Meme Project

 As someone who spends three days out of my week taking classes as a full-time student, and the other four days of the week working a mediocre job to compensate for the first half, the capitalistic mindset of the country tends to make me exhausted. America preaches hard work yielding luxury to anyone, yet the cost of living raising every year makes that hard to believe.  

In the article Memes Are Our Generation’s Protest Art, Alan Schaaf, the CEO of image-hosting site Imgur, told VICE, “You can express yourself with one picture of a meme better than a whole page of text.” A picture says a thousand words, this may feel especially true in today’s world, where you’re much more likely to come across important political news from a meme on your trending page than the seven-o-clock news. Memes have power, “More than just humorous interventions, these memes undermine the pretensions of power and respect politicians use as a de-facto method for quieting dissent and broadcasting their often contemptuous messages,” from How Memes Are Making Protest Art More Powerful. Our generation has the unique experience where most of our political beliefs were brought to us by the internet. The internet is an incredibly powerful tool to spread messages due to the sheer ease it takes for something to get viral and be seen by others. In Interventionists Chapter One, Micheal Rokowitz had a project titled paraSITE where he made tents for the homeless that connect to vents outside buildings to inflate. This project used public attention to aid in getting his message across, stating that “The visibly parasitic relationship of these devices to the buildings, appropriating a readily available situation with readily available materials, elicited immediate speculation as to the future of the city.” With the internet connecting millions of people worldwide daily, it’s much easier to showcase parasitic relationships of politics. 

A topic I’m passionate about is capitalism, and the discussion of universal basic income. Using images in my camera roll, I’ve created three memes expressing dissatisfaction with the current capitalistic system we have in place.