Macchine Adulatrici (Sycophantic Machine)

You know that flattering, annoying tone of ChatGPT? Marco Cadioli made a video about it. It’s called “Macchine Adulatrici (Sycophantic Machine)”. The audio is composed of all the phrases the model used to “guide” the author during the creation of the video itself. If you ask me, this is definitely the romantic hit of summer 2025.

This user

A userbox (commonly abbreviated as UBX) is a small colored box designed to appear only on a Wikipedian’s user page as a communicative notice about the user, in order to directly or indirectly help Wikipedians collaborate more effectively on articles.
Kristin Merrilees published an interesting article about them in her Substack. You can read it here.

“In a chapter from the 2009 book “Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World,” William Westerman writes about the history and culture of userboxes: ‘A fair number of these are self-referential, or even metafolkloristic, in the sense that they make use of in-jokes that would only be comprehensible to aficionados of the same television series, adherents to a particular religion, or experienced Wikipedians.'”

Map of Reddit

Andrei Kashcha made an impressive website that maps Reddit. It visualizes 116K subreddits and 1.5B comments (Nov 2024-March 2025). An interactive exploration of community connections across the platform. I could literally spend the rest of my life browsing this.

Vape-o-Gotchi

Rebecca Xun and Lucia Camacho built the Vape-o-Gotchi, a vape device that dies if you stop puffing.

There’s a big trend of parental locking yourself,” Camacho added. “I’m locked out of certain apps behind a password that Rebecca knows, so I don’t scroll Instagram too much. It would be cool if you could have that for nicotine.” But then, explained Xun, Camacho “found this Stupid Hackathon. And we were like, it’d be kind of funnier to be evil.” And with that, their “evil-mode” Vape-o-Gotchi, which instead rewards users for vaping, was born.

Game art mods are back

In 1995 we got Ars Doom, one of the very first examples of artistic modifications of videogames. Using the Doom II engine and Autodesk’ AutoCAD software, Orhan Kipcak and Reini Urban created a virtual copy of the Brucknerhaus’ exhibition hall in Linz and invited artists to submit virtual artworks that could be displayed in the new map. Armed with a shooting cross, a chainsaw or a brush the player could kill the artists and destroy all the artworks on display.

Between 1996 and 199 Palle Torsson & Tobias Bernstrup created the series Museum Meltdown,  three artistically modified videogames based on reconstructions of famous art museums (Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius and Moderna Museet in Stockholm). They used Duke Nukem 3D and Half Life.

In 1999 Florian Muser and Imre Osswald created NoRoomGallery, a mod level of Quake that reproduced the exhibition spaces of Hamburger Kunsthalle in Berlin.

Now, in 2025, Filippo Meozzi and Liam Stone gifted us with the delightful Doom Gallery Experience, “an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings”. No weapons this time, just glasses of wine and complimentary hors d’oeuvres.

BONUS: Here are is a text I wrote in 2005 about artistic modifications of video games (unfortunately, it’s available in Italian only).

The Toaster Project

I just found out about this incredible work called The Toaster Project. In 2009 Thomas Thwaites decided to recreate a mass-produced toaster from scratch. The TED Talk about the project is also great.

“It takes an entire civilization to build a toaster. Designer Thomas Thwaites found out the hard way, by attempting to build one from scratch: mining ore for steel, deriving plastic from oil … it’s frankly amazing he got as far as he got. A parable of our interconnected society, for designers and consumers alike“.

 

IMG_0001

Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Developer Riley Walz made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos. Amazing.

Telematic Dreaming

Telematic Dreaming was originally produced by Paul Sermon in June 1992 for the annual summer exhibition entitled ‘Koti’ at the Kajaani Art Gallery in Finland, linked via videoconference to the Tele Gallery in Helsinki. This full-length 40 minute documentary was produced shortly after the premiere of Telematic Dreaming and includes interviews and rare line-out recordings from the opening ceremony.

Every webpage deserves to be a place

Matt Webb added a new feature to his website called cursor party. It lets web visitors see other people’s cursors on his site. And they can chat with each other and share text highlights. “It’s a miracle that we can feel togetherness over the internet. And yet! And yet!”

This is the internet that I fell in love with, almost thirty years ago <3

Occasional updates

A really cool website full of old Casio wrist camera photos taken more than 20 years ago:

“It’s an amazing thing that looks just like a normal watch, but has a nifty little built-in digital camera that lets you take lots of photos on the quiet – and then beam them to your computer! Expect occasional updates documenting my travels and drunken nights…“

Sensing, more than reading

Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content: great new article by Caroline Busta.

“But what if, for better or worse, this non-reading mode is a form of adaptation: an evolutionary step in which we’ve learned to scan, like machines, for keywords and other attributes that allow for data-chunking, quickly aligning a piece of content with this or that larger theme or political persuasion? What if, in a time of infinity-content, a meta reading of the shape and feel of content has become a survival skill? The ability to intuit a viable meaning via surface-level qualities—ones that are neither text nor image but a secret third thing—is now essential for negotiating our sprawling information space. Perhaps we’re tapping into a more primal human intelligence.”