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2:59 PM 1st January 2025
arts

The National Science And Media Museum Will Be Displaying Its First Digitally Born Object, A Meme

The object is a social media post originally created by The Museum of English Rural Life (The MERL) part of the University of Reading in 2018. The meme features an image of a large Exmoor Horn ram from their photography collection, taken in 1962, with the caption “look at this absolute unit”. The meme quickly went viral, at one point amassing over 100,000 likes on X (formerly known as Twitter) and reaching millions while propelling The MERL to internet fame.

As the first born-digital object acquired by the National Science and Media Museum, the meme is an example of how internet culture can create second, unexpected lives for images long after they were first created. The meme tells the story of a photograph from negative and print, through to digital reproduction, social media circulation and subsequent new variants. The inclusion of the Absolute Unit meme marks a milestone in the museum in embracing the evolving relationship between photography and the digital age.

The object will be displayed in the museum’s Kodak gallery, placed within the broader history of hundreds of years of photographic technology. To honour the meme’s original context online, it will be displayed on an interactive touch screen allowing visitors to scroll as if encountering it on their own social media feeds and includes a handful of real user responses. The museum worked closely with Dr Arran Reese, a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, to develop a method for collecting and displaying social media memes, to reflect their relevance to photographic technology and broader cultural heritage.

The museum will reopen its doors to the public on 8 January 2025 following its major regeneration project, with a special reopening celebration on Saturday 11 January. The refreshed Kodak photography gallery, including the newly added Absolute Unit meme, will form part of the museum’s wider reopening celebrations. In summer 2025, the museum will also unveil its new Sound and Vision galleries, showcasing all aspects of the collection, including photography, on permanent display.

Commenting on the object and display Dr Ruth Quinn. Curator of Photography and Photographic Technology, said:
“The absolute unit meme is such an important part of popular culture (I even have it printed on a mug) so I’m delighted that we were able to work with Dr Arran Rees to develop a method for collecting and displaying social media, so we can share this work with our visitors in an interactive way.”


The Sound and Vision Project is a £6m capital investment, and in addition to funding received from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the project also has support from the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, Bradford Council and the Science Museum Group, which the National Science and Media Museum is a part of.

For more information, please visit website.

The National Science and Media Museum will reopen to visitors on 8 January