Today everything is digital, but then a heat wave arrives and changes your plans: reality is like that, and it prevails. The fact is that the battle of memes at the SoyMeme Festival in Madrid, which is being held this weekend at the Pilar Miró Cultural Center, was delayed for almost two hours due to the forty degrees in the city: too many degrees to think, to imagine, to do stuff. To live.
The battle of memes, by the way, is the memeril equivalent of the battle of roosters, which in turn could be the rapper and freestyle equivalent of the beefs that Góngora and Quevedo threw in their sonnets in the Golden Age.
That is to say, a refinement of the hesitation, an update of the joke. Something like that.
Noelia Pérez de las Heras, the sarao’s mistress of ceremonies, defined it as a way of “imputing the meme”: that is, turning it into a competition. She also said that the “meme is anthropology”, but did not elaborate.
Participating in ‘this’ (for lack of a better synonym) were four of the best meme generators in the country, with cool names: Deconstruction Demolitions, Virtual Garbage, Queensdeledit and Pro.del.Kastineo. There were two large screens to see the inventions they made with their mobiles (one used his laptop, although there are also those who still write for Olivetti). They asked for applause, not likes. Everything was very strange.
The participants, of course, faced each other two by two: one won and the other lost, and then the winners faced each other, in a scheme as old as humanity, because victory still matters, no matter how hard we try to the contrary. The master of ceremonies threw out an idea and they (and they) returned a meme, and so on to the best of three. Eugenio Merino was on the jury, who put Franco in a refrigerator and made an effort to be aware. “Lads, lads, here we go,” the MC announced.
The first topic chosen was cryptocurrencies, in the plural. They had three minutes to launch a meme. Won Deconstruction Takedowns with a comparison. On one side, the “christocurrencies”. Advantage? “Adorable little nuns make them, they lead you to salvation, they eat them” (it was the image of some pastries). To the other, cryptocurrencies: “He makes them a rock that smells strong, they lead to bankruptcy, they are not eaten.” And so.
Before competing, Derribos had sentenced: “The more horrible, the better.” This is a guild norm. Now that it is so easy to make it beautiful, the challenge is the ugly, the seedy, that which interests Alberto Olmos so much. It is curious that the democratization of creation on the internet has gone hand in hand with the emergence of the crappy: so Twitch is TV but crappy (with less money than traditional, with fewer cameras) and the meme is the vignette but crazier , faster, more free. And… this is another matter.
The second theme was: ‘soft boy from Podemos’. The meme is image, but also anarchy of language, of grammar; a happy anarchy, without complexes. The ‘soft boy of Podemos’ came to be a heavy leftist, one (not one) who wants to flirt with ideology. He won Virtual Garbage with a ‘soft boy’ who tried as best he could: “If you want, we’ll have a drink, but Burguer King or McDonald’s, which promote capitalism, is prohibited.”
The tiebreaker to go to the final was with Victoria Federica as raw material, and she won a meme that paired her with Omar Montes. Two icons of this time, for whatever. The sociology of the Internet is as mysterious as statistics.
Then Queensdeledit and Pro.del.Kastineo faced each other, and the memes were more minimalist, more difficult to describe with words, but no less ingenious. They laughed at the defense of the rich on the internet, of Madrid, of Bad Gyal, of C. Tangana. The one from Madrid from Queensdeledit was left without a prize, but it was great: «Pa ke kero sex if the heat in Madrid is fucking me hard». It turns out that you could think with heat. Fuck no, but think yes. All in all, it was Pro.del.Kastineo who went through to the final. His Madrid meme was a modified poster of ‘El Madrileño’, by C. Tangana. In his version he only put ‘log’. Live was more fun.
The final was to use classic memes as a template and come up with something new. It was very meta, and therefore more difficult to understand for the layman. Eugenio Merino did not know the communist Bugs Bunny meme, but he still voted. The contest was decided with the mythical strong dog against weak pooch. The winner was Virtual Trash. He multiplied the strong dog and left a single weak one. And he wrote: “Me at the gym.” A classic, wow.
