Ellie Hain is a ‘culture hacker’ interested in the design and spread of future narratives, looking at it especially through the lenses of internet culture. Her background, as a law school drop out that spent way too much time on the internet teaching herself knowledge from a wide array of fields (from techie stuff to hardcore theory to sociology) led her to work at the London based think tank Perspectiva, where she had a research project on Social Imaginaries. She also works as a media strategist and art curator and is currently part of the curation team of the upcoming exhibition ‘Corona Culture’. https://www.corona-culture.org/
She will also participate in the exhibition with a curation of ‘corona memes room in collaboration with the accounts @berlinauslandermemes @berlinclubmemes.
Tarn Rodgers is a multidisciplinary copywriter, journalist and social media manager. Since September 2018 she’s worked as the Lead Editor of Emerge, a media platform highlighting people, projects and perspectives that are sowing seeds of social transformation. Her background is in digital communications (copywriting/social media management) and journalism. During her studies in the UK and USA she became interested in how the internet is shaping culture, with a focus on the construction of gender identity. Most recently she has been immersed in topics related to personal development and exploring how we might deconstruct societal norms and narratives to initiate inclusive and ecologically viable systemic change. We met in Berlin, where both of us are based, at the beginning of the year, as Emerge and Perspectiva became part of the same organization, and we instantly clicked. We both shared a passion for the deeper philosophical issues that our intellectual work was covering, but our language was the landmark of the young millennial woman: a combination of internet slang, astrology and harry potter references, and feminist inside jokes. As we were working in an extremely theory-dense field, we became obsessed with the need of injecting those theories into our collective imaginary via the means that our current social media landscape provides, such as internet memes and influencers. We recently did a talk at the new platform the Stoa (https://www.thestoa.ca/) on that topic together that was very well received, and I feel really sums up our story and background that are asked in this question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3RxaVpaxFk