Irony of Fate is a project born out of a collaboration with Mo(n)stre, a platform for the arts and humanities which, in an ironic fashion, discusses exhibitions, monsters and everything that populates Italian exhibition spaces.
I asked Mo(n)stre to select some of my works, starting from the photo-documentation, to rework them and create new memes. The desire for this co-operation stems from the fact that many of my works deal with themes related to neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, genetics, and the relationship between nature and culture. In this sense, I was interested in the typology of interventions usually carried out by Mo(n)stre and his work with memes in order to open up a reflection on these new «cultural entities» and their transmissibility.
The work carried out by Mo(n)stre in Irony of Fate is a true memic re-elaboration of my art. The works are accompanied by the caption of the original together with «explanatory» audio notes by Mo(n)stre, and juxtapositions and comparisons with images of artworks from the past, which give rise to real «involutional» memes.
From this strange combination, a sort of meta-memetics arises, aimed at reflecting in a new way both on my works — opening them up to other levels of interpretation — and on the very role that memes have today, through the work carried out by Mo(n)stre.
The aim of Irony of Fate is to pave the way for a new memic re-signification, to investigate the way in which culture transforms itself and perpetuates itself over time. As philosopher Carlo Sini said, «culture is an automaton». In other words, culture is a machine that moves, even if it is nothing but the product of the natural evolution that distinguishes human beings.
For this reason, I became interested in the reflection on memes and their analogy with genes, in the belief that today’s digital algorithms are as natural as evolutionary algorithms. What changes, in this sense, is only the speed of transmission. After all, a similar reflection was already made in the Medialism of Gabriele Perretta, developed in the 1980s, which already sowed the seed of the implications we are experiencing today: the digital flood, NFTs, memetics.
The word meme was introduced for the first time in 1976 by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. In it, Dawkins proposes a new key to interpreting human cultural evolution. Homologous to the gene — the basic unit of biological evolution — the meme is a cultural unit, replicable and transmissible by imitation (Greek: mimēma) from one individual to another.
Following the analogy with genes, memes are involved in a process of replication, mutation and selection in the world of culture. The longer-lived and more fecund a meme is, the more likely that cultural unit will prevail over other competing, less attractive ideas, less capable of replicating themselves.
Before undertaking this experiment with Mo(n)stre I had already addressed these themes in 2011 with the work Io_nel_progetto_di_un_altro, where the propagation of cultural memes was delegated to an algorithm providing a series of instructions. The principle: in carrying on someone else’s discourse you no longer express the other, but yourself within the other’s discourse.
Mo(n)stre’s intervention refers to memes (artworks) that have come down to us today, grafting them onto my works and suggesting unexpected meanings. For these reasons, Irony of Fate hides a meta-memetics that invites us to consider the very nature of memes and of the mutations that occur on the cultural plane.
If virality is the key to the evolutionary success of a meme, irony of fate, those packaged by Mo(n)stre on my works are involutional memes: they do not have a humorous framing, they do not actively seek diffusion, but they open up — through the play between the original works and the new dimensions of meaning added by Mo(n)stre — further keys of reading for the viewer.