It all started in 2016.

Jules Durand, a young design student, was working on his thesis about memes, studying them not just as online jokes, but as cultural artifacts, analyzed through the lenses of graphic design and typography.

At the same time, I was building a meme database and had just co-founded the internet collective Clusterduck, together with Arianna and Emma Magrini, Tomato Cappelletti, Eugenio Pizzorno, Silvia Dal Dosso, and Noel David Nicolaus. We were preparing Internet Fame, a curatorial project for the Wrong Biennale of Digital Art, in collaboration with Robert Sakrowski.

“If you want to make a book with this database, I’m very interested.”
Jules Durand, 2016

That was the beginning.

That was the beginning. We curated a beta version of the Meme Manifesto for Internet Fame, and from there, the project started to take on a life of its own.

At its core, Meme Manifesto is a transmedia research project dedicated to unveiling the symbolic power of memes.

It now includes a book, a growing digital archive, an interactive website, workshops, installations, talks, and a research methodology.

Each part of the project reveals a new layer: memes as formats, as language, as influence, as manipulation, as expressions of a collective unconscious shaped by the platforms we inhabit.

Back in the early days of Clusterduck, we started an internal chat called Just Fresh Dank Memes.

The rule was simple: no words, no reactions, no emojis,just memes.

This constraint became a method.

We began using memes as our only mode of communication, pushing us to think from within meme language, not just about it. The chat became a living lab, and eventually, the seed of what would become our archive.

To make sense of the chaos, we began organising memes on visual boards first using Adobe XD, then Figma and Miro. We mapped patterns, cross-referenced formats, and followed hidden signals.

Then, in 2020, after winning the EMAP/EMARE open call, we felt the need to bring memes into the physical world. We wanted to touch the memes, to prevent them from vanishing into timelines.

So we started printing. Pinning. Taping. Cutting. Sorting.

That’s how the Detective Wall was born, an analog response to a digital language.

Of course, 2020 wasn’t ideal for gathering IRL.

After that summer, we moved the archive online again, but this time with a clear methodology. We began developing and sharing meme protocols, frameworks for collective research that others could use and adapt.

Workshops from Madrid to Vietnam, Mexico City to Berlin helped us refine this approach. People contributed their own insights, and the archive grew in unexpected directions.

We began to feel like we were breaking through algorithmic bubbles trying to map what lies beneath.

They are born in anonymity and spread with speed. Used by activists and advertisers, trolls and artists. Memes carry humor, but also ideology.

They encode symbols, rituals, and beliefs.

To study them is to understand how culture moves online.

To understand them is to resist manipulation and memetic warfare.

This is why we created the Detective Wall Guide, the digital platform The Iceberg, and Aby Bot, a Telegram chatbot designed to help users contribute directly to the archive.

With DJ Detweiler, we developed a sonic extension of this research, a soundtrack for The Iceberg.

From ten small tables in 2020, the Detective Wall became a 20-meter installation at Villa Arson, and a 14-meter one at KW Berlin.

Invited by curator Nadim Samman to be part of Poetics of Encryption, we pushed the project further, integrating new sculptural elements like the r/Place Door and the Black Hole Mirror, bringing meme culture into dialogue with physical space and critical theory.

Today, Meme Manifesto continues to evolve, not just as an archive, but as a collective inquiry into the symbolic, political, and emotional codes of our time.

It is a shared effort to decode, to understand, and to protect ourselves from the invisible architectures shaping our digital lives.