In Jay Delay’s “Portrait of a Spam Artist” he reveals the true nature of both an artist and a spammer, one being the simple personification of code and the other of darkness.
We see this first with the extremely beautiful (and utterly fake) Billions of Years which consist of eight separate Image layers, each GIF being four blocks long. Each GIF shows a scenery or a type of portrait with a landscape being “added” in each new scene, just as blocks are added to this GIF. This was made in ten hours and is a load of work to create. But as a spoon can be broken, however strong and useful it is, and there are only so many pencils that can be sharpened. So on and so forth.
This GIF, as much as it is simply a representation of how time passes (we are all headed towards nothingness in this horrible, godforsaken universe, are we not?) it is also a timepiece. The GIF shows us just how much time is passing by. It is also a warning to the viewer that the minutes are counting down, and the decades are disappearing and disappearing, as more and more GIFs are added to the (very long) GIF of time.
The next image in this GIF is a representation of darkness. Although this GIF was put together in just over ten hours, yet is incredibly complex, and represents it’s creator’s preoccupation with corruption. The middle of the image contains all the colours that are in the flag of Norway (which are black and white). All of these colours are not showing up in this GIF. The colours which are supposed to appear do. The others which do not are not intended to. This GIF is an acid metaphor for the corruption of modern and ancient society.
The next 32 images in the gif were accidentally deleted and included eight people sitting on an escalator. Each person has their arms crossed in opposition to the other. This is a symbol of a woman suffering under the weight of patriarchal oppression. As the escalator goes up, the picture gets darker, the people get tighter, and their arms and legs become contorted and twisted.
For the visual pun, we can’t have just one. After all, puns are the cornerstone of the internet. These images use just a few other metaphors to create a completely unique joke. To me, this is the essence of modern culture, and it deserves more appreciation than it has gotten. The internet is not “an ocean of distractions”. It is, in fact, a river of the best memes ever designed. Just because people find one type of meme better than another, it doesn’t mean that they are “good” memes.
To me, memes are the most important form of art ever invented, since the internet is all about the visual image. So instead of rejecting meme culture, I ask that we instead embrace it. I ask that we look for new ways to use it and find more ways to do it better. It doesn’t have to be limited to having a hard time finding memes for every occasion, or being afraid of having too much attention to have the motivation to do it. If we use memes in the right way, then there is no limit to how much we can do with them. Just try to be honest about what you’re doing and use it to make the world a better place.
Hasta la meme.
Thanks for reading!
