MEME CULTURE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 339/ 07 Oct 2022 03:02

I just checked and it was nine years ago that I devoted this column to Richard Dawkins’ theory of ‘memes’ –  ideas that act somewhat like genes by propagating from mind to mind and perhaps mutating during that passage so that some survive while others perish. Examples could be religions and political ideologies. In that column I said meme theory  interests me as a metaphor, but that I only partly accept it as important ideas like ‘liberalism’ or ‘Islam’ are too big and baggy to be treated as single coherent things. I did however sympathise with him over the way giggling netizens were applying his serious concept to pictures of talking cats and cheezburgers.

Now in 2022 I can see how condescending that was, because the internet meme has developed a colossal momentum, becoming something between a genre of comedy and a subversive language. It’s not a form that I’ve practised much myself, being of a generation more wedded to older forms of pictorial subversion that descend from Dada, Surrealism and Situationism, like the cut-up photomontage or the single-panel cartoon strip with speech bubbles. What prompted my recantation was actually posting a proper meme of my own, based on that photo of Keir Starmer and Liz Truss at the Royal Funeral.

I did some online research to grasp the rules of modern memeography, and soon realised that the meme has evolved into a format almost as spare and rigorous as the Japanese Haiku. A single photograph with a caption – funny, mocking, witty, gross, dark, horrid etc – often split into an opening line at the top and a punchline at the bottom, superimposed in bold, white, sans-serif letters. I found sites like the ‘know your meme’ database that collect, analyse, praise and criticise memes, and apps that help you to author them, which I didn’t need as Snapseed does the job well enough.

I also realised that while some memes are political, most aren’t: they’re something different, though equally significant and interesting. Those Dadaist/Surrealist montages by John Heartfield and Hanna Höch that I grew up to admire were produced by a handful of artists radicalised by world war and revolution, whose mass media were the radio, newspapers and pamphlets. Today’s meme generations grew up not merely with TV and cinema, the internet and computer games but also the ubiquitous ability to generate their own content. They’re individualistic (perhaps no coïncidence that ‘meme’ can be parsed as ‘me me’), hyper-aware of appearance and attitude, competitive, easily bored, and permanently anxious about status and popularity. They employ memes as a hieroglyphic language in which to express and to laugh at fears and frustrations in almost therapeutic fashion. The best and the worst of memes combine gross humour and subtle cynicism in ways barely comprehensible to an old fart like me unless I make a real effort.      

What I did get nearly right nine years ago was the cat bit, because a frequent meme component is the subversive animal picture – some animal with an ambiguous facial expression that could represent a human emotion that can’t easily be named. The original lolcat asked for cheezburgers in a mock-cute pidgin language, but was soon deposed by grumpy cat who just frowned expressively, who got deposed in turn by that prairie dog that gave you a ‘side-eye’ glance which could mean either friendship or scorn. 

And then along came that damned dog with the inscrutable expression – quizzical? amused? wary? – called ‘Doge’ in meme world. He/she/it’s face gets deployed as a Lego-style component that can be attached to other things, for example, a grossly over-muscled gym-bod, to stand as a symbol of success, failure, complacency, anxiety or whatever. Doge so intrigued me that I paid he/she/it the ultimate compliment of looking them up on Wikipedia. Turns out to be a ‘she’ called Kabosu, of a Japanese Shiba Inu hunting breed. First rose to fame in 2013, since recognised as among all-time greatest memes, has a popular cryptocurrency, a computer game and a NASCAR winner named after her. But the ultimate tribute is that an NFT of the original Doge meme was acquired by PleasrDAO and fractionalized into $DOG token (whatever that means). Memes now not only are coherent things, but arty things that are hence ‘worth’ money.

While I apologise for my earlier condescension, I have to admit that I remain wedded to a rougher, more political style of memeing than is currently fashionable. My favourite memes  come from places with histories of dark, sarcastic humour like Glasgow and Moscow, about apocalypse, panic buying of bog-rolls and the GULAG. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, perhaps the world will end not with a bang but a meme…

[Dick Pountain regrets that this column has no room to display his three favourite memes, but you can see them at XXX.XXX.XXX]

GO WITH THE FLOW

Dick Pountain /Idealog 338/ 05 Sep 2022 03:37

In last month’s column I explained how I came to terms with, and eventually even to love, taking photographs with my smartphone rather than a proper camera. I take even more pictures now because the phone is always ready in my pocket. What hasn’t changed is that I select a very few of the pictures I take to post online, on Facebook more than Flickr nowadays (since the latter was taken over by SmugMug) and recently more on Instagram too. Before posting them I examine these pix in a photo editor and often lightly tweak them, by cropping (I’m not squeamish about that) and maybe a touch of exposure correction and/or sharpening. Fewer still get selected for heavier mangling, with special effects making them into graphic art, to look like a painting or a poster.I started learning such post-processing tricks many years ago under Windows 3 in Paintshop Pro, then Adobe Photoshop Elements (which became so bloated and that I stopped at v5, hacking my install onto each successive new PC). When I jumped ship to a Chromebook I needed to find a photo editor with a layer-based approach the equal of Elements and SumoPaint did that for a  while until its publisher switched to a rental business model and removed the feature I used most. 

I tried AutoDesk Sketchbook which is a good-looking app with a clever user interface – so clever that it still baffles me and I use it only occasionally. Then a professional photographer friend introduced me to Snapseed, which he uses on an iPad but I’ve found is just as good on Android. It too has a clever, minimalist user interface that avoids lots of cascading menus, but its UI clicked with me instantly, and for those minor touch-up jobs it’s the best tool I’ve ever used. The exposure controls are superb, particularly an ‘Ambience’ slider which works subtle magic on the ‘feel’ of pictures, and a ‘Details’ slider for structural sharpening that’s as good as the Nik Filters I miss so much from Photoshop days. However it doesn’t support multiple layers – only a rather limited ‘double exposure’ – and its handling of text is limited and idiosyncratic. 

I happened across an online magazine article which tested what it claimed are the 10 best Android image editors and grimly set to trying them all. Most were powerful enough, but not in ways that help me: many are clearly aimed at youngsters into anime and manga, others way too complicated, but one of them called ArtFlow Studio grabbed my attention. 

At first it was more puzzling even than Sketchbook or Snapseed: upon launch you face a blank screen with a white dot in the upper left corner. Click on that dot and a very minimal UI does appear with a single row of small icons along the top of the screen, a pair of thin vertical sliders at the left edge, and a hideable Layers box at the right. No text is visible anywhere, though clicking and holding the icons does pop up a hint. 

It took me several weeks to uncover all the power I need within ArtFlow, because it’s organised in such an unusually economical and elegant manner that you need to adjust, to stop looking for items in menus. Everything descends from the six icons at top left which spawn visual palettes of brushes, erasers, smudgers, fillers and selectors while those two left-hand sliders control the size and intensity for each tool. Once I’d got my mind right, I 

began to appreciate the speed and uncluttered screen. 

ArtFlow’s handling of layers is extremely powerful, with more Blend Modes than either Elements or Sumopaint, and its effects filters are also excellent. I do miss a fractal filter that only Sumo offers (and from which I’d created a whole art-style) but it’s some consolation that ArtFlow has an unusually controllable Solarise filter that can create some very striking effects. Its one major lack is that ArtFlow doesn’t handle text at all, but this discovery lead me to make another that has completely transformed the way my imaging workflow works. 

Not only does Android’s Files App recognise Snapseed, Sketchbook and ArtFlow in its ‘Open With’ menu, but these three apps also recognise one another in their own Share commands, so if I need to add text to an image that I’m creating or editing in ArtFlow, I just share it straight into Sketchbook which has rather superior text handling, then return it back into ArtFlow.

Sketchbook, Snapseed and ArtFlow Studio are all available free for Windows too (though both Snapseed and ArtFlow require Bluestacks or a similar quality Android emulator). If ever you’re feeling symptoms of menuphobia, one of them might provide instant relief.

[Dick Pountain wonders whether, if a picture is worth a thousand words, he might submit 4/5ths of a picture next month]

 

WHAT I DID ON MY HOLIDAYS

Dick Pountain /Idealog 337/ 07 Aug 2022 02:01

Just back from a holiday visit to in-laws in Scotland, our first proper break from London since the lockdowns disrupted everything. Before Covid we would visit Scotland most years, by car or by train, to Edinburgh, the Highlands or The Mearns of the North East. However, since PC Pro is not a travel magazine, I figure that the best way to tie this column into technology is just to describe what felt so different this time round.

Packing used to be a matter of some concern in the days of Windows laptop, tablet, digital camera and phone/PDA, along with their rat’s nest of cables and power supplies. This time I took just my Chromebook and phone, and though it would be nice to claim only one cable it was actually two. We flew by Loganair from London City to Dundee. I’d booked on their website and didn’t need to show any tickets (even on a phone), simply some photo ID. Once we arrived in Montrose reconnecting to the online world was almost entirely seamless, as my Chromebook remembered their wi-fi address and connected automatically, while the phone being new had to be told. Chromebook also effortlessly cast YouTube and Spotify streams to their Sony TV and sound system, even though they don’t have a hardware Chromecast dongle. And while once upon a time mobile signal coverage was distinctly iffy in Northern Scotland, but that’s no longer true.One of the day trips we made was through the rolling hills of the Howe o' the Mearns to visit villages mentioned in Lewis Grassic Gibbons’ trio of between-the-wars novels which I greatly admire. These hills were covered by a vast harvest of ripe golden wheat: the valley contains some of the most productive soils in the world, and around 85% of UK bread flour is from home-grown wheat. The hills also display quite a lot of wind turbines, which neither ruin the landscape nor incur the frothing NIMBY wrath they do in England. Out sea there are vast wind farms, some right on the horizon, slowly replacing the fading oil industry. 

For me the biggest change compared to previous visits was that while I took many photographs, it was with my phone rather than a camera (despite having often declared in this column that I’d never succumb). Last year my trusty old HTC phone died and I replaced it with a Moto G8 Power Lite which has served very well and takes far better pictures. That summer I decided to experiment using the Moto instead of carrying (or forgetting to) my Sony WX350 pocket camera, and I was pleasantly surprised by the sharpness and colour balance of its pictures, and the convenience of always having it to hand. What I didn’t like was its user interface, which often had me shooting videos when I wanted stills, and occasionally blurry pictures that took ages to process which I discovered was because I’d inadvertently pressed a tiny, indecipherable icon and turned on  'bokeh' mode. 

I grumbled on Facebook about such options persisting after the camera was turned off, and wished the phone would reset itself to defaults between sessions: a FB friend Tony Sleep pointed me toward Open Camera, a free, no ads app that’s way better than Motorola's own camera app and works well with most Android phone cameras. With that obstacle overcome I’m happy enough with the Moto’s image quality for viewing online on FaceBook or Flickr, though it wouldn't do for large prints. 

I still don’t like the narrow phone portrait format as used on Instagram and in FB 'stories', but I've become very fond of the wide landscape format. After six months of this testing, one day I took both my Sony 350 and the phone, snapped identical pictures and compared them. I concluded that both lens and sensor in the phone appear superior; that neither is quite wide-angle enough; that the Sony camera has optical rather than digital zoom, but I rarely use telephoto nowadays. My overall impression is that pix from the phone look good over a fair range of zoom scales but then quite suddenly collapse at the deepest zoom into ugly sharpening artefacts, while the camera’s pix degrade more gracefully with scale. Probably the phone’s tiny lens demands a more aggressive sharpening algorithm.This Scottish visit was the first time I’ve travelled anywhere with a phone as my only camera, and I have to say I’ve been delighted with the results, though it’s taken over a year to learn how to exploit its abilities to the full. So am I now tempted to spend £1000 to get a flagship Apple, Samsung or Google phone? Nae chance.

[You can see a selection of Dick Pountain’s Scottish photos at  https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=dick.pountain&set=a.10162151385019478]