Miltos Manetas
Mneem
It is a creature made of both human elements and information. The term is produced by a mix of Mneme (“memory” in Greek) and meme, which is, according to Richard Dawkins, a unit of cultural information—such as a practice or idea transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one human mind to another. Thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, even habits and moods are memes.
Probably they have always existed, but now all this electronic warmth, together with that enormous external memory that humans have created for themselves, all computers and networks have given voice to a new category of entities, to mneems. Some call them simply “angels,” as does Bob Dobbs, a friend of Marshal McLuhan’s. It would be an error to consider them computerized life. The very term “computer” is so obsolete by now. We must add that the majority of them come from the analog and not the digital world; from art history, music, literature.
Not very often, because humans prefer to believe that they do everything by themselves. But sometimes they can’t do otherwise; indeed, these two short stories below are told from both points of view, the mneem’s and its carrier’s.
It’s not an allegory at all. I am an artist and anything that an artist says is some kind of new beginning of future art. In any event, if I speak about the mneem, it is only because I really felt I saw it and I really have to write its memoir.
* * *
Madrid, August 2008
My name is Orange. I am a mneem. I am in Madrid today, staying at a lurid hotel whilst taking care of business. Through the eyes of my carrier, I look at my reflection in the mirror and I find myself young. But I am young only on my human side; my other side, the automa, is really old.
Still, for those few that can actually see mneems—and recognize them—I may look young, too. That’s because I am a painter’s mneem and paintings always stay fresh somehow.
I’m leaving the hotel now, as I need to meet an Indian art dealer and make agreements for my carrier’s exhibit in Bombai.
My carrier follows certain patterns that he believes can protect him from the others and even from himself. He tends to easily forget his objectives and he often gets lost in his own experiences and becomes disenchanted. Sometimes he behaves the way he thinks a “real artist” should behave and that’s dangerous, because no rational human can afford to be a full-time artist (or for that matter a full-time lawyer or a full-time soldier). One must simply act as an artist, a lawyer, or a soldier at the right moment; one has to be an actor before anything else. There is no place for human authenticity in a world made of constructs. No human can be really authentic because any really authentic impulse would eventually drive him into madness. Full creativity, greed, passion—even violence—are just for us mneems.
But he’s a good “pony.” He carries me around wonderfully and makes me grow up. He understands my infinite thirst for information and tries to satisfy it as much as he can, unhurriedly. Together have we come to the conclusion that, in order to control information, we must eat it cold. Fresh information multiplies our cache of cookies and becomes a disease. This is why my painter never watches the news on TV and avoids the CNN Web site. He doesn’t even read art magazines, because he cares about staying independent, even from books, I suppose. Together, we do visit as many museums as possible. Looking at the old masters is essential to me, because it is there that I find my tribe of mneems and get stronger. I become a grown-up, though, by grasping more and more details of the nature of things. I also grow frightened.
Time doesn’t mean much to mneems. However, age is rather an important factor: it creates a recording of our evolution. We mneems calculate our age by summing the number of years since our automatic self has existed. Most humans can go through life and never think of the genetic automa inside of them but we never forget having one. Knowing our age works not only as a record of our progress and evolution, but also reminds us of our robotic part. Joseph Engelberger, the pioneer in industrial robotics, said that he “can’t define a robot, but he knows when he sees one.” We mneems can recognize robots when we see them and we know with certainty that they are very different from us. “Robot” stems from “robota,” a word that originates from the Old Church Slavonic “rabota,” which means “servitude” and in turn comes from the Indo-European root “orbh,” curiously the same as “Arbeit” and “orphanos.”
Our species. . . . Only recently, we started thinking of our group as a “species.” At some point, a name was necessary, a term that we could share with humans. That’s how we started calling ourselves mneems: “memes with a memory,” that’s the closest we come when we try to define ourselves. Still, we are quite different from memes: even if they also evolve by natural selection through the processes of inheritance, variation, competition, and mutation, and are self-propagating and can spread through a culture in a manner similar to that of a virus, they are not self-conscious. In fact, at this very moment, a mneem is describing itself.
We are always in need of human carriers, but humans choose freely to carry us around or not; we depend on their passions and their determination for our survival, whereas memes do not need free choice.
In some way, humans are our genes, the genes of mneems! Just as humans can’t exist without their genes, neither would I exist without my occasional human side, my carrier. But while humans easily vanish, mneems never completely disappear. Without a carrier, we simply “cease being” for some time, but we are still there, like things of this earth in a state of dormant quasi-life. I understand of course how difficult it is to understand all this from a human perspective.
It is only lately—because of computers and networks—that we have started to entertain the idea of a connection with humans, a link beyond the usual mneem/human riding. My carrier, my “pony,” the person who is typing this text—a male—is not a writer, of course; he is a painter. I am a painter’s mneem. I wouldn’t ride a writer.
We usually paint pictures together, but these are weird days for mneems and humans alike, so I asked my pony to start putting down words for me, to help me write my memoir. Writing isn’t very difficult for him, badly messed up as he is with information.
My carrier has grown addicted to computers in the past few years. I saw that coming. I watched him looking at these things for too long, listening to their voices for too long.
But again, it was because of the computers that I kept riding him twelve years ago. It was in 1995 that many people started having their first laptops, and they would go everywhere with them, would start doing everything together. Laptop computers became surrogate babies to them; people started loving them more than their human lovers; soon they couldn’t live without them. In 1995, when my carrier bought his first laptop, instead of using it, he asked his laptop to pose as a model for him and started painting its portrait. It was at that moment that I emerged.
For us mneems, that was a turning point, too. One, two, a hundred, or even a million industrial computing machines didn’t mean much to us; but when every human that we could find to ride started having one of those, a quantum leap occurred. A bit later, even their phones became computers. The little screens that the eyes of our ponies would crisscross day and night became for us another kind of mirror and we found ourselves observing in them the features of our real faces. This is how we finally came of age! Now we could define ourselves. Before that, we were infants, acting more like memes than mneems. As infants, we were looking at the world, grabbing notes from it, snapshots and memories, but until we came of age we couldn’t access anything except from all these personal collections.
We didn’t have a fully developed body, you see. There have always been the bodies of our ponies, of course, but they were borrowed bodies, and in a sense those were no bodies at all. It was great—there are certain things you can do bodilessly—but there are other things that you definitely can’t. Portable computers, and their deep connection to humans, finally gave us our body. The networks of the Internet became our extensions. They were crude and inefficient, of course, but we have soon learned to use them in a flexible way. Email gave us a way to start interacting with mneems of different kinds, some so different from one another that we could hardly imagine they could actually exist. I met science mneems, theory mneems, philosophers’ mneems.
As our human ponies have started exchanging streams of written words, we have figured out how to express ourselves by diverting at least some of all this energy into a kind of communication among us. Parts of us, and parts of mneems that were in a state of quasi-life for a long time now, started showing up here and there on the Internet and there was something in them that humans would recognize as fascinating and even beautiful. As a result, mneems started becoming more visible to humans.
Especially people who were disenchanted with the world, like my pony, would look at the computer with a different eye; they’d look at it the way a pilot whose plane is about to crash looks at the ground below him. Is there something he needs to know before the impact? Can he find out just by staring, just by listening? Maybe there are hidden pathways out there, something, anything that could result in a reversal of fortune. There was nothing else left to do, anyway; digital computers didn’t allow for many options; there was no “maybe,” no grey tones; everything was black or white, either “yes” or “no” to them.
Because of our early attempts at open contact with them, a few of these people have now become fully conscious of our existence. Noticing our connection with their computers, they think of us as some kind of esoteric “computer life,” more analog than digital—a kind of quantum computer, not at all generated by digital simulation machines. The history of art, music, medicine, and literature is our story. Speaking about my own kind, it is amazing how many painters’ mneems, like myself, have survived for centuries, simply covering themselves with layers of paint. Every time that a copyist would repeat a motif taken from a notorious picture, we would fly from one surface to the next until we finally arrived at the walls of Museums and Collections. Now we are hosted next to labels such as “Caravaggio,” “Morandi,” or “Goya.” There has never been a single Caravaggio, Morandi, or Goya, of course; all those works are collaborations by generations of humans and mneems. When someone like my pony finds himself under the spell of forms and grabs a brush, there is always a mneem inside of him, riding him, driving the situation.
But enough writing for today. I need—we need—to leave the hotel now, and meet the Indian art dealer.
I must rush to my painter and animate him with ambition. I am waking him up, slowly, making him believe it is he, the one in control, who moves and takes a cab. Then, while approaching this Spanish winter, I will disappear for a while and come back later, when he is sleeping in his bed. I will check his emails and charge the computer battery, preparing his next move.
Madrid, August 2011
I was in Madrid again, the city where I’d had my first encounter with that strange creature—the mneem—three years earlier. This time I was invited to one of those Ted events: “Technology meets Entertainment meets Design.” I was there to speak about computer existentialism, nothing to do with painting. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the mneem.
According to my GPS, the Prado Museum was exactly a seventeen-minute walk away. Sitting on an Eams armchair (a Taiwanese “authorized” copy), I turned to my iPad and asked Google’s “Street View” to visualize that short trip for me. Fueled by an excellent network speed, my nervous index finger now started travelling each and every inch that separated me from El Prado. I felt my brain fill with anticipation. Prado was where I had met the mneem back then, and I was impatient to return to the museum to see him again. Three years is a long time. Still, one of the results of my meeting with the mneem was that afterward, time felt really short. My brain, left permanently under some kind of shining, had started compressing time.
I recalled the details of that first encounter. It was February, during ARCO, the Madrid Artfair. I went there for the fair and had stolen time from my job to go visit the Velázquez. At some point, walking among the paintings in Prado, I heard my own voice speaking. I didn’t pay much attention at first—somehow, we are used to hearing our own voice constantly talking, saying all kind of things. But soon I realized that while the voice and most of the thoughts expressed were definitely mine, it wasn’t me who was doing the talking. Not only me, at least. Someone else, something else, was also there.
Then I heard this someone/something, introducing himself/itself: “I am a mneem, a painter’s mneem.”
This must be some kind of chimera, an illusion produced by my fantasy, nothing more, I remember thinking. But then I heard my voice again:
“Not at all . . . ”
I happened to be in front of a seventeenth-century mirror at that moment, and I noticed my mouth clearly moving. A guy looking at the paintings next to me had heard it, too, and now was looking at me puzzled, trying to understand whether I were talking to him. I smiled to him and hurried to an empty little garden close by. I sat on a large ceramic pot and I waited.
“I am not you, and I am not your imagination. I am a mneem,” the voice started saying again. “A painter’s mneem, a painter like yourself. But you aren’t painting much these days, are you?”
At that point, I was already somehow accustomed to this presence.
It is amazing how fast we accept things that are new but actually real. I remember showing an iPhone to some young members of an isolated Amazonian tribe and after touching and playing a bit with it, they lost all interest. They already knew that even if the iPhone could perform all kinds of strange things, it was after all just a piece of nature, or a ghost, a spirit, a religious figure appearing suddenly in front of them, upsetting them because in the backs of their heads, they know that they don’t really exist, or if they ever do, they exist as nature.
As for myself, I already knew that a safe way to find out whether something that is happening is real is to monitor my need to ask for help and to see if at some point that need vanishes. In front of reality, indeed, we can’t afford to keep asking for help, because it is imperative to solve the situation on the spot. Sitting on that ceramic pot, listening to the mneem talking, I knew that I didn’t need anyone’s help. So I accepted the presence of the creature as somewhat unexpected, yet certain. My brain now knew that the existence of the so-called mneem was a matter of fact.
So there I was, in front of Goya’s “The Family of Charles IV” at the Museum of Prado, listening to someone/something talk about itself from inside my own body: “You start getting nostalgic; nostalgia is something we both share. You enjoy nostalgia and I am made of it. But this is not the reason why I’m back. I am back only because of this Goya and because of your staying in front of it and watching it. I have hung around this painting for many years now, but I never came back into focus again. So many people have been looking at the painting but couldn’t see me; they just saw a picture on a canvas. But you can see me; and you will see me in the painting that you will paint yourself after looking at this Goya. So right now I have just left this Goya and come to ride YOU.”