Meme Awareness

This definition for "meme" is offered on my computer dictionary:

"an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation."

It's a term used in biology, usually, I guess. But it totally makes sense why that word is applied to the current use of meme media, of passing ideas through use of familiar images in order to link to it all connotations and past hyperspace/mainstream culture associated with it. 

Dr Pepper is right, virtually every topic has memes made for it—even Breast Cancer Awareness, the topic I believe I'll be doing. I'm doing research about it for now. (If, in the end, it looks like it won't work for whatever reason, my backup is Harry Potter. Potter Project = done in one second.)

Clearly these memes don't follow the common route of mocking or poking fun at their subject matter. It seems they're more poking fun at the idea of memes, but that may be the nature of memes in general anyway. 

But the first image is just not even humorous on any level. We know cancer kills. We know it. Then not eating kills us too. Looking at that meme makes me think: awareness doesn't change anything; DO something. Give food to those who starve. Get informed about cancer, your own history and treatment and prevention procedures.

The second meme brings to light the often overlooked fact that breast cancer has no gender bias. It's not all about pink. Look at all the blue in that meme; and the male fish is solemn, serious, while the female fish (eyelashes) in the background is surprised. Some people get caught up in the pink and don't remember breast cancer is just cancer located in the breast, same mutation that happens anywhere else in the body, no matter which body. 

Once we become familiar with memes, we realize their intent is to deliver a message, and one, like I said, heavy with preconceived notions and ideas of the image. Connect these with obvious statements to contradict or reemphasize the image, and your message is wrapped and delivered. The two (image and text) work together, blend flavors, to get the right taste in your mind: you are now thinking what I wanted you to think. And now, every time you see another meme you'll have that meme in mind, and a whole web of relating images and thought patterns is forming.

Memes are a strain of new media cancer on the web culture system: mutating out of control, sometimes ruining once-innocent images/icons (Wonka, fist pump baby, Schrute) so that, always, those images will represent something more than ever they originally did.

Fan art was a bit harder to find. Interestingly, a lot of what I've found so far is anime style. 

I don't know much about digital art rendering whatnot, but this would appear to be not drawn by hand. Shadowing/highlighting looks pretty cool, proportions also seem realistic, so it wasn't just some beginner, is my guess. The artist has two works posted where I found the one above, both relating to breast cancer awareness. Going off what Lev has said about Selection and Compositing, it would appear that the artist hasn't composited separate existing material and rendered a new media, but has more or less "drawn" the image using selections offered through digital software. The final presentation isn't montage, because it isn't made of complete media elements pieced together; however, anything digitally rendered isn't coming purely from scratch, either. The available colors, any filters or effects, these features are "shipped" with the software, included, programmed in. So, this artist isn't necessarily producing this "fan art" as an imitation of something she saw already displayed in association with breast cancer awareness (a lot of fan art is pure or exaggerated imitation, much like a singing attempt at a karaoke bar versus a professional band cover of the same song), because there is no real "image" for breast cancer, excepting the pink ribbon, which does make its artistic appearance in the piece.

Here's one last photo that I believe does represent a composite of familiar images mixed together with "invisible" editing to send a "real time" message.