Meme-orial Park Bench

meme-orial park bench [2023, installation]

A site-specific, conceptual homage to the UK’s tradition of memorial park benches, Meme-orial Park Bench transforms public space into a portal for introspection, digital ephemera, and collective memory. Engraved with a custom plaque, the bench features a QR code that unlocks a deep-web streaming page for EUPHORIA—an album that can only be accessed within a 10-meter radius, tethering the experience to the physical world through custom GPS and JavaScript coding.

Dedicated to Atay Ilgun, IKLECTIK, Most Dismal Swamp, MEMERGENCE OF DOOM forum members, and a wider constellation of friends and family, the bench is both a personal landmark and a communal offering. It channels the textures of urban life—grime beats from a distant car park, the laughter of a funfair, late-night Bluetooth speakers clashing with the quiet of nocturnal birds—crafting an ambient soundscape that bleeds into the album’s conceptual framework.

By fusing the ephemeral nature of online culture with the permanence of a physical memorial, the work questions technology’s place in our lived environment. Unlike digital media, which demands attention through relentless optimization and algorithmic visibility, the Meme-orial Park Bench simply exists—a quiet, dystopian counterpoint to the fleeting, high-speed nature of online content. It invites passersby to pause, to listen, to be present, grounding a nocturnal, digital nostalgia in the slow rhythms of real-world decay.

A hidden yet open secret, the bench remains an enigmatic waypoint in South East London, waiting for the right wanderer to discover it.

‘…I don’t know, but the image of a park bench on a summer day, with an elderly couple taking a rest on it or groups of people sprawled around it, munching on McDonald’s and listening to TikTok tunes from a shitty Bluetooth speaker late into the night, strikes me as utterly idyllic and romantic. From the distant, ecstatic screams of the funfair to the nocturnal chirping of birds, and the sounds of grime emanating from the car park, it all just coalesces into the album’s vivid visual landscape and is pretty much the quintessential embodiment of EUPHORIA. Furthermore, literally living with my computer throughout my upbringing, a significant part of EUPHORIA is undoubtedly influenced by my nocturnal digital life after dark and the work that goes along with it. To bring this to a full circle, I must have had this intrinsic craving to anchor it in the tangible world, and the meme-orial park-bench emerged as the perfect, palpable antithesis to running a deep-web forum or spectacle art – a physical manifestation mirroring my virtual existence and the stuff I put out. It’s not an online-content competing for your attention amongst algorithms anymore, it just ‘exists’. Imagine what comes to mind when we think of technology; efficient, invisible, fast, optimistic, constantly updated – but this is physically present, slow, dystopian, obsolete and governed by chance, striking deep into the heart of value.’

[taken from CLOT interview ‘ATAY ILGUN, in search of raw experience, ecstatic tranquillity & radical novelty’]