Designing a speculative digital forest for archiving meme culture as public memory

Abstract

Memes, fleeting yet potent vernaculars, encode cultural memory, public sentiment, and grassroots critique. Their ephemerality, combined with platform dependence and weak institutional archiving in non-Western contexts, renders them vulnerable to digital oblivion. This paper introduces MEMESCAPE, a speculative and participatory design project that reimagines meme preservation through the metaphor of a digital forest. Instead of treating decay as loss, MEMESCAPE stages cycles of growth, mutation, and evolution as central archival gestures. Grounded in a practice-led approach, the research integrates mid-fidelity prototyping, participant walkthroughs (N=8), and psychoanalytic reflection. The prototype, built in Figma, maps static memes, GIFs, and videos to forest analogues, each with distinct behaviours, resembling elements of an ecosystem. Guided sessions revealed emotional responses to public history documented from multiple perspectives. Findings suggest that the forest metaphor shifts user perception from passive content consumption to participatory cultivation, encouraging ethical reflection on the preservation of memes while facilitating their evolution. In the Sri Lankan context, where memes often outpace traditional media in shaping political discourse, MEMESCAPE foregrounds the politics of memory itself. The project contributes to speculative archival practice by proposing an inclusive, living and affective interface ecology that resists permanence, embraces transformation, and invites users to feel the experience of active exploration of digital chronicles of public history.