Meme Stratum treats internet culture as sediment. 53 memes from 2000 to 2026 hang in a 3D space as sheets of paper pinned to a wall, and the Z axis is time: scroll, and you dig down through the layers of the last 26 years.
\nThe piece is a critique dressed as an excavation. The visitor is handed a finite attention budget — five salvages, out of fifty-three fossils — and everything they do not choose is left to decay. A counter in the corner keeps score of how many memes went past unread while they were scrolling.
\nThe timeline is cut into six named eras — The Primordial Era, The Viral Video Age, The Golden Age, The Social Media Surge, The Post-Ironic Era, The Algorithmic Age — that swap under a giant typographic year as you travel.
\nEvery fossil carries a rarity derived from how it died, not how famous it was: a meme that faded slowly outranks one that died overnight, and a meme that came back from the dead (Pepe, Doge, Rickroll) outranks both.
\n| Rarity | \nCuration score | \n
|---|---|
| MYTHIC | \n100 | \n
| RARE | \n50 | \n
| UNCOMMON | \n25 | \n
| DISPOSABLE | \n10 | \n
Salvaging two fossils that died the same way pays a combo bonus, which quietly pushes the visitor from “grab the famous ones” toward actually reading the deaths. The session ends in a consumption report: what you consumed, what you saved, what you missed, and a grade — Conscious Consumer, Attention Deficit, Binge Consumer, Casual Scroller — with a rank from D to S.
\nEvery visitor is assigned a random digger ID on arrival (SHINY EXCAVATOR #84), which is what lands on the Hall of Diggers scoreboard. Over an exhibition day the board turns strangers into competitors.
Scrolling geology with a mouse felt wrong, so the piece also speaks Web Serial. A rotary encoder on a Pico W streams its delta over USB and the strata turn under your hand. The controller ships as firmware in both CircuitPython and Arduino flavours, in a parametric two-piece OpenSCAD enclosure printed for the show.
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