Prevailing themes of motion, cuteness or outrageousness, and self-identification and fantasy in today’s AI, memes, and GIFs began generations earlier. Today’s small-scale ephemeral digital graphics share common timeless motifs with those of the past. They also contain constantly evolving distinctive features reflecting the cultural conventions wrought by quickly changing technologies and a society’s need to communicate expediently through the visual.

Erika Piola

Internet memes are repeated behaviors or ideas spread on the internet that can be viral, as well as more niche, and like an inside joke. This section highlights image-based memes created by individual users shared publicly on Reddit, an anonymous social media website.

Meme formats are often based on images from popular media like The Simpsons, personal photos, and social media posts. Like the analog movables on exhibit, image-based memes use a repeated image, often with new or altered text. They typically incorporate humor to express an idea or spread information, can share social or political commentary, and build community. By repeating an idea or image, memes package an unfamiliar thing (context or content added by a creator that can initially be confounding) with a familiar thing (the repeated image, phrase, or idea). This repetition can explicate or simplify complex ideas, communicate the creator’s identity, represent a community, and/or spread the meme themselves.

Internet memes have evolved into many subgenres and styles since they began to be created in the late 1990s. The displayed digital formats illustrate how memes use movement and repetition to also communicate ideas and provide moments of serious fun similarly to the historical materials on view.

Abigail Guidry