TechnoMEME is the theme of Fuse Factory Annual Exhibitions (FFE) in 2018 and 2019. Following the successful invitational exhibition last year, FFE 2019 continually searches for other artists’ creative interpretations of this theme. Since the concept of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ ‘Meme’, which considered cultural transmissions and imitations as phenomena of self-replication for being an effective propagator of genes according to his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the ambiguous and metaphorical idea from its theoretical beginning has unintentionally morphed into new viral phenomena, such as the trend of the ‘Internet meme’ within online media culture. For this year’s theme, the Fuse Factory looks back at Dawkins’ original term and reviews the usefulness of a meme’s imitation, transmission, retention, and mutation that can be applied and utilized in contemporary art, technology, and culture.
FFE 2019 is considering how new media art translates the ongoing technological phenomena of replication, imitation, variation, reproduction, and mutation responding to technological evolution at the nexus of digital culture. In addition to being the second season of TechnoMEME, FFE 2019 views artistic possibilities of technological and biological matters and platforms that create cultural and behavioral practice as ‘human-nonhuman-meme’, which can be enabled to transmit and replicate between human scientific endeavors and nature. Here is one of many references, although this case is a very rare type of animal behaviors and abilities responding to human culture. The rhythmic cockatoo Snowball’s spontaneous reactions and humanlike dance would enable us to rethink about human uniqueness and appreciation of nonhuman others.
These artistic explorations can operate as correlative phenomena for intercommunications and interrelationships rather than reinforcing anthropomorphic consciousness and humanized one-way relationships. We seek to include artworks that examine the following:
- How could we as artists imagine how imitable human consciousness, intelligence, and behavior can connect on par with nonhuman nature and vice versa, or in terms of interspecies?
- How can we as artists imagine humans as social, cultural, and biological entities, and technological propagators, which can increase understanding of nonhuman others?
- Moreover, based on the assumption of Dawkins’ claim, the gene-centered view of evolution, how can human genes and memes be transmitted into technological hosts, “surviving machines” and “vehicles”, for leaping from human into hybrids, and surpassing conventional parameters of human nature?
- How could we sustain humanity?
Here is the list of keywords regarding the theme of FFE2019 – TechnoMEME 2:
Transmission, imitation, replication, variation, mutation, reproduction, propagator, selfish vs. altruistic, compatibility, co-creation, intercommunication, interrelationship, multispecies, trans-species, interspecies, humanized vs. dehumanized, symbiosis, evolution, technoculture…
