A meme 12 years in the making (!?). In 2008, we created an installation by assembling a large Mickey Mouse plush toy, a television, an armchair, a cabinet, a rug, and a rope. The installation was photographed and then destroyed, ensuring it could never be exhibited as a physical object again.
The idea was to transform the photograph into a meme, allowing the sculpture to exist only through the countless variations people would eventually create and share online. But no matter how hard we tried, the image failed to “go viral.” After a year of trying, we gave up and declared the project a total failure.
Then, twelve years later, in 2020, we discovered that the image had indeed become a meme. Countless versions were circulating across diverse online channels and groups dedicated to topics like TV shows, politics, football fandoms, horror films, and comics—often tagged with the misspelled caption “Mickey is Died.”
Anonymous users had produced thousands of adaptations, reworking the image in endless ways: cropping it, flipping it, adding jokes, pasting graphics, replacing the screenshot on the TV, and more.
Here are a few examples:
