User:Brice/UTC/UTC

UNRAVEL THE MEME

For this first project you will take look at particular given memes and analyse them. Formulate your own questions in order to dissect, interpret, assess, the meme. For example: What characterizes your meme? How is it used? How widespread is it? Where did it originate from? What are keywords that you would attach to it? What is it’s effect? What are it’s components? What does it link to? What is your opinion of this meme? How is it transformed? How would you categorize it’s iterations? What story might you want to tell about this meme? And how would you visualize this story? Ultimately your findings will be displayed as a mini-exhibition during the Wereld van Witte de With.

3 WOLF MOON T-SHIRT

About

Three Wolf Moon is a t-shirt that was ironically made into one of the top selling apparel items on Amazon in 2009 after being inundated with tongue-in-cheek customer reviews. Three Wolf Moon t-shirt was designed by Bulgarian artist Antonia Neschev and produced by The Mountain, a New Hampshire-based company that offers a variety of nature-oriented graphic tees. The Amazon product page received its first ironic review on November 10th, 2008, when reviewer named Brian Govern hailed the T-shirt as a magical product :

• " This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that's when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to 'howl at the moon' from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn't have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn't settle for the first thing that comes to him. I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt."

Three Wolf Moon is an example of an Internet phenomenon known as “customer review comedy”, which occurs when an online product page is inundated with humorous customer reviews. Examples of this include the Amazon review pages for Tuscan Whole Milk and a Laptop Steering Wheel Desk.. On January 7th, 2009, Body Building Forums member user787877877 posted a thread titled “Just bought a wolf tee (srs)”, to which member steve_nash replied with a link to the Three Wolf Moon Amazon page. On May 20th, a Facebook page titled “Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt” was created, which accumulated over 3,700 likes within the next three years. As of September 2012, more than 2,200 Amazon customer review posts have been submitted to Three Wolf Moon T-shirt’s product page.

News Media Coverage

On May 21st, the BBC published an article titled “Joke Review Boosts T-shirt Sales”, reporting that the shirt’s Amazon sales increased by 2,300% as a result of the ironic reviews and quoted Amazon senior manager Russell Dicker revealing that it had reached the top selling item in their clothing store. On the following day, The Washington Post published an article titled “It’s Made of 100% Cotton; Its Sales Are 99% Ironic.” On May 24th, The New York Times published an article titled “Think a T-Shirt Can’t Change Your Life?” A Skeptic Thinks Again", revealing that the original ironic reviewer Brian Govern was a student at Rutgers School of Law in Camden N.J. who created the review on a whim. He was searching for a textbook and decided to make the review. He did not actually own the shirt. The meme has spread on the image-sharing site Flickr, the microblogging site Tumblr and the social news site Reddit.

Other Customer Reviews

• Tuscan Whole Milk
• BIC Cristal
• Banana Slicer
• AudioQuest Diamond

Parodies and attributions

A similar shirt featuring Keyboard Cats instead of wolves has been produced at the T-shirt design site Threadless. In July 2009, this was the most highly rated design there.

A similar shirt featuring hippopotamuses with unicorn horns has been produced at dudeiwantthat.com.

The official Star Wars online store created a "Moon Over My Ewok" shirt that parodies Three Wolf Moon with Ewoks and the Death Star in place of wolves and a moon.

Capcom prepared a limited run through iam8bit of a "Three Wolf God Sun" shirt for the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con International, featuring images of the wolf gods Amaterasu and Chibiterasu from their video games Ōkami and Ōkamiden.

Minecraft has parodied the design in its own T-shirt merchandise, replacing the wolves with Creepers, an iconic enemy featured in the game.

Joel Watson, author of the webcomic Hijinks Ensue, created a "Three Wheaton Moon" shirt featuring Wil Wheaton.

CONTEXT TEAM

Influential Speech

There was something verry powerful in the 3 wolf moon customer review in the way that it was writted. Just like we’ve seen it on the 3 wolf moon t-shirt’s review sometimes the power of words is something that can be very strong. But it’s also all about the context and attitude. Then we decided to keep the 3 wolves moon’s review to see how its impact and strength could modify any others contexts. Speaking of the context, here, we had two elements, a kind of an ugly t-shirt that you probably never wear and a review that made it very funny and changed his all signification, becoming a brand new icon of the internet subculture. Here, we wanted to show (by using the same process) how a « meme » could be powerful desecrating a political and important speech for instance (we picked Obama’s and Hitler’s speeches as an exemple) wether it’s good or bad and create a all new context just because of influential speakers. A picture or a video that belongs to a certain collective thinking can be shaked and destabilized by Influential speeches. We also picked several people that can be very influent in many different ways (politicals, actors, presentator, fiction character), so it can show how people follow ideas.

EXHIBITION

For the exhibition, we decided to show the video and the t-shirt of the t-shirt in order to have a kind of an explanation pour the people coming. This video also worked well with Marjoleine and Arthur's project witch was creating a new context, working on the relation between words and pictures and the new context that it could create.