Deep Fried Feels

Deep Fried Feels is a memetic exploration of the contemporary world's crises—or "polycrises," to use an expression made famous by economist Adam Tooze, which emphasizes their interconnected nature—and an "attempt to map out the hypercomplex, interlaced cluster*uck that is the world we are living in." Clusterduck draws on memetic "poor images" found on the fringes of the internet's dynamic and ever-expanding reservoir of content, transforming these motifs into high-resolution works while simultaneously imitating the distortions and noise of traditional "fried" memes. The resulting images capture the dissonant, fragmented nature of our shared online existence through a hyper-saturated aesthetic, and each meme/character they represent serves as a representation of the collective emotions—commonly referred to as "feels"—evoked by local or global polycrises. Chapter by chapter, Deep Fried Feels navigates urgent issues, including the attention economy and data loss, which define and destabilize communication in the digital age, intercepting and reimagining forms of resistance to the ongoing processes of cultural gentrification, searching for spaces of freedom and dissonance. The book is published in the framework of the first edition of the Paul Thorel Prize "L'UNDICESIMA CASA", with the generous support of the Paul Thorel Foundation.