A meme based on a photo of ours, 12 years in the making (!?). In 2008 we made an installation by assembling a large Mickey Mouse plush toy, a television, an armchair, a cabinet, a rug and a rope. It was photographed and then destroyed, so that it could never be exhibited as an object again.
The idea was to turn the photograph into a meme, so the sculpture would only exist through the many versions that people would eventually produce online. But no matter how hard we tried, it didn’t work, the image never “went viral”. After a year we gave up and considered the project a total failure.
Until twelve years later, in 2020, when we discovered that the image had indeed become a meme: countless versions were circulating on the most diverse channels and groups – on TV shows, football teams, horror films, comics -, often tagged “Mickey is Died” [sic]. Anonymous users had produced thousands of versions, adapting it to different meme formats, cropping the image, flipping it, adding jokes, pasting graphics, replacing the screenshot on the TV and so on.
Some examples:
