Reconfiguring the Meme Machine

Bianca Tainsh
Following its 2018 genesis in Berlin, The League for Human Integrity makes its Australian debut at Blindside. Reconfiguring the Meme Machine introduces this meta-movement for ideological reinvention in the age of Mass Consumerism, and constructs a platform for its peculiar activities.

Through this initiation the project will adopt a local vernacular, which will include a series of workshops by Melbourne artists aimed at sabotaging conventional value systems through creative agency.

In Workshops for Ideological Reinvention the movement also invites Melburnians to test their own views of the systems that drive everyday culture, daring them to deprogram from fabricated archetypes and reinvent their own ideologies. By driving this social and personal transmutation, the movement offers a new perspective of being an autonomous, self-expressive individual, who also identifies as a member of the global collective, the worldwide web of humanity.

Within the gallery space are the artefacts of Integrity’s quest to turn the tide on Mass Consumerism. By uncannily appropriating its tools and tactics, the movement fights fire with fire. Creating spectacle and harnessing the Meme as an easily replicated concept that jumps from mind to mind, the project creates its own plethora of customisable trends. The most significant being the movement’s Talis Insignia, a visual representation of its philosophies, which is also a mnemonic symbol and talisman for its members. In this way the project combines both archaic and contemporary archetypes as it explores the transcendent qualities of ritual, the fellowship of sharing a philosophy, and the semiotics of agency in images and words.