#pmclass

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Three Memes-

1. A social issue- this is my condensed and hopefully clarified version of the meme I showed in class last week. I wanted to express my frustration at people’s willful ignorance about gender in spite of the existence of a number of resources they could turn to for understanding, including real nonbinary people who they won’t listen to.

2. My class content meme- this is meant to reflect some of the ideas presented in Rushdie’s “Outside the Whale”. The meme features an otherwise self-assured teenager realizing a harsh or frightening reality- much like the ‘interested’ approach to consuming art and media causes us to realize the role it plays in enforcing oppressive social conditions.

3. My gif meme- this hopefully gives a sense of the state of seemingly constant anxiety driven by an influx of media, some of it accurate, some of it less so. Over it I included a popular joke made prior to the year 2020- “don’t ask me what I’ll be doing next year- I don’t have 2020 vision!” The joke seems especially ironic now considering that a handful of months ago nobody would have predicted the state the world is operating in today. 

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Social Meme: Shortly before I created this meme I saw a video on twitter of Trump defending his definition of COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus”. I chose this meme format because it’s often used to depict people who are refusing to accept fact or truth. In this case Trump is refusing to accept the fact that the term “Chinese Virus” is racist and offensive.

Class Content Meme: I based this on the quote from Rushdie’s essay, “I am recommending the ancient tradition of making as big a fuss... as noisy a complain about the world as is humanly possible. Where Orwell wished quietism, let there be rowdyism,” (Rushdie, 99). It depicts Rushdie making a wail, one that no one- not even and Orwell- can successfully block out.

Détournement: For this gif I took the famous “The Starry Night” painting by Vincent van Gogh and contrasted it with pictures of cityscapes clouded by smog and air pollution. I wanted to juxtapose the acclaimed beauty of the sky captured by van Gogh with what the sky has become due to air pollution. I added a quote by Theodore Roosevelt, “Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground.” This quote has many interpretations when associated with the pictures, but my main reasoning was to question how we can keep our eyes on the stars (dream of a future) when we can’t see one? (https://giphy.com/gifs/QVsAoeWeqUV89ieU7y)

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Here are my Memes for the meme project due today.

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This is my GIF, I had the original video from something I made with friends and I saw it’s ability to be changed into this. I think it pokes fun at Trump’s continued hate for the media and how irrational it is.

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I wanted to base my meme off of Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”, so I tried to use a popular line from a common movie to show how Debord thought of the spectacle as being so widespread and effective. I think pairing it with a feature of the spectacle makes an interesting commentary as well.

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I wanted to make a play on the common “This is fine” meme in regards to the COVOID-19 outbreak. I think it shows how it is a serious problem that was largely downplayed by the Federal Gov., and I think this draws a strong parallel. 

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This detournement meme is meant to describe the current situation regarding unemployment. I used a famous work of art, “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, who describes that this painting was created when he was in a particularly depressed and melancholy state of mind. I wanted to utilize those same emotions and apply them to the rise in unemployment because of COVID-19. I placed human faces in the painting to add a relatable element, and the “glitching” feature is to add a sense of urgency to the gif. 

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My class content meme uses the “Left Exit 12 Off Ramp″ meme, and is inspired by John Berger’s perspective on publicity. He describes how one of publicity’s main purposes is to create marginal dissatisfaction with our current station in life. To this end, humans are constantly turning towards the easy, immediate alleviation of this dissatisfaction, in the form of gaining glamour through commodities and materialistic gains. Thus, the path to true satisfaction and long term happiness is often ignored in favor of the path of least resistance- In this case, the left exit 12. 

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