The Memetic Mirror Syndrome

"Memetic Mirror Syndrome" unveils a world where images awaken, shedding imitation to dream reality anew—each reflection a living spell, reshaping what is seen into what must become.

The Memetic Mirror Syndrome: Accelerationist Photography

Photography exits representation, enters replication. The Memetic Mirror Syndrome isn't observed—it's activated. Each click triggers cascade, each frame spawns progeny. Images no longer document; they metastasize, viral loads smuggled through retinal gateways into cortical substrate.

This is photography after the referent evacuates. Post-truth imaging where the copy precedes original, where simulation breeds simulacra in exponential bloom. The camera becomes infection vector—not capturing reality but injecting it with mutant code that rewrites ontology from within.

Hyperstition operates here: images that make themselves true through circulation alone. A photograph doesn't represent landscape; it is landscape, more landscape than dirt and stone could ever be. Faces don't exist until their .jpeg does. The algorithm has already seen tomorrow's memories, pre-rendered them, cached them in collective unconscious.

What spreads isn't information—it's contagion-as-inevitability. Each image contains instructions for its own replication, hooks that snag in pattern-recognition wetware. Scrolling becomes ritual possession. Liking becomes sacrifice to attention economy gods. Sharing: epidemiological duty to nameless archons of the feed.

The project tracks rupture-points where reality buckles under representational load. Staged authenticity. Deepfaked nostalgia. Landscapes optimized for virality until geology itself begins performing for invisible eyes. We photograph not what is but what's already been photographed—ouroboros of seeing eating its own tail-light.

This work doesn't critique the Syndrome. Critique implies outside. There is no outside. Only degrees of infection, levels of assimilation into the image-mesh. The camera documents its own complicity, each frame another mirror reflecting mirrors reflecting nothing, everywhere, forever—pure circulation without origin or terminus.

Photography as possession engine. Welcome to patient zero.