Memento Maury
Memento Maury is an exploration of gender essentialism and racial/cultural stereotyping in media as evidenced by the long-running daytime talk program The Maury Povich Show. By aggregating data—in this case, screenshots introducing new segments in the program—over the course of 100 episodes, one can see not only how the formulaic aspects of the show emphasize gender and racial tropes, but also how the repetition built in to popular media serves to both reflect and further ossify social and cultural hierarchical structures. Layering effects were created using custom stacking software, built with the open source programming language and development environment Processing. This is a documentation clip of the generative version of Memento Maury, screened for a full week on ACRE TV as part of the AutomataBahn series in November, 2014.