Chapter Three:

Mind/Body/Bricolage

Collage is the creation of artwork through the re-arranging of materials already present in the artist's environment. In many ways, the body itself is made of bricolage as cholesterol and proteins arranged over time into a cohesive structure. In the memetic ideosphere, the persona, or projected self, is created by a process of remixing the available memes, and subcultures form around deforming, transforming, or refusing specific aspects of their cultural memepool. Sorting and selecting from the memes available, most of us pre-consciously create a composite identity that is worn as a vehicle to navigate and negotiate social spaces. The act of selecting a self out of memes is a conceptual bricolage which produces a persona. From within this autonomous sphere memes breed and mutate, as the persona evolves over time within this shared space. An iterative process occurs as well, where the results of these remixes are passed back and forth, and as people themselves change in the face of stimulus and stress.

Stress itself is an emotional marker, and an agitator of memetic evolution. Things that place one under stress have survival significance to older physiological systems so the experiences that are paired with stress are more memorable. Bonds formed in the face of stress are more intense²⁶.

The overall conceptual system that should perhaps evolve in the face of refining this stress to encourage evolutionary trends and the bonding effects of stress would be to envision a tribal core that modularized various income-generating signals within a larger social body, to in fact approach the creation of tribal organs that fulfilled actions necessary to the larger social body as a whole.