A meme based on a photo of ours, 12 years in the making (!?). In 2008 we made an installation assembling a large Mickey Mouse stuffed toy, a TV set, an armchair, a wooden cabinet, a rug and a rope. It was to be photographed and than destroyed, so that it may never again be exhibited as an object.
The plan was to turn the photograph into a meme, so that the sculpture would only exist through the many versions people would eventually produce online.
But no matter how hard we tried it didn’t work, the image never “went viral”. After one year we gave up trying, and considered the project a complete failure.
Until twelve years later, in 2020, when we discovered that the image had actually become a meme: versions of it were circulating through the most diverse channels and groups about TV shows, football clubs, horror movies, comix… often tagged “Mickey Mouse is Died” [sic].
Random anonymous users were producing thousands of different versions, adapting it to different meme formats, cropping the image, flipping it, adding humorous texts, pasting logos and graphics onto it, replacing the screenshot on the TV set and so on. Here are some random examples:
