 |
|
 |
|
| About · Contact · Help · Desk · ⚙ · 3,562 articles | Contents · A–Ž index |
This logo is missing!
If you have it, please email it to us.
The Memefest team is an international network of communication experts, media activists, academics, professionals, educators and researchers. Today Memefest is spreading alternative theory and praxis around five continents, from an independent centre based in Slovenia and four global sibling centres in Brazil, Colombia, Australia, and the Balkans. Memefest is currently developing a Memefest North America, with the current and former Canadian and American members of its team and jury.
Memefest deals with the social impact of ideas as they are disseminated. The name of the festival is taken from the theories of memetics, pioneered in the 1970s and later taken up by cultural theorists such as Douglas Rushkoff in his book Media Virus. According to memetics theory, a meme is 'a contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people.' From the point of view of memetics theory, the mass media is presently the most sophisticated engine for the dissemination of memes - in an information society, modern battles are fought less with weapons and more with ideas.
Traditionally, every year Memefest asks participants in the Communication and Sociology categories to respond to an academic or culturally-critical text (typically an excerpt from a book), and those in the Visual Arts category to respond to another less lengthy text (often a manifesto). Memefest particularly tries to incite non-student participation in the Beyond... category, which accepts all and any types of submissions whose format deviates from the requirements of the first three categories.
In the Communication section of the 2003 Memefest the participants commented on Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, while designers were given the manifesto First Things First as an outlet for static visualisation, moving visualisation or web design. The 2003 Festival brought together over 240 works from 24 countries. In 2006 the text chosen for the first group was Richard Barbrook's The High-Tech Gift Economy, which discusses the co-existence of market and gift economies on the net and poignantly argues that the idea of utopian anarcho-communism, within such an environment, is dead. The text chosen for the Visual Arts group was The Principles of a Global Ethic, a call to the raising of a universal 'spiritual' consciousness as a long-term solution to the economic, social and political crises in the world. In 2007 the theme was Ecology and the meme was a movie trailer for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Memefest 2007 received works from around the globe, from four continents.
Each year at the conclusion of the Festival the Memefest Awards are given in each of four categories - Communication Studies, Sociology, Visual Arts and Beyond... - and other inspiring works also receive honourable mentions. The entries are presented in the Memefest online galleries, inviting participation and discussion.
Culture.si offers information on Slovene cultural producers, venues, festivals and support services, all in one place. It encourages international cultural exchange in the fields of arts, culture and heritage. The portal and its content is owned and funded by the Ministry of Culture, funded by the European Union Recovery and Resilience Plan and developed by Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory.
.svg){kind=link}
.svg){kind=link}