So I ended up having a busy day today. Last night after the escape room I went to a bar with my friends and they bumped into a woman who they knew. She had been working with another woman who had an exhibit called "MEMExhibition" in the gallery Oksasenkatu 11. As you can tell from the name, it was about memes. We really got to talking at the bar, which I was surprised about because I'm so shit at talking to people and nowdays I feel a lot less precise and confident in the way I express myself. Anyhow, we talked about memes, what they do and their effects on society knowadays. I went into an aside on Alexander Dugin and the effect of the occult on modern memetics (as in what I read in Dark Star Rising by Gary Lachman). The whole thing sounded so interesting I decided to actually go to the exhibit and looked it up on Facebook last night at like 1AM to find out today is the final day it's open. I also noticed that I was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday as well and was intent on going there too. I was touched that the people holding it remembered me.

I headed to the gallery so I'd be there around 12 when it opened but made it closer to 13. When you come in there was an antechamber where you were given a small briefing where the facilitator asks how you view memes and what they mean to you. She sort of then sent you to the backroom where she tell you to take your shoes off and says it's dark and you need a flashlight but since they were running low she asked if I could use my phone light which was totally ok with me. She explains that there is a "meme tool" that controls a monitor that displays memes, what speed they go and also there is a freeze button to pause it if you find one you like. Afterward there would be a debriefing discussion. She also issued a trigger warning for some of the content. Then I went down the cramped spiral staircase down through a dark basement hallway where I first saw two holographic religious pictures: one of the Madonna with baby Jesus and the other was the classic angel picture "Bride Over Troubled Water", which was familiar from childhood. (Man I remember looking at that picture when it hung over my bunk bed as a kid and wondered what a hassle those robes the angel had must have been, like an unreal amount of complexity given the simple nature of the surrondings in the picture.) From the hallway you could hear the constant beat of "Kekkkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen", from that voting video that's become a meme in itself.

So then I was in a small room that had a TV against the right wall and a few chairs and a mattress against the far wall from the door. The only illumination was the screen that had a constant bubbling soup of memes boiling away, one lamp to the right of the door and a UV lamp to the left by the chairs at the left wall. I was able to get a chair by the left wall directly across the screen, there was a woman next to me in the larger, nicer chair and a couple on the mattress reading the books that were tossed around the floor of the room. They were all interesting books; "Man and his Symbols", "Leviathan", "Kuoleman Joutsen", The Birth of Tragedy" and most notably I remember seeing "No Logo" by Noami Klein and "Children on the Matrix" by David Icke.

I watched the memes on the screen quite intensely, many I recognized, many I didn't, especially the finnish ones. Some made me laugh: "Too gay to live; too trans to die" and the X-Files one where Mulder just says "AIDS". Oddly enough there was one book title AIDS on the floor. On the wall by a typewriter there was a picture of Clinton with a orthodox Christian priest. There was a hypnotic feel to watching that soup of memes passing by, once in a while getting a good one. Three nicely, hipstery dress people came in and when they started watching the memes they laughed out loud that made me laugh a lot more at the memes. It was probably the first time I watched memes with others, consuming memes, in their macro form that is, seemed to me to be a solitary hobby for me. The facilitator said people should stay for at least half an hour, but I think she counted the debrief time as well. I stayed like half an hour down there. The "meme tool" was not too impressive: when you made the memes for faster the music changed from sad finnish music to more techno-y stuff so I just put the dial back down to low and went back to sit.

After I had enough I went back up and the lady wanted to have a discussion. I sat down, had her say buy to other guests and she talked about memes, introducing a photocopied text by Dr.Robert Finkelstein that was his work with weaponizing memes for DARPA. She also mentioned how she read a KGB history in lukio about how the Soviets would plant lies about pedophile elitist groups to sow discontent in the West and mentioned that the "Epstein didn't kill himself" meme is likely being spread by Pizzagate conspiracy theorists and Russia. She even said she was shocked when an American guy had seen the exhibit and had defended the meme. I was jolted awake: for a long time I felt that Epstein's death was shadowy and likely was a murder. I bought into that meme. Was I believing a conspiracy theory? I've come across the "Epstein didn't kill himself" meme so much I really started to take in for granted. I admit I hadn't done the research or looked into the claims of foul play but who does these days?

We talked some more, cybernetic psychology and the lack of gore memes that people in their 30's remember. (They were censored out for this exhibit). When more people joined we started talking about how marketing can now use memes to effect us, how the oral tradition of the Kalevala was memetic and more about Russian meme warfare. I would have stayed for longer, the converstation was so intense and cool but after about an 40 minutes I had to leave to make it to the dinner. (later at the dinner a friend who is really into memes who showed interest in the exhibit but couldn't make it was talking about Jessikka Aro and her investigative journalism into Russian troll farms. She wondered, what does the Russian state want from sowing discord?) The people were really cool and relaxed too. To be honest, the exhibit itself was not technically impressive but the converstation in the end really put the whole thing in context and made what could have been a silly little exhibit something a little more profound. I'm def going to take some time to look into the Epstein stuff. I've already lost one friend to Pizzagate so I owe it to myself to make sure I have my facts straight. My friend had become so toxic and combative after going into Pizzagate deeper and deeper, taking more and more of the "red pills" the alt-right offers until she started believing in anti-immigration stuff and the like. The one that really got to me was when she recounted an article she read and started wondering out loud "why do they market to gays and lesbians, they are such a small market, it must be something else they are trying to achieve..."

Read about Military Memetics!?!?!?!?

After all that I head off to Roihuvuori and had a nice Thanksgiving dinner with many friends and laughed a lot.