When a jpg is downloaded or screenshotted, it is compressed. With a lower resolution, visual artifacts appear. The more an image is shared, the more degraded it becomes. Meme culture recognizes and appropriates this visual style by purposefully deep-frying memes. These images appear crunchy, recognizable by an excessive saturation and contrast, riddled with fore-mentioned visual artifacts.  This makes an image appear as if it has been shared countless times, signifying a great cultural weight.

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I have been using digital collage to document the daily stream of media I am exposed to. Memes, videos, ads, and photos I passively consume are immortalized. Media intended to be viewed and digested in an instant are given a longer lifetime, blurring the boundaries between advertisements and art. These images are deep fried to signify a sense of importance, counter to their passive role in my life. By putting these images in context with one-another, they are given new meaning through association. I own none of the original source images, encountering most without a singular clear author (as normalized on the internet). These collages are a mapping of my daily digital exposures, offering tabs of whatever content algorithms assign to me.