The Culture Story Presents
Memes, Myths & Machines
In conjunction with Singapore Art Week 2022
About The Show
With the advent of NFTs, a new ecosystem has emerged around popular digital artefacts, 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, ZXEROKOOL’s first solo exhibition in the nation - “Memes, Myths and Machines”. ZXEROKOOL 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, ZXEROKOOL blurs the distinctions between art and memes, memes and life.
The Tower of Stonks
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The Tower of Stonks is ZXEROKOOL’s 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, ZXEROKOOL’s 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 ZXEROKOOL’s 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.
Meme-vangelion
Meme-vangelion, is an art parody combining two of the internet's most beloved shitposting icons: The cult classic anime Evangelion and Doge. Here Doge is seen as an angelic force and harbringer of meme destruction, with the spear of longinus in his side.
Super Doge Land
When one surfs the digital seas, one will inevitably come into contact with the doge, the doge comes in various shapes and sizes, he is the ruler of the internets, patron saint of memes and protector of the realm.