Are memes art? Can the pope be young? These are things you may ask yourself on a daily basis, and the answer to both those things are simple: are memes art? It depends. Can the pope be young? Only on HBO. For cyber artist Kay Slater’s new Uncommon Hacks 2017 experiment, Slater takes the art of the homage into virtual reality. The homage? To the memes ever-swirling around Joe Biden and President Obama, and the former’s unconditional love of ice cream.
“[I] spent the weekend making a memorial simulation for Joe Biden and his love for ice cream,” wrote Slater on Twitter on January 15th. The end result, crafted at Chicago’s UNCOMMON HACKS 2017 hackathon, is a fever dream of memes, neon colors, disorienting sounds, and a floating island (that rivals Bioshock Infinite’s Columbia) constructed of tweets and billboards of our soon-to-be-outgoing Vice President licking a sweet, presumably vanilla ice cream cone.
a tribute to the most saccharine of Vice Presidents
Though technically untitled—its itch.io page is just called Uncommon Hacks 2017—the Biden memorial pays tribute to the most saccharine of Vice Presidents. The man who made friendship bracelets for himself and his drone-dropping Commander-in-Chief. A man who even in the face of hardships, has shown nothing but grace and gratitude—inspiring the memes of Silly Biden. The Fictional Biden that will prank adversaries, to the chagrin of Obama. With this digital memorial, the Internet’s fanaticization of a living politician they do not know personally will live on forever. The VR cherry on top of a meme sundae.
You can watch a video below of a walkthrough of the Biden memorial from Uncommon Hacks 2017, or give downloading the game a shot (though, as the developer warns, it likely won’t install due to a bug).
