Using Context as an Artistic Medium
Lil Nas X, Jenny Odell, and Distracted Boyfriend
In her 2019 book How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy, artist and researcher Jenny Odell writes, "my medium is not the digital image, my medium is not even the screen, my medium is context.”
In a way, this is true of all post-internet art (or whatever it is we’re calling it now). Post-internet artists like Brad Troemel, Joshua Citarella, and Odell herself make objects and experiences that are located in the gray areas between prank and craft, criticism and aesthetic production, the internet and real life, platforms and people. There’s sculpture, photography, performance, and other stuff involved—but the thing underneath it all is context. What we’re really talking about when we talk about internet art is a revolution in context-making.
Context is also the main artistic medium of memes. A pliable, multifaceted material, it is just as literal and worked upon as the bronze in a sculpture or the brushstrokes in a painting. Meme-makers manipulate context through specific, definable operations.
The Dump Context
So now you know this is really going to be about memes, but before we get there I would like to talk about Jenny Odell some more. Her 2015 organization/archive piece The Bureau of Suspended Objects (BSO), completed during a residency with the San Francisco city dump, makes a museum from pieces of trash. She goes online and meticulously researches objects found at the dump, tracing them back to where they were manufactured and describing how they were sold and used. She then presents the results of that research in a curated exhibition experience (available both online and in-person) that presents the trash as a museum-worthy artifact. The in-person exhibit pairs with the internet through a Tumblr blog and scannable QR codes that allow a user to learn even more about each object.
Odell doesn’t change the objects themselves, but rather the frames around them. She meticulously manipulates the context and the social situations these objects are embedded in. In the materials accompanying the online version of the Bureau, Odell says the project’s goal is to: “...reframe the objects not as items in a static and irreversible category (trash) but as inflection points in an ongoing flow... (and) show how the moment of ‘becoming trash’ has more to do with changing circumstances and emotions than with the material reality of the object.”
The contexts (“changing circumstances and emotions”) we assign to things in the world are not natural, but produced synthetically through human interventions. Like any set of human interventions, those that produce context can be manipulated by economic, political, and ideological structures: classifying trash as “trash” and putting it in the dump is not only a practical necessity, but a political performance (showing the capacity of the state to perform services) and a mechanism for concealing the excess and environmental consequences of consumer culture.
Odell renders context visible by making it pretty and funny rather than just present. The Bureau of Suspended Objects (BSO) and the accompanying online archive also parody the self-presentation of academic and governmental bureaucracies (down to the acronym!). Odell points out how the cues which lead us to take a subject seriously, to consider a source authoritative, or to avoid noticing an important part of the story, are the result of specific aesthetic choices. Context is produced by a set of discrete, aesthetic operations: in the BSO, it’s in the organizational scheme used to index her objects, the handwritten captions, the lighting in the room, and the way she welcomed people into the space (parodying the way receptionists welcome people into art galleries).
Normal is not normal, the default is not the default. Every space we enter (whether IRL or online) is heavily contextualized. The modes by which we are led to perceive or experience information (and, from there, deduce a reality) are intricately and artistically crafted by other humans. And the advent of the internet changed the methods and consequences of that contextualization.
Context as Relational Value
In his analysis of the ice-bucket challenge of 2015, George Rossolatos proposes that “memes should be viewed as structural gestalts that allow for their recognizability by virtue of semiotic constraints in the form of an invariable inventory of expressive elements.” Difference and repetition. Every Ice-Bucket Challenge video must have the ice-bucket, the pouring, and the verbal statement of intention — these things allow people to recognize that video as an “Ice-Bucket Challenge” video meme. But what changes across the videos — the people doing the challenge, the size and type of ice buckets poured over their heads — is what makes it interesting.
Rossolatos argues that the repetition of these fixed elements is the point of the meme, more so than the actual content of the message. He writes, “(the) greater value... is not its meaning, but its relational value in effecting preconscious bonds among network community members.” Another way to say “context,” in my view, is “preconscious bonds among network community members.” Context is the set of assumptions and instruments that place us in relation to a message and a speaker before the speaker even opens their mouth — and so, by creating an ensemble of resonant, standardized elements and gestures, a meme creates a social context. The part of art is to create this context while also recklessly messing with it.
The point of a meme isn’t to make a picture — the point is to make frames.
Memes by the layer: 2015, 2017, and 2023
In image-macro memes, different contexts are communicated visually through the relative depths of things depicted on the screen. Take Distracted Boyfriend as an example.
In the meme you see below, there are three contexts, layered one on top of the other: this post on my Substack written in 2023, the text captions written on August 21st, 2017, and the original photograph, taken at some point in 2015:
Each of these contexts (2023, 2017, 2015) implicates a different set of actors and audiences. Each of these contexts is also associated with a different spatial region and communicating element of the meme: 2015 lives in the photo, 2017 in the text, 2023 in the framing of the meme on this page. Each of these contexts means one thing on its own, and more things when joined with the others. In 2015, the meme is a stock photo apparently caricaturing sexist behavior by photographer Antonio Guillem. On August 21st, 2017, when posted with text labeling the figures on Twitter, it becomes a political commentary and a participant in an ongoing meme tradition. In 2023, it’s an example to make my argument.
Each of these successive layers changes how we read the ones below it. Your perception of this meme, framed as it is here, is very different from what Redditors in August 2017 saw. Similarly, the three people looked very different to Redditors in 2017 than they did to Antonio Guillem in 2015. The meme ties these contexts together into one knot, using the depth of the image to differentiate them.
It is this negotiation of contexts that makes the meme a meme. Typically, a humorous effect comes from the juxtaposition of the 2015 photographic context (which is a picture of a man leering at a woman, that we interpret a particular way) with the 2017 meme context (which is a serious joke about capitalism). At each context is an interpretive community, which both brings the meme together and is invoked by it.
Evolution can you give me
With object-labelling memes like Distracted Boyfriend, this analytic approach works cleanly: it’s pretty obvious that different people take the photo, write the text, and post the meme. It’s a bit messier (but still sound) when applied to other memes:
In this meme posted by Instagram’s @donotresearch_reloaded on December 1st, 2022, the bottom layer is a four-panel, a format that calls to mind Rage Comics. Above it is the “evolution can you give me” meme format. On top of that is the “pattern-seeking brain” text (the change to a Serif typeface indicates that it was added after the other text). The photo in the fourth panel, of Greek columns which look like the Twin Towers (an optical illusion frequently circulated online) adds another context — and invites the viewer to project their own, misidentifying it as 9/11. Again, further contexts are layered on top, closer to the reader: the Instagram scroll on which I encountered the meme, and now the Substack post on which the meme sits, etc. What’s interesting is that this layering is both spatial and temporal: you can see that the photos are on top of the four panel, but you also know they were put in after the four panel.
Lil Nas X
Visually representing context-shifting as layered windows is characteristic of the internet as it has existed for the past few years. Take, as another example, this Twitter exchange surrounding Lil Nas X:
There are three layered contextual framings in this tweet. At the lowest layer, a homophobic Instagram post by Pastor Troy @pastortroydsgb stands next to a picture of Lil Nas X. The middle layer is Twitter user @yoyotrav (Ronald Isley) posting a photo of that Instagram post with his own comment defending Lil Nas X and criticizing Pastor Troy. The top layer is @LilNasX himself joking about the whole situation and saying he looks good. The lowest-down layer happened first and the uppermost layer happened most recently, so the layers visually communicate a chronological relation between the three contexts. There are also three different speakers (Lil Nas X, Isley, Pastor Troy) each represented in their own layer. Further, there are three different moments of reception: the first is Ronald Isley’s interpretation of Pastor Troy’s Instagram post. The second is Lil Nas X’s interpretation of Isley’s interpretation. The third is the interpretation of the 616,000 fans who liked the Lil Nas X post. It should be noted that in the user interface of Twitter, the reception of a tweet goes into the frame surrounding it, which is a form of control bar that allows a user to interact with the tweet.
The experience of reading on social media consists of opening these contextual windows, glancing at their frames, and interpreting the relations between them. Further, it means contributing to the construction of these framings with your own interactions.
Graphical User Interface
Reading memes as a series of layered contexts is a pretty broad approach. But it works because the use of visual layering and depths to depict context-shifting comes from the Graphical User Interface (GUI) itself, which has characterized the computer experience since the 1980s. Ultimately, the place where context is being produced here is in the interface as much as in the meme.
On a desktop or laptop computers, icons float on a screen framed (at the top, usually) with a kind of control bar listing battery, time, and other contextual clues about the condition of the device. The cursor floats above the icons, representing the user’s “I” (when it hovers over text, it literally becomes an I). Clicking an icon opens a program, which presents itself as a “window.” Metaphorically, the window opens onto a space beyond and below the space of the cursor and the screen. For most applications, this window has a frame, mirroring the one of the whole screen: a scroll bar on one side, and a kind of control panel on top that allows the user to navigate within the application. If the application is an internet browser, going to a website opens another kind of window, which is contained within the window which is contained within the screen. The GUI works by creating a series of frames, layered on top of each other and cascading deeper into specificity, as the picture below shows.
As Johanna Drucker argues in “Reading Interface,” the GUI’s arrangement of information works to “organize our relation to complex systems” rather than just representing those systems to us. What we manipulate onscreen is “an abstraction of computation, not a window through which information passes like fast food at a drive-through.” Prior to the GUI’s invention, interfaces like punch-cards or command-line coding offered a different context for our interaction with computers — and future inventions like dystopian Metaverse headsets or computers implanted into our bodies will offer other interfaces. Since the GUI is historically specific, belonging to a certain era and relying on a certain repertoire of hardware (keyboard, mouse, screen) the interface relations it creates (and the ways of viewing information/reality they suggest) are also historically specific.
Drucker argues for us to view interface as a “constitutive boundary space,” in which different systems and agencies meet and evolve. For her, it is crucial to study “the rhetorical semantics of graphical organization, because they construct meaning rather than simply present it.” We can’t separate our thinking from the interfaces we do it on and the contexts those interfaces allow us to construct. A windows-within-windows presentation of information turns specific communicative contexts into discrete, manipulable rectangles whose relation to one another and time is communicated through their relative depth on the screen — and whose arrangement is almost entirely up to the user.
Memes and Spatiality
Seeing a meme as a series of nested context-framings using visual depth to present the relationships (both chronological and pragmatic) between different contexts offers fresh possibilities for doing a digital self. Returning to Drucker’s contention that the GUI exists not only to “represent” but to “organize our relation to complex systems,” I would argue the mission of internet memes is similar: not primarily to represent, but to organize relations. In this sense, memes are not primarily doing mimesis. They do not imitate reality, but rather alter our relations with reality (as experienced online) by enunciating and manipulating contexts in an aesthetic way.
Read this way, memes are less like pictures or books than they are like chairs and tables. They are to online space what architecture and ritual are to real space: the things that create context and frames for interaction. They are the chairs and tables we sit at, but also the social codes that contextualize that place as a zone where we may sit, eat, and watch the street; that render our selves as customers and that person with the white shirt as a waiter; that transmute the microplastic-shedding rectangle you pay with into money, the trash-filled pavement over the railing into a city I have always dreamed to live in, and you sitting across from me into a friend I’m happy to meet and get to know.