[Air-L] Call for Animal Meme / Internet Culture Research

An Xiao Mina anxiaostudio at gmail.com
Tue Sep 15 23:42:40 PDT 2015


Hi folks,

Please to share this call for research/submissions for an ongoing
exhibition I'm working on at the Museum of the Moving Image. Feel free to
reach out if you have any questions.

Best,
An

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Call for Submissions: Animal Memes/Humor for “A Global Perspective” at the
Museum of the Moving Image

Part of How Cats Took Over the Internet, curated by Jason Eppink


While cats are regular fixtures on many internets around the globe, some
cultures tend to focus on different animals, while others rarely engage
with animals online at all. In collaboration with the Museum of the Moving
Image, The Civic Beat, a global research collective looking at the creative
side of civic technology, is assembling a map that examines some popular
animals and memes, reflecting the vast diversity of internet cultures
around the world.

The map project is part of How Cats Took Over the Internet, a new
exhibition curated by Jason Eppink that offers a cultural deconstruction of
the popular animal online. The map continues with this deconstruction by
looking at other animal memes and meme cultures in global contexts, taking
a quirky topic to offer a deeper look at the many diverse cultures that
exist on the global web.

The map covers cultural appropriation of llamas in Mexico, Chile, and Peru;
the grass mud horse in China; goats in Uganda, the United Kingdom and
Brazil; cats in Japan and Pakistan; hyenas in Kenya; bears in Russia; and
internet cultures (such as Iran and Syria) where animals don’t generally
have a large presence. Each entry is written by a researcher with
experience in the country’s online context. The map will continue to grow
throughout the course of the exhibition, and it will have a second life on
a dedicated web site at a to-be-determined future date.

We are seeking meme submissions from internet researchers — academics,
journalists, cultural critics, and others — in a wide variety of countries,
including but not limited to:

   - Argentina
   - Australia
   - Canada
   - France
   - Germany
   - India
   - Indonesia
   - Italy
   - Malaysia
   - Nigeria
   - Saudi Arabia
   - South Africa
   - South Korea
   - and many others

We’re particularly interested in submissions from the global south and
emerging and underrepresented internet cultures.


Submissions should include the following:

   - Your name
   - Institutional affiliation and title
   - Your research background
   - Country whose internet culture you are studying
   - A brief paragraph (3–5 sentences long) looking at an animal meme (or
   animal-based humor) most representative of the internet culture of the
   country you study and some of the social and cultural reasons for its
   popularity. (This will be trimmed down by the curators to about 2
   sentences, but the extra content is helpful.)
   - A few representative meme images, with English translations (if needed)
   - Agreement to release the writing under a Creative Commons NC-BY-SA
   license.

For more information, please see a brief write-up about the project at
https://medium.com/the-civic-beat/internet-cats-internet-llamas-and-cultural-specificity-on-the-global-web-a2245e9709f8.
Submissions are due October 9 to info at thecivicbeat.com; questions should be
addressed to the same. We accept email or Google Doc submissions. No
attachments please.

Please feel free to forward this email or share this link for the call for
entries:
https://medium.com/the-civic-beat/send-us-your-animal-memes-6e5d9cca1cb0.



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