I’ve never experienced “Radioactive Cats,” Sandy Skoglund’s 1981 installation, in person, but I love the photographs I’ve seen of it: a gray kitchen, with an old man and woman, and everywhere, cats, painted neon green, crawling, writhing, looking lanky and predatory and anything but cute. Skoglund likes to take the things that seem tame and comfortable to us and render them in ways that make us squirm. Lately I’ve begun to think that “Radioactive Cats” suitably predicted the status of the feline on the Internet.

If the Internet is a collective unconscious, we are in big trouble, and I don’t think you have to find sites by child-molesters or terrorists to prove the point. When child-molesters are few, cats will do.

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Tags: animals, stone age memes, technology by Eva Thury
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The folks whose lives are intertwined with the tendrils of the Internet believe the meme is something new, but there have always been memes. The latest thing, the knowing smile, spreading from person to person. The sandals of the meme now have wings, but there have always been things we pass along knowingly, loving the knowing.

The purpose of this column is to twit the leet and ponder the creeping kudzu of the Internet. Is there anything new under the sun? Or are those memes on the walls of the Great Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux?

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Tags: stone age memes, technology by Eva Thury
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