The Culture Story Presents
Memes, Myths & Machines
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About The Show
With the advent of NFTs, a new ecosystem has emerged around popular digital artifacts, including memes. This propels greater attention and recognition to memes as a media format and reflections of contemporary concerns. As we move further into the digital – or as some would specify, the Metaverse – memes will continuously grow in their significance, as representations and identifiers for online communities.
Against this backdrop, The Culture Story presents Singapore-based artist, Jonathan Leong's (a.k.a The Cyborg Samurai, previously known as ZXEROKOOL) first solo exhibition in the nation - “Memes, Myths, and Machines”. Jonathan’s work takes a deep dive into meme culture, to consider how the rise of the internet and the fast-growing blockchain communities will increasingly intersect and interact with contemporary visual cultures and art history.
Memes serve as important signifiers of the 21st century, holding up a mirror to our digital lives. Drawing attention towards memes and looking into the organic emergence of new terms and behaviors from the internet, The Cyborg Samurai blurs the distinctions between art and memes, memes, and life.
The Tower of Stonks
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The Tower of Stonks is a reinterpretation of The Tower of Babel (1563) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Throughout history, mankind has sought to achieve great feats, just as the 1563 painting depicts the iconic Biblical story of mankind’s thirst for reaching heights in achievement which try to mimic the Heavens, The Tower of Stonks is a contemporary allegory of society’s thirst for dominance in the online world – which has become irrevocably tethered to our offline reality.
The Garden of Internet Delights
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The Garden of Internet Delights is a reinterpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490 and 1510) by Hieronymus Bosch. What does it matter whether or not you're in front a keyboard (or a touchscreen graphic of one) when more and more of the things we interact with daily are themselves online? In a reality where our reality can be modified in a day - the boundary between the offline and online, or the physical and the digital, blurs into irrelevance.
The Meme Machine
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The Meme Machine is an artistic representation of the idea that in the phygital world, we are all carriers, commentators, and prophets of symbols, news, cultural ideas, and expressions of thoughts within the metaverse via writings, speech, video, communities, and other rituals inherent in the growing digital realm – which acts as an online amplifier of culture for the offline world around us – further deepening the phygital world and the advancement of the metaverse.