War Memes
⌊ Web-based mini installation. Part of the Crossing Borders project for the 2005 European Capitol of Culture in Cork, Ireland.
In her book The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore develops the theory of the meme. Simply stated, a meme is for the mind what genes are to the body. Your consciousness is a collection of the memes which you have absorbed in the course of your lifetime, through education, television, books and communication with other humans. Memes are passed from one mind to another through imitation, and just like genes successful memes survive over long spans of time in the form of cultural memory.
One of the implications of Blackmore's book is that memes could be a building block of an evolving extra-human life form. Just as genes combined in the primeval soup as DNA to create more complex organisms, memes could be finding ways to combine in order to create a life form which we will find difficult to conceive. A potential arena for this could be the internet, which stores millions of memes, and within which (with the help of human "hosts") memes are mutating and combining.
I would like to assist with the healthy development of this super-entity by offering some pre-emptive psychological treatment. Just as psychologists look for traumatic events in a patient's childhood in order to treat mental illness, I would like to use the internet to seek out potentially traumatic memes and render them harmless by turning them into something beautiful.
War Memes is a web-based mini-installation which continually searches the internet for traumatic memes. The keywords for these search actions are "people killed + war", "casualties + war", and "deaths + war". Using the images and text found at these web locations as source material, aesthetically pleasing video images are generated in the hope that they can someday help soothe the tortured memories of our future super-being.
Video stills from the installation
