zed equals zee

In case you’re not keeping on top of Internet viral goings-on, there’s a new meme that I think is fairly interesting, conceptually. It’s nominally known as ‘Wikipedia Names Your Band,’ and the idea is to create an album cover using a randomly-generated band name (from a Wikipedia entry), album title (from a quotation), and image (from Flickr’s interestingness pool). This is clearly a descendent of the Surrealist party game, Exquisite Corpse. The difference is that, in the former version, human creativity and agency entered for each component, but the whole was randomly generated. With this Internet meme, each component is random, but the creator gets the opportunity to form a cohesive whole through graphic design. As well, our baseline expectations for record albums is for a certain amount of disconnect for the three elements; it’s the meaningful juxtapositions that violate these expectations.

Or, of course, it could just be another silly Internet meme.

Take a look at the Flickr pool and feel free to share your favorites in the comments, or create your own and tell us about it here.

MP3: Franz Ferdinand – No You Girls [buy] [Franz Ferdinand]

Image: tamachi station – something he can understand by Flickr user sharpener, reposted here under its Creative Commons license.