Towards a Sympoietic Theory of Memetic Evolution
Author
Editors
Publisher, Location, Date
Institute for Network Cultures, Amsterdam, NH, Netherlands, 17 May 2024
Keywords
Internet Art, Media Art, History of Biology, Systems Biology, Media and Communication Sciences, Media Theory
ISBN/ISSN/ISMN, DOI
- ISBN/ISSN/ISMN:
- 9789083412566
Text
In 2021, ‘Traumatized Mr. Incredible’ made his rounds on social media: the beloved All-Ameri- can hero from The Incredibles (2004), who has been a regular visitor to different memescapes, appears burned out from years of fighting villains. The disillusioned image was generated by Nathan Shipley aka @CitizenPlain as an experiment of reverse toonification using Elad Richard- son and Yuval Alaluf’s pixel2style2pixel image translation framework.1 To ‘toonify’ an image (in most cases, a photographic portrait of a person) means to generate it in a cartoon or anime style. ‘Reverse toonification’ is thus the generation of photorealistic images from cartoon characters. While the ‘original’ Mr. Incredible is known for his wide smile, known from various memes cele- brating wins, reverse-toonified Mr. Incredible does a 180 turn, looking distraught and unsettling. Shipley’s generation went viral on Twitter and hit a sweet spot in the uncanny valley, leaving users fascinated by the technical possibilities and at the same time perturbed by their results. The AI-generated image was further alienated using a grainy black-and-white filter, similar to the technique of deep-frying memes. This was placed in juxtaposition with the original cartoon character and captioned ‘The teachers copy’, with Traumatized Mr. Incredible labeled ‘What the students get’.
Volume/Issue, Pages
40-57
Activity List
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- Chloë Arkenbout, Idil Galip: Critical Meme Reader III. INC Reader 17. Institute for Network Cultures. 2024-05-17 -
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Associated Media Files
Document#1