Memeing to the Moon: THE CYBORG SAMURAI and Stonky Doges
By Clara Peh
In June 2021, the non-fungible token (NFT) of the iconic Doge meme - the popular image of a Shiba Inu, and the symbol of Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency branded after this meme - sold for 1,696.9 Ether (which is equivalent to over 7.2 million USD at the time of writing). The sale follows a string of record-breaking NFT sales of popular memes, such as “Bad Luck Brian” for 20 Ether, the “Disaster Girl” which sold for 180 Ether, and the Nyan Cat meme for 300 Ether. These high-value sales can be seen as representatives of the growing power of memes, and importantly, a reflection of how our visual cultures and values are shifting alongside the internet.
Memes are characterised by their infinite shareability. They can be created and uploaded by anyone, shared any number of times, and adapted to endless interpretations and reinterpretations of an identifiable visual motif - sometimes it’s a funny expression, an absurdly humorous row of texts, or a surprised, chonky dog. The most popular memes can be recognised for millions of internet users, and is able to build a connection with its viewer within a matter of seconds - given how quickly we scroll past content on the web. In the age of the internet (or post-internet, as some would say), memes are, undoubtedly, one of the most important facets of contemporary visual cultures and artefacts.
With the advent of NFTs, a new ecosystem has emerged around popular digital artefacts, including memes, propelling greater attention and recognition to memes as a media format and reflections of contemporary concerns. As we move further into the digital – or as some would specify, the Metaverse – memes will continuously grow in their significance, as representations and identifiers for online communities.
Against this backdrop, The Culture Story presents Singapore-based artist, THE CYBORG SAMURAI’s (previously known as ZXEROKOOL) first solo exhibition in the nation. “Memes, Myths and Machines” comprises three key exclusive NFT artworks, alongside two companion pieces, that will be exhibited alongside their physical twins on-site. In these works, THE CYBORG SAMURAI takes a deep-dive into meme culture, to consider how the rise of the internet and the fast growing blockchain communities will increasingly intersect and interact with contemporary visual cultures and art history.
One of the three new artworks shown in this exhibition is THE CYBORG SAMURAI’s Tower of Stonks. Tower of Stonks is filled with signs and symbols of the internet and takes after the canonical painting, Pieter Bruegel’s Tower of Babel. Bruegel’s 1563 painting depicts the biblical story that warns of mankind’s desires to reach for greater and greater heights in achievements. The story is told in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 11, Verses 1 – 9, with Babel as the first city built by the descendants of Noah after the Great Flood. In this time, there was one united population who spoke the same language. Together, they had desired to build a tower of lime and bricks that could be tall enough to reach the heavens. God condemned these ambitions and vain plans, thus, dispersed what was one united population with one language, to different groups of people speaking separate languages and spread across the world. The etiology is known for explaining our lack of a common language across the human population.
The Tower of Babel is broadly considered a symbol of the height of humanity’s ambitions and the propensity to cross boundaries. The desire to reach the heavens is interpreted as superficial and arrogant. In the Tower of Stonks, THE CYBORG SAMURAI draws parallels between present desires for humans to reach “intergalactic heights” (to the moon) with the initial attempt to reach the heavens.
“To the moon” is a popular phrase used across Twitter, Reddit and other online communities, with which, users express their belief or hope that a stock and asset will rise significantly. It is often accompanied by a rocket emoji, emphasizing the heights the user hopes the stock will go to. The phrase represents a natural desire for one’s financial holdings to increase in value, but in this light, can also be seen as a phenomenon emerging out of an unending greed to accumulate capital.
Furthermore, “stonks” comes from an intentional misspelling of the word, stocks, and allegedly first appeared on a meme posted on Facebook page, Special Meme Fresh, in 2017.[1] The phrase and its accompanying meme are often used as a reaction to jokes regarding poor financial decisions and misguided investment attempts. The Tower of Stonks, can thus be seen as a reflection of ambitious prevalent in today’s financial market, especially with the rise of retail investors (especially in light of 2021’s GameStop mania) and cryptocurrencies.
In Tower of Stonks, Bruegel’s many-layered red brick and grey lime structure is transformed into a three-tiered structure with hot pink flowing lava and yellow warning tape lining each layer. Emerging out of the flowing lava cake tower, is a dog with a muscular human body, breaking out and gripping a rocket ship in its hand, accompanied by an illustrative representation of the classic rocket emoji. The dog face takes after the many digital drawings and derivatives of the original doge meme. The muscular body similarly takes after drawings and jokes used to differentiate between those who are “swole” (to be large and muscular) and “chad” (often used to describe an “alpha male” or simply, a confident or successful male) with those who are “cheems” (a Shiba Inu who is characterized to enjoy cheeseburgers and is, in comparison, just a regular good boy and not a chad). The “stonk doge” is thus a playful embodiment of several popular memes and internet phrases. It is depicted to be so tall, that doge’s head breaks above the clouds, and is both metaphorically and literally, aiming to challenge the sky as its limits.
In another one of THE CYBORG SAMURAI’s works, Garden of Internet Delights, the artist replaces the visual motifs in the canonical painting it is based after, with technologies and symbols of the present, in similar fashion to what he has done in Tower of Stonks.
Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490 – 1510) is an iconic triptych that depicts three scenes on sin – with Paradise or Eden on the left, an illusion of a Paradise in the centre, and Hell on the right panel.[1] In borrowing Bosch’s composition, THE CYBORG SAMURAI lends from and builds on the narratives surrounding the reference painting, directing viewers to consider the elements and happenings within Garden of Internet Delights within the original painting’s framing on sin.
[1] https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-garden-of-earthly-delights-triptych/02388242-6d6a-4e9e-a992-e1311eab3609
The Meme Machine takes Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing, Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) as reference, populating the image with rocket ships, an artificial background and more of the net. Interestingly, the Vitruvian Man drawing builds on da Vinci’s research into the Roman architect Virtuvius’ theory of the ideal human proportions, demonstrating his efforts to add to significant texts and introduce new ideas representative of progress made in his time.
The Meme Machine lends on this symbolic value of the original drawing, and in the same vein as Garden of Internet Delights and Tower of Stonks, they articulate the fluency with which digital artists such as THE CYBORG SAMURAI are able to appropriate and resituate visual signifiers within different digital contexts. In a continuation of postmodernist techniques, memes can extract an image and repurpose it for a myriad of interpretations, such as how the original photo of a Shiba Inu has gone on to represent an uncountable number of possibilities. Internet (or some would say, post-internet) images, in deep resonance with the creation of memes themselves, makes use of the same method, to introduce different associations and narratives to a new image, borrowing from that of another. Aided by the ability to share images and digital assets rapidly across digital platforms, visual objects spread and can take on multiple new lives of their own. THE CYBORG SAMURAI’s artworks are both a product as well as a catalyst to this cycle.
Memes serve as important signifiers of the 21st century, holding up a mirror to our digital lives. Drawing attention towards memes and looking into the organic emergence of new terms and behaviors from the internet, THE CYBORG SAMURAI blurs the distinctions between art and memes, meme and life.