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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