Fig 3 - uploaded by Idil Galip
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Meme captioned 'this meme brought to you by THIS FUCKIN GUY AAA??! GET A LOaD of HIM ' (Instagram: @lilperc666, 2020). Reproduced by permission
Source publication
There exists a specific genre of grotesque meme art on Instagram. Created, curated and appropriated by an Anglophone community of multi-media artists (i.e. @djinn_kazama, @males_are_cancelled2, @thebottomtext, @patiasfantasyworld, @aquarium.drinker), these memes seek to alienate Instagram’s mainstream, viral-meme consuming audience through grotesqu...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... community's memes exhibit a self-confessed and intentional garishness which stands in opposition to the aspirational aesthetics of mainstream social media influencers, but they coexist on the same platform and utilize a similar entrepreneurial logic. They laugh at this aspirational spirit, but also laugh at themselves for contributing to it too, in true carnivalesque fashion (Figure 3). In its core, meme-laughter engendered by the grotesque body and the vulgar text is 'not simply parod [y]; it is no more comic than tragic; it is both at once, one might say that it is serious'. ...
Context 2
... its core, meme-laughter engendered by the grotesque body and the vulgar text is 'not simply parod [y]; it is no more comic than tragic; it is both at once, one might say that it is serious'. 15 The comedy, tragedy and seriousness of the grotesque which Kristeva presents can be seen in Figure 3 created by artist @lilperc666. There are many meme creators who are minoritized, and many have developed a sense of left-leaning, radical politics as a result, which they try to practice in both their digital and offline lives. ...
Context 3
... being hyper-aware of the incompatibility of their politics and their 'digital workplace', they are still too precarious to completely withdraw their content, and therefore labor, from said platform. This sense of platform-captivity is implied in Figure 3, alongside Trump's famously grotesque visage 16 . Figure 2, on the other hand, is a meme created by artist @todaywasmybirthday on Instagram. ...
Citations
... A través de la noción de creatividad vernácula (Burgess, 2006;Coleman, 2010) las autoras no solo se fijan en los productos culturales (como memes, composiciones visuales, canciones y álbumes…) sino que incluyen como algo central en el género muchas otras formas de mediación online, como la creación y seguimiento de hipervínculos, de tags, el uso de seudónimos etc. Desde este enfoque holístico, las prácticas musicales cobran sentido en el contexto multimediático en el que se despliegan, entiendo como un todo inseparable la comunidad y sus formas de expresión. Este abordaje holístico también está presente en los análisis de los memes, y otras formas creativas de Internet, que abordan el fenómeno en el marco del folklore digital (de Seta, 2020;Lialina y Espenschield, 2009;Rowan, 2015;Galip, 2021aGalip, , 2021bGalip, , 2021c. Olia Lialina y Dragan Espenschield (2009) recogieron bajo la idea noción de 'folkore digital' una serie de reflexiones y prácticas desarrolladas online «de usuarios para usuarios», problematizando la distinción entre artistas y hackers cualificados, por un lado, y usuarios, con bajo estatus y limitaciones técnicas. ...
... La etnógrafa cuenta cómo la acción de explicar lo que era un meme a un público académico le hacía sentir como una informante en contra de la cultura de meme, como si estuviera revelando una suerte de secreto latente en la esencia de los memes (Galip, 2021b, p. 70). En su texto 'The grotesque in Instagram memes' (Galip, 2021a), la autora analiza la creación y compartición de memes como rituales bufonescos a través del concepto antropológico del carnaval. Poniendo el foco en la estética inquietante y bizarra de los memes desde un análisis visual entiende los memes grotescos como un elemento del folklore digital que crea, a través del horror y la incomodidad, una comunión corporeizada entre el meme, creadores y audiencias amplias. ...
Este artículo es una revisión bibliográfica de los estudios sobre memes desde una perspectiva interdisciplinar. En un ejercicio de recursividad metodológica, he utilizado el conocido meme The Political Compass como una herramienta analítica para mapear los estudios sobre memes en base a dos ejes: Perspectiva comunicacional - Perspectiva artística (eje de ordenadas) y Orientación underground - Orientación mainstream (eje de abscisas). En los cuatro cuadrantes que forma el gráfico ubico estudios sobre imágenes virales, comunicación digital, creatividad vernácula o folklore digital para observar cómo los memes han sido abordados desde muy diversas disciplinas y cómo la idea de meme hace referencia a distintas formas y dinámicas creativas. Este ejercicio memero-analítico pretende abrir el campo de los estudios de memes para provocar preguntas más allá de la cuestiones como la viralidad, el potencial comunicativo o activista, las dinámicas de la cultura participativa o las peculiaridades del arte popular.
... As observed by Merrill and Lindgren (2021), in the wake of the bombing of the Manchester Arena in 2017, the city's enduring civic symbol, the Manchester bee, was reinvigorated in public responses to the traumatic event through both digital and non-digital channels, including hashtag usage (#manchesterbee) and social media-shared images. Additionally, specific meme figures, such as kitten memes, have been observed to serve as coping mechanisms in the face of acts of terrorism (Jensen et al. 2020), while some memes are crafted with a grotesque aesthetic, inherently conveying subversiveness (Galip 2021). In this manner, collectives can harness memes to summon the engagement of digital publics within distinct timeframes and various contexts, such as fostering a sense of collective identity within minority communities like the LGBTQ (Gal, Shifman and Kampf 2016) or during periods of conflict to galvanize engagement in national identity activism (Divon 2022). ...
As digital media pervades every aspect of our lives, the ways in which we record, view and respond to wars are being shaped by these technologies. Within our deeply mediatised society (Couldry and Hepp 2017), in times of crisis, individuals turn to social media to tell their stories of trauma and grief (Eriksson 2016; Leaver and Highfield 2018). This allows the specific realities of war, trauma and collective suffering to be witnessed, shared, seen and remixed. This chapter delves into the war in Ukraine as it is depicted and mediated through the lens of one of the most prominent Ukrainian TikTok users of 2022, Valeria Shashe-nok (@valerisssh). Through this example, we examine how ongoing cultural trauma and its audiovisual representations are presented on digital platforms. In particular, we explore how users leverage TikTok's technological features, such as duets, stitches and the LIVE, to create meme-based templates for communicating the realities of warfare, showing how these templates shape digital expressions of trauma. Expanding previous work on cultural trauma, collective grief, and history in digital spaces (Abidin, 2019; Divon and Ebbrecht- Hartmann 2022; Eriksson 2016; 2018; Eriksson Krutrök 2021; Leaver & High- field 2018), this chapter places emphasis on the role of audiovisual memes on TikTok as templates for war storytelling in Ukraine in 2022.
