Memes as a Portal to the Past and Future: How Extinction Rebellion Is Using Memes to Change the Narrative Around the Climate Crisis

By Chloë Arkenbout, September 28, 2023

Since their first occupation of the A12 highway in The Hague, Extinction Rebellion has been reporting live on their actions through memes. Yes, you read that right, memes. The climate activists even organized a meme workshop during one of their membership meetings in September. Whether you think that the civil disobedience organization that peacefully protests [...]

Call For Proposals – Critical Meme Reader III: Breaking the Meme

By Chloë Arkenbout, April 18, 2023

The meme is dead. Or at least that is what opinion pieces, magazine articles, conference presentations, and even memes themselves have declared over the years. Despite this, “meme” is as pervasive a neologism as ever, used to describe a variety of digital media. Everything from bits of internet humor, image-macros, viral videos, to copy-pasta, urban [...]

Clapback Fury Art Installation by Saeeda Saeed

By Chloë Arkenbout, April 25, 2022

In 2018, the state-supported Saudi Electronic Army created thousands of fake Twitter accounts to promote the veneration of rulers both online and offline. Similarly, in 2017, legislation was put in place where “retweeting narratives that go against the state, the royal family or religion” is seen as an act of terrorism punishable by a thousand lashes and [...]

Call for Speculative Theory: Critical Meme Reader #2: Memetic Tacticality

By Chloë Arkenbout, March 22, 2022

The power of memes has developed beyond virtual images. The distinction between the virtual and the ‘real life’ no longer applies, or perhaps never really existed. The effects (or should we say affects?) of memes move through digital infrastructures, policies, regulations, agencies, and bodies. How can we democratically and collectively design memes as an active [...]

Call for Proposals – Memes Beyond the Image

By Chloë Arkenbout, December 1, 2021

The Institute of Network Cultures is looking for theorists, researchers, journalists, artists, activists, designers and other creatives and thinkers that are working on meme studies and practices, that want to participate in two upcoming events: A workshop during the concluding programme of the Berlin Transmediale 2021–22 festival at Transmediale Studio in Berlin on the 27th [...]

Recap: Critical Meme Reader Launch @ Spui25

By Chloë Arkenbout, November 23, 2021

On the occasion of the launch of the ‘Critical Meme Reader, Global Mutations of the Viral Image’, edited by Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson and Daniel de Zeeuw, we dived into meme studies on the 7th of October at Spui25. Beyond the so-called ‘Alt-right’ and its attendant milieus on 4chan and Reddit, memes have passed the [...]

Out now: INC Reader #15 Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image

By Chloë Arkenbout, September 2, 2021

Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image Beyond the so-called ‘Alt-right’ and its attendant milieus on 4chan and Reddit, memes have passed the post-digital threshold and entered new theoretical, practical, and geographical territories beyond the stereotypical young, white, male, western subject. As they metastasized from the digital periphery to the mainstream, memes have [...]