A Random Walk with Serendip

I'm an absurdist. I'm also a musician and my stage/performance name is The Fenceless. The photo I've chosen illustrates a phrase that inspired me to choose this stage name, which goes along with my personalised definition of absurdism, in which I believe anything is meaningless, so therefore anybody has every right to assign anything any function or meaning they choose. I took this photo while on a trip to Northern Kenya two years ago, and it is of a chicken perched comfortably on a fence...

I spent my memo thinking a lot about niches and privacy and how the two were connected. One of the things that really inspired that was considering my own niche. Here's the representation I did of it on Friday! (see also my response to Anne's question about interim spaces as niches for an explanation of this particular aspect of my niche).

Meme: A cultural element or behavioural trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene.

-Oxford English Dictionary

The first time I was exposed to the idea of memes was in Daniel Dennett’s book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which I read for a college class on evolution. Dennett gave several examples of things he considered memes...

 For my project I was really interested in the quote by a youtuber Tyler Oakley: “Just because I make videos doesn’t mean that I have to make the same kind of video every time…people that make videos are not just one dimensional who produce one thing for one type of person every single time.” (Tyler Oakley, Save the Drama Fo’ Yo’ Mama). For my project, I wanted to experience representing myself on youtube.

Below are two videos. For my Visual Anthropology class, the...