICA in their presentations, and in turn, SPECIAL AMERICA implicated and absorbed aspects of other presentations.

In all of its manifestations, SPECIAL AMERICA aims to explore American Exceptionalism in the hope that the literary communities in which we perform question their own modes of community-driven exceptionalism. We take part in communities as we deconstruct the assumptions and contradictions that animate them. In this sense, SPECIAL AMERICA is a complex grassroots effort in the tradition of Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. While invoking and problematizing literary communities’ values and false realities, SPECIAL AMERICA seeds the communal discourse with theoretically engaged humor and the shared experience of live performance.

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