Momi visit

Peysakh Shalumov

I visited the Momi during the weekend and the first thing I realized is how different the exhibits were since the last time I was there. I was there a few years back and the exhibits had changed in a way that connects less to imagery but more to today’s society and media in general (excluding the exhibits on sound). The perfect example of this was the exhibit “How Cats Took Over the Internet”. The exhibit places a timeline of cats on the internet with the museum’s amphitheater. The timeline is extravagantly huge and remind of all the cat phenomenons:from memes like the grumpy cat, to countless funny cat videos on loop on a huge screen.

Looking at the popularity of cats on the internet, we can see how twitter, reddit, and tumblr took cats and skyrocketed their popularity. The general audience was captured by the cats and from there the cats took over the internet. Gifs, memes, photos, and videos were already popular among the general audience but combining it with cats made everything history. Today, our attention span is short and our interest changes as fast as we can scroll through the internet, so, the media of cats was a perfect fit.