Programming
Rémi Beaupré
Meme Snippets
The project plays with the syntax of HTML, CSS or chatspeak tags to craft coded phrases that address ethics, media and the future. His statements will be inserted randomly throughout the year and will serve to punctuate the annual programming of this component.
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The word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.
(Le mot n'est pas reconnu comme un virus parce qu'il est parvenu à un stade de symbiose stable son hôte.)
- William S. Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution
A meme is an idea that behaves like a virus--that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects.
(Un mème est une idée qui agit comme un virus – il se mobilise au sein d'une population, s'emparant de chaque personne qu'elle touche)
- Malcolm Gladwell
We are growing more and more familiar with the code which constitutes our online lives. Social networks such as blogs inflate in popularity, and the means to customize these methods of personal broadcasting is no longer reserved to the programmer. We are more and more accustomed, in one way or another, with programming and its manifestation.
Now more than ever do we each have the potential to be a node for receiving and transmitting bits of information, however trivial or notable as they me be. These transmissions circulate freely, and can be absorbed by any number of individuals, to be then processed, and perhaps re-transmitted. We infect each other daily with memes that have different degrees of impact. They are ideas. They are icons. They are enablers.
I transform snippets of HTML or CSS and occasional instances of hashtags or chatspeak into linear sentences about ethics, media and the future. I maintain their structure in a believable and useable code, as if it were part of an unknown and unnamed website of which the entire scope is beyond grasp.
These meme snippets are a linguistic mashup, a play on punctuation and syntax. Periods and exclamations appear at the beginning of sentences. Brackets contain very succinct conditions. The space between words is gone. everyWordIsCapitalizedExceptTheFirstOne. The sentence is expressed as a single unbroken string.
In my meme snippets using HTML "comments" I often play with the nature of commenting online, a curious mix of pertinent points of views and useless volubility that is all done behind avatars or in the cover of anonymity. I find this a vibrant contrast to the increasing collection and transmission of our personal information and data, coupled with our will to exhibit what we consider as our profiles. I find the fight for anonymity and privacy, the obsession with the exhibition of online profiles, the shear mass of data collection coupled with random chatter are great defining factors that will shape the things to come.
Rémi Beaupré was born in Timmins (Ontario) in 1974. Graduating in Visual Arts from the University of Ottawa in 1998, he found creative media: photography, drawing, installations, and digital works. He draws his creative choices from cyberculture and its iconography. His works are executed like a tweet or social media status: a comment without immediate conclusion immediate conclusion, a conversation to be continued.
