Karl Daum
class of 2021
Karl Daum is a second-year MA student in the Visual and Critical Studies program. His research looks into the epistemic implications of 9/11 conspiracy memes, and their effects on political subjectivity. He believes it's high time we start taking these visual objects more seriously in politics. Memes are no longer that subculture thing people do in the weird corners of the internet. Now they're breeding grounds for insurrection and white supremacy.
Karl has an MFA from SFAI. His self-portraiture and performance tackled questions of vulnerability and shame.
He also holds a BA in (American) History from Columbia University. He wishes he were a race-car driver.
Karl’s Thesis
Sacred Simulations: Hypertruth and the Precarity Politics of Post-9/11 America in 9/11 Memes
Why do 9/11 memes appear on social media 20 years after the attacks on September 11th? Looking at three recent examples shared to sites like Reddit and YouTube, this thesis approaches the question from two angles. I use poststructural theory to first examine their epistemic implications on visual communication. I then engage biopolitical and post-political theory to understand what these memes reveal about political subjectivity in post-9/11 America. Contemporary 9/11 memes often reference 9/11 conspiracism. They take advantage of accessible software to shuffle the symbolic order, collaging disparate signs into alternative narratives. These post-simulacral objects, I argue, indicate a new cultural formation that I term the hypertrue. I trace the hypertrue back to the narrative manipulations of the Bush administration and attempt to show how 9/11 informs current conversations about precarity. Culminating in the 2020 meme “#allbuildingsmatter,” I argue that 9/11 memes have become digitally discursive sites wherein the politics of who lives and who dies speak past one another in Western liberal society.