page_title: Lolcat
section_title: Recurring characters
hierarchical_section_title: Lolcat / Recurring characters
caption_attribution_description: English: Eva &amp; Franco Mattes, Ceiling Cat, 2016. Taxidermy cat (56 x 13 x 20 cm) and custom made hole (13 x 13 cm) Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
context_page_description: A lolcat, or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. The image's text is often idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect, and is known as lolspeak.
  Lolcat is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation LOL and the word "cat". A synonym for lolcat is cat macro or cat meme, since the images are a type of image macro and also a well-known genre of meme. Lolcats are commonly designed for photo sharing imageboards and other Internet forums.
context_section_description: "Ceiling Cat" is a character spawned by the meme. The original image was an image macro with a picture of a cat looking out of a hole in a ceiling, captioned "Ceiling Cat is watching you masturbate." There followed numerous examples with the format "Ceiling Cat is watching you [verb ending in / rhyming with -ate]" with Ceiling Cat superimposed in the upper left hand corner of an image macro depicting the appropriate action. The underlying theme is that the cat is looking down on one, almost in a form of judgment. "Ceiling Cat" and the corresponding "Basement Cat" (a black cat who lives in the basement) represent good and evil in the lolcat universe, and in some cases God and Satan, as in the LOLCat Bible Translation Project. Ceiling Cat by Eva and Franco Mattes, a 2016 taxidermy cat installation mimicking the meme, is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
caption: Ceiling Cat (2016) by Eva and Franco Mattes, a taxidermy cat installation at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "8283", "Image ImageLength": "5982", "Image BitsPerSample": "[16, 16, 16]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 21.0 (Macintosh)", "Image DateTime": "2020:01:08 12:14:10", "Image ExifOffset": "260", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "734", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "2150", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/125", "EXIF FNumber": "16", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Manual", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2019:05:15 11:20:25", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "49471/7102", "EXIF ApertureValue": "8", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "25781/8133", "EXIF SubjectDistance": "701/1000", "EXIF MeteringMode": "CenterWeightedAverage", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "80", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "8283", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "5441", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "188679/100", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "188679/100", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "3", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "63", "EXIF BodySerialNumber": "SR64000048", "EXIF LensModel": "HC 80"}