Ancient Meme Protocols - Reverse Xenoarchaeology
performative installation in collaboration with Chonglian Yu
Ancient Meme Protocols is a performative installation and “reverse-xenoarchaeological” field report imagining alien researchers excavating the digital debris of a vanished 21st-century human civilization. Presented as an open excavation site, two “researchers” periodically publish their findings through experimental Chinese rap and audiovisual performance, revealing speculative misreadings of human memes, digital artifacts, and decentralized protocols.
Developed from our perspective as East Asian artists living in Europe, Ancient Meme Protocols reflects on the invisible protocols that organize human communication: those shaped by language, nationality, cultural memory, and the tacit conventions embedded in internet culture. These fragile social agreements are contrasted with the rigid protocols of decentralized networks, digital signal processing, and AI systems. By placing human and machinic forms of communication side by side, the work asks whether mutual understanding is ever truly shared, or merely emerges from overlapping yet incompatible systems of interpretation.
Drawing on speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2016), the project combines speculative design, live electronics, experimental performance, and storytelling to create an external perspective on the protocols that govern communication. Rather than treating misunderstanding as failure, Ancient Meme Protocols proposes it as a productive condition—one through which new meanings can continually emerge, mutate, and adapt.
Premiere and exhibition 03.06-07.06.2026 in Linz
