IRC-Galleria

“I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think you think I am.” (quoted in Jurgenson, 55)

The diploma project is called ‘jonne’, and it’s concept deals with a specific, perhaps the most notorious Finnish meme, carrying the same name. Originally a popular name of the 1990’s, Jonne went through a transformation of its linguistic meaning caused by viral images and internet memes originated in social media. Knowyourmeme.com describes the word as an “insult for typical teenage and preteenage kids who swear excessively, drink energy drinks and do stupid things out of peer pressure and try to act "cool". (Knowyourmeme) Due to jonne’s high popularity, the word is now as well used to describe the whole generation, born in the 1990’s. The meme originates from the ‘finnish 4chan’, Kuvalauta, where the name was ironically linked to photographs predicting young boys, who presumably in the first place were attempting to boost their social statuses and to practice the discussed self-design through their social media accounts. The original, mimicked photographs were posted on the early Finnish social media platforms, such as to IRC-galleria, which were popular among young people, operating long before Facebook or other social media giants. Contingently, after a certain period of time and due to the ‘appealing’ qualities of the pictures, the opposite happened; the subjects became sort of undead virtual beings, “lost boys” of the internet as viral images and internet memes, losing their original meaning; the gaze of others took over their presence and the images gained a capability to transform into endless new versions of themselves used in different contexts. The circulated representations became more real than the originals, which instead became secondary and unimportant. Whereas the images became popular and parts of the growing internet culture, they also found their way out of the internet’s virtual gaze, beginning to affect ‘analog’ popular culture and therefore also human language.
In 2018, the concept became an official dictionary adjective, and therefore it did not only have an effect on the physical world through popular culture, but also through language per se. As the internet has superseded the traditional, physical dictionaries, the internet-based dictionary of the Institute of for the Languages in Finland describes jonne as a word used to describe a young male acting childishly or embarrassingly. (Kotus) Universally, jonne is an early case of an increasingly emerging phenomenon, revealing a both linguistic and social bridge between the internet and the analog, ‘real life’ and likely one of the first cases of internet-originated words becoming an accepted part of official, state language. Whereas memes have a significant impact towards language, it is only natural also for certain names to gain new meanings and become sort of stereotypes; a certain kind of personificating mold is easy to create. Internationally also few other names have become popular through memes in internet culture, such as Karen, defined as “an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people's behaviors” (Dictionary.com) and Chad, which is used as a “nickname for any attractive, popular men who are sexually successful with women.” (Knowyourmeme.com), but at least for now, they have not reached the official, state level in the sphere of language.
The online project is a collection of self-portraits, in which the original viral, memetic images are being recreated and the identities of the subjects are replaced through digital chroma key-process in a performative manner. Personally, the self-portraits hover on emotional levels, as ironic, contrived attempts to fit the conceptual mold created by popular (internet) culture and grapholect, which both are today increasingly shaped and affected by internet memes. The project is dominantly realized online: similarly to their digital ancestors, the images are uploaded on the above-mentioned, still existing social media platform IRC-Galleria, under the nickname jonnev (jonnev), hinting towards my ‘real’ name. Although the images still perform as mere representations, likewise the countless modifications and recontextualizations made from the original photographs, the identities of the subjects are centralized and the bridge to the analogue world is reconstructed through the linguistic meaning created over time. Whereas the pictures are online in social media under one profile, the project does not have a definitive final point. It invites other users to interact within the limits of the platform and to even take the images out of their context by copying, saving and modifying them, since their referentiality is very clear.