Memefest: share your memes
For the sixth year now, the organizers of Memefest, a “festival of radical communication,” are encouraging students, professionals, artists and activists alike to contribute their talents to our collective counter-culture.
Over time, the phenomenon of idea-dissemination has taken various forms and has adapted itself to different socio-cultural settings (in many cases eventually changing these settings themselves). Suffice it to say that the successful dissemination of ideas, measured by their acceptance by the largest possible audiences, has not always been related to the inner worth of the ideas themselves in terms of their political, scientific, economic or social worth. Valid ideas and values are often lost in the shuffle, while mediocre, or even harmful ones, are sometimes accepted by large numbers.
Ideas do not exist in isolation. Their power can manifest itself only in relation to the environment in which they are spread. The name of the festival is taken from the theories of memetics pioneered in the 70s and later taken up by cultural theorists such as Douglas Rushkoff in his book Media Virus. According to Memetics theory, a meme is a:
“contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people.”
Theorists of Memetics (Dawkins, Blackmore) propose that memes are autonomous as they travel (and take root) from one individual to another but these same theorists also allow the possibility of deliberately creating and spreading Memes.
The quality of a Meme is determined by the process of its selection that takes part on every level of transmission. The spreading of Memes can sometimes be obstructed. A Meme in the wrong place at the wrong time will not be able to spread for it has to be accepted by individuals - its hosts. Whether naturally occurring or deliberately created, once a Meme ‘infects’ a certain number of hosts, it becomes autonomous and spreads of its own power.
The Memefest team departs from the principle that there is too much talent and knowledge being wasted in marketing communication, and other “mind-altering” media practices that spread negative infectious ideas. However, we being never pessimistic by nature, our organization is founded upon and nurtured by the hope for change. Together, we can explore how ideas are and can be created and spread, replicating themselves in a manner akin to viruses. These disseminated ideas are called memes. The goal that Memefest sets out for its participants is to generate and replicate more positive and beneficial ones. Together we will nurture them and Memefest will reward the best ones!
The movie trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is a sardonic speech about nature and its “age long relationship to man.” Hitchcock makes no reservations about stating that this relationship is destructive and unilateral. However, the movie scenes that follow the speech hint at nature’s revenge. Rather than being a monologue, Hitchcock’s trailer forms part of a critical dialogue about human interference in a natural state and humanity’s attempts at omnipotence over a stronger force that started in the Romantic period and that earns more and more political weight as more generations grow up witnessing various kinds of destruction and ruin.
More info at MEMEFEST
