CHEESEWORLD

CHEESEWORLD
Year	2024
Medium	Web-based meme maker, Community-generated memes, AI image generation
Website	https://cult.inc/cheeseworld

CHEESEWORLD (stylized as #CHEESEWORLD) is a community meme project and participatory art initiative developed by Remilia Corporation in 2024. The project centers on a two-stage production process: users generate hyper-muscular anthropomorphic animals using accessible AI image generators, then apply a consistent visual treatment through a web-based meme maker that adds watermarking, deep-frying effects, saturation, and Impact font captions. Emerging during summer 2024 between the CULT token presale and its December launch, CHEESEWORLD functioned as both a guerrilla marketing campaign and an experimental investigation into collective memetic production.

The project gained institutional recognition in February 2025 when a curated 1GB archive of community-generated CHEESEWORLD memes was featured in the exhibition Poetics of Encryption at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, as part of Eva and Franco Mattes' ongoing P2P project. CHEESEWORLD represents an application of New Net Art principles through its emphasis on post-authorship, networked collaboration, and the treatment of meme production as artistic practice.

Development and context

CHEESEWORLD emerged in summer 2024 following Remilia Corporation's announcement of the CULT token presale in June, which raised $20 million within six hours of launch. During the subsequent six-month period before the token's December launch, CHEESEWORLD served multiple functions within the Remilia ecosystem. The project maintained community engagement during the token generation event delay while functioning as a testing ground for Remilia's "metameme thesis" regarding accelerated memetic production through vertical integration of meme creation infrastructure.

In Remilia's December 2024 Christmas memo, the organization described CHEESEWORLD as "the introduction of #CHEESEWORLD into the memetic pantheon over a fond summer of TGE delay." Coverage in Decrypt characterized the project as creating "layers of deep fried AI-generated memes" that functioned as barriers to entry requiring cultural fluency for participation.

Production process

CHEESEWORLD's distinctive aesthetic emerged from a two-stage production workflow that democratized meme creation while maintaining visual cohesion. The first stage leveraged accessible web-based AI image generators, most notably Microsoft Designer and Bing Copilot's implementation of DALL-E 3, which allowed users to produce the project's signature hyper-muscular anthropomorphic animals without requiring paid subscriptions. These tools enabled participants to generate bizarro masculine gonzo animal imagery with minimal technical expertise, lowering barriers to entry for meme production.

The second stage involved processing generated images through the CHEESEWORLD meme maker hosted at cult.inc/cheeseworld. This web-based tool applies a consistent visual treatment including watermarking, deep-frying effects (compression artifacts and degradation), saturation adjustments, and classic Impact font text for top and bottom captions. Together, these effects create a grainy, rough-edged style that makes CHEESEWORLD content immediately recognizable as part of a cohesive memetic body of work.

This factory-model approach maintains specific formal constraints while enabling mass production. The standardized visual treatment functions as both a quality control mechanism and a tribal signal, with the distinctive aesthetic serving to identify CHEESEWORLD memes within the broader landscape of internet culture. Users can process images recursively, repeatedly applying the effects to generate increasingly distorted iterations that amplify characteristics of digital decay.

Visual language and lore

The project's visual motif centers on hyper-muscular zoomorphic figures that operate at the intersection of juvenile power fantasies and algorithmic aesthetics. These exaggerated animal bodies, often depicted in incongruous business attire such as suits and ties, simultaneously reference and subvert the uncanny distortions characteristic of AI-generated imagery. The imagery appropriates what Remilia describes as "deliberately lowbrow, offmarket #LuxuryArt," embracing populist aesthetics while satirizing elite cultural signifiers.

Within the project's emergent narrative framework, CHEESEWORLD constitutes "a diffuse collection of warring animal yakuza gangs competing over memetic turf in an infinitely expanding rhizomatic web dreamt up in a decentralized play pretend." This fictional structure provides loose narrative scaffolding for community participation while maintaining the project's emphasis on distributed authorship and organic lore development.

The symbolic vocabulary of CHEESEWORLD includes three primary elements: cheese as a metaphor for money and influence, gangster animals representing intensity and commitment ("because they go hard"), and the scan filter functioning as what Remilia describes as "a search for beauty" through digital degradation.

Collaborative methodology

CHEESEWORLD's formal qualities emerged through an asynchronous meme workshop that spanned Twitter timelines and private group chats. The social media ecosystem's call-and-response dynamics facilitated instant feedback loops, allowing participants to generate rapidly referential works within a participatory mode. This methodology represents what Remilia characterizes as an accelerated artmaking practice that collapses traditional production timelines into compressed creative bursts while maintaining conceptual coherence across collective output.

The project's structure coordinates what Remilia describes as "devoted constituents—a group of non-artists" to generate content within established formal parameters. This approach aligns with Remilia's broader theoretical framework regarding the democratization of cultural production through network-native practices, where traditional distinctions between artists and audiences dissolve into collaborative memetic production.

Institutional recognition

In February 2025, CHEESEWORLD received institutional recognition through inclusion in Poetics of Encryption, an exhibition at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague. Following an invitation from net artists Eva and Franco Mattes, Remilia developed CHEESEWORLD as a guest contribution to the Mattes' ongoing P2P project. A curated 1GB archive containing thousands of community-generated CHEESEWORLD memes was compiled, with Remilia and the Mattes collaborating on the selection process.

The artwork was distributed through the P2P server housed in a white monolithic structure at Galerie Rudolfinum. Within the exhibition framework, CHEESEWORLD remained hidden within the server infrastructure, showing no output beyond blinking lights and cooling fan sounds. This presentation strategy challenged conventional exhibition viewing practices while emphasizing the peer-to-peer distribution model central to contemporary digital practice. The public could participate in the distribution system by visiting peer-to-peer.xyz and contributing to the seeding process.

The P2P installation includes cage design by Salotto Buono, software by Nelini and Ziliani, and installation by Michal Stochl. The Poetics of Encryption exhibition, curated by Nadim Samman, explores digital secrecy, algorithmic governance, and the gap between technological systems and human comprehension.

Critical reception

Writing for Human Events in March 2025, Michael Dragovic (Remilia's Chief of Staff) situated CHEESEWORLD within broader discussions of AI-assisted content creation. Dragovic characterized CHEESEWORLD memes as examples of "multifactored citational art" that utilize "playfully daisy chaining iterative outputs to create complex memes around a collaborative, ironic lore." He argued that each CHEESEWORLD meme functions as a cultural artifact that chains the posterity of its references to its own existence through recursion, representing a more sophisticated engagement with AI technology than simple generation of generic content.

Observers noted CHEESEWORLD's function within Remilia's community dynamics during the CULT token launch period. The project's aesthetic and participatory structure created what community members described as barriers to entry that required cultural fluency, with participants needing to navigate "layers of deep fried AI-generated memes within the fictional 'Cheeseworld' that appear to make no sense at all" and "avoid the intentional misinformation" to understand the shared cultural framework.

Theoretical framework

CHEESEWORLD is described by Remilia as "post-NFT" in that it functions as "a centrally coordinated and hyperfinancialized collection of digital tribal signals, but in the form of a posting formula decentralized from any specific PFP." The project is characterized as a "hypermeme" because it operates as "a universal, recursive and multi-layered format, but with an organic fan lore interlinked through an embedded hyperweb and the social media swarm."

The project functions as a demonstration of what Remilia terms the "metameme thesis," which addresses accelerating memetic production through control, automation, and acceleration of a vertical meme supply chain, combined with what Remilia describes as "the hyperfinancialized bootstrap of a pervasive memetic formula driving organic content production from the inside." This theoretical positioning connects CHEESEWORLD to Remilia's broader framework of New Net Art and its emphasis on network-native artistic practices that treat meme production, financial markets, and community formation as integrated components of cultural production.

See also

• New Net Art
• Post-Authorship
• CULT
• Milady Maker
• Network Spirituality