meme-o-matic02portlandguerillaart.jpg One day I was walking down a street here in Portland and a little box caught my eye. You know those boxes where real estate companies give out their free informational catalogs? Well, someone had taken one of those and turned it into this haunted-house looking drop box. There is a sign that says it’s the meme-o-matic and another sign that tells you to submit your entries. There’s a pad of paper and some pencils inside the box. The box is locked to a telephone pole and there’s all this hardened purple goop-looking substance around the pole. I have dropped a note or two and had no clue what was going to happen to my note.

Today I walked by and saw a little zine attached to the Meme-O-Matic and the zine was titled “Meme-O-Matic” so I took it and left a book about NW Geography there instead. The zine is about 16 pages of submissions from people walking by, the zine also has red staples.

mem-o-matic03portlandguerillaart.jpg I decided to google Meme-O-Matic and I found that whoever this is has created a myspace page that has pictures of different Meme-O-Matic’s and changes these boxes have gone through over time. The individuals involved in this project are part of the Purple Planet Artists Corporation; claiming to be other-worldly, they are attempting to direct human interaction and transmit data without humans losing their humanity. In the blog portion of the myspace page there are some nice writings about how humans who are involved in corporations slowly turn into robots and they are troubled by this because they find that a corporate body is an appropriate tool for what they are trying to do. The zine has a creature-feature, monster style to it and talks about how memes are like parasitic, living organisms that enter our bodies. Pretty fascinating stuff!

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2 Responses

  1. jimmy brougher

    July 24th, 2008 at 1:06 am

    1

    full circle. I fell in Love with eric by reading his zines. now he is writing a hi-fi sci-fi zine and one of the first articles i read was about a low-fi zine machine promoting some of the ideals that eric embodied when i first got to know him.

    i forgot about the utter delight i used to have reading your publications eric. i hadn’t read any of this blog because it sounded like unimportant “fun” that i couldn’t/didn’t want to relate to(a time for everything, yes “fun” included, just not my time). plus, i often get fearful that people i care about have lost focus and are simply existing having some-how been siren-songed away from what Life really is. i avoid finding out what people are really doing so that i don’t have to confront this fear. confronting this fear forces me to confront the fear that i to may be wasting time…i finally gave in and checked the bog out just because.

    after i read a few posts and thought for a while i remembered that it was what i saw in you through your self-published writings/drawings that cemented you in my heart. i saw glints and glimpses of that same person in these writings. i am going to pay more attention now.

  2. Capitalists vs. Socialists Chess Sets & Free Street Interventions | Beer and Sci-Fi

    January 26th, 2009 at 11:47 am

    2

    [...] I’ve always been curious to know if these free boxes are set up and then left alone, or if someone comes by and cleans them up occasionally. I would hope that the latter is the case. I know that the one directly above is updated and taken care of often. It used to be an entirely different color and one day it disappeared and was soon returned in this new state. This one is actually different than a normal free box. There is usually a pad of paper, and pens and you can draw images and submit them into the slot at the top. Every now and then a zine will appear and all the submissions are published inside. I’ve actually written about this one before here. [...]


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