Liminal Fiumicino

Jeffrey Smart, Fiumicino Bypass, 1966

Jeffrey Smart, Fiumicino Bypass, 1966

In recent weeks I’ve been working on a piece connecting liminal aesthetics with painting traditions of the past, including Metaphysical painting and Magical Realism, and I happened to come across the work of Jeffrey Smart (1921–2013), an Australian artist. He made several paintings inspired by the coastal town of Fiumicino near Rome (places that are extremely familiar to me since childhood) distilling them into scenes of crisp geometry and eerie quiet.
The one with the stop sign immediately made me think of one of the most famous liminal images that circulate online (also referenced in Kane Parsons’ Backrooms movie).


The Vintage Artificial Intelligence Collection

“A curated collection of early computer software claiming some aspect of artificial intelligence as a primary feature, allowing the early interactions of humans and machines before things got a little strange. Includes a variety of programs intended as therapists, conversation partners, and opponents”. On Archive.org.

Supercut Database

A supercut is a tightly-edited montage of short video clips organized around a theme, often a recurring word, phrase, or trope from film or TV. It used to be everywhere online around 2007/8, and we also have a ton of examples coming from the artworld (think about the award-winning Christian Marclay’s 2010 installation The Clock). The term was coined by Andy Baio in a blog post on Waxy.org, with the help of Ryan Gantz. The name stuck. Since then, supercuts have appeared in countless places. Baio just resurrected his old repository and you can browse it here.
And if you want a deep dive into the history and the aesthetics of this genre of montage, you can watch Max Tohline’s 2021 video essay “A Supercut of Supercuts: Aesthetics, Histories, Databases“, an amazing video that traces back the genetic lines of experimental film, fan remix, documentary, news, and more, uncovering the roots of the supercut well before YouTube. “These multiple interlocking genealogies reveal that the supercut isn’t just a new form of compilation editing; rather, it’s a new way of thinking expressed by a mode of editing. In fact, the supercut is only a small part of a much larger story about a culture that traded one paradigm of knowledge and power, that of the archive, for a new one: the database“.

My favourites? The video collecting all the “dude” pronounced by Hurley in Lost and the monumental Palin’s Breath.

[via]

In the Long Tail

I just watched this lecture performance that Mark Leckey gave in 2009 and I am in awe. The quality of the footage is not great, and it’s split in 7 parts, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s so powerful and prescient that no resolution issue can weaken it. It captures the essence of the internet in its more profound implications, telling a tale that starts with a dematerialized cartoon cat, dives into cybernetic theory, predicts the combinatorial vertigo of generative AI and ends up in pure psychedelic ecstasy, evoking angels and universal spirits.
I found the video thanks to this article written by Gia Festa on Do Not Research, which I can’t help quoting:

“He tells the crowd that, through the long tail machine, we can arrive at the future of desire. Smoke is flooding the stage, IDM is pumping through the speakers. Leckey speaks in foreboding monotone about how all of humanity is going to be united in ecstatic cybernetic equilibrium, a sort of Human Instrumentality Project-like singularity. The long tail will bend into a ouroboros and we “become one with the swarm”. This long tail machine would have a feedback loop so immediate and effectively self-regulating that it becomes almost prescient; our desires are informed by our content / our content is informed by our desires. The long tail know the contents of our dreams before we dream them“.

 

Dream alleys

 

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Un post condiviso da Napulensuonno (@napulensuonno)

Generative AI has facilitated the emergence of an avalanche of weird and surrealist-adjacent imagery. These pictures and videos attract our attention precisely because of the strange and unexpected visions they bring to our daily media feed. But we’re going to get used to them really soon. I’d say it’s already happening. Having a specific taste for the genre, I follow several accounts that produce this kind of imagery, and my algorithm keeps showing me new related content on a daily basis. Recently, I came across a couple of accounts I really like, because I think they manage to create a very specific narrative and emotional universe that goes beyond the inevitable aesthetic standardization of the models.
Take a look at @napulensuonno and @vagabondiary. The first is an incredible dreamcore-style journey through the city of Naples. It’s like lucid dreaming through the narrow, noisy alleys of the city, encountering flying horses, floating apartments and dancing statues.  The second one is also very dreamlike, but centered on the kind of tenderness and overwhelming, passionate feelings that only adolescence can bring. Also, it gets me because my (rare) lucid dreams look exactly like that, with a lot of hugging and flying.

 

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Un post condiviso da Charles Lopez (@vagabondiary)

Patina Machine

The Patina Machine is an automated, agentic video essay pipeline created by Dutch artist Constant Dullaart. It functions as an autonomous system that continuously generates and publishes unique algorithmic video essays on a recurring cycle, exploring themes of machine authorship, prompt culture, and platform capitalism.

“The entire system operates as a continuous loop: generate, validate, publish, repeat. Conceptual Framework The essays explore themes of manufactured authenticity, simulated imperfection, and the commodification of trust in AI-mediated culture. Drawing on Barthes, Benjamin, Baudrillard, McLuhan, and contemporary media theory, they examine how the markers of “realness” are themselves becoming products of algorithmic design. The project itself embodies this tension: an automated system producing critical discourse about automation, generating arguments about authenticity through entirely artificial means.”

Welcome to Folk Valley

Folk Valley is a new surreal meme circulating on TikTok and Instagram. It treats a fictional location as a real-world hotspot for bizarre, absurd, and increasingly horrifying events. Think of it as 2026’s evolution of the “Only in Ohio” trend, mixed with eerie digital folk horror (though it started out more comic than scary, with deadpan clips of UFOs, explosions and the now-iconic Folk Valley Cat). Videos are chaotic, inverted, or deep-fried, accompanied by minimalist or glitchy audio, like peaceful birds chirping or random sounds.

As Nolan intended

The “As Nolan Intended” meme is everywhere. It mocks the director’s obsession with peak cinematic presentation — IMAX screens, 70mm film, maximum immersion — by showing his films playing on the most basic and improbable devices imaginable: iPods, Apple Watches, flip phones, smart fridges, cracked phone screens, you name it.
The joke is the gap between Nolan’s near-religious insistence on scale and fidelity and these deliberately pathetic viewing conditions. It’s currently exploding around The Odyssey, but the format actually goes back to 2017, when a Twitter user posted an image of Dunkirk playing on a vintage Game Boy.

I suspect the meme’s genealogy also runs through that clip of David Lynch getting mad at the very idea of watching a movie “on your fucking telephone.” And, of course, it echoes the “Doom runs on everything” meme, especially in the wide and improbable range of devices involved. As always, humor turns out to be the sharpest weapon: the sillier the image, the more effectively it questions the director’s snobbish authority over how his films should be seen.

 

Backrooms through time

A fascinating trend is emerging on Twitter. Users are imagining the Backrooms as an element outside of time, depicting them across every era, place, and context: from prehistory to the Renaissance, through ancient Egypt, ancient China, and the Victorian age. It all started with a post by Dyoudi Mitimasa @Project_Crater @dyoudim titled “The Sun”.
Like Bruce Sterling once said, we’re not just multi-cultural, we’re becoming multi-temporal.

Flea Market Montgomery

Flea Market Montgomery was a furniture flea market store in Montgomery, Alabama. Despite their closure in 2009, the store created one of the most famous (local) television adverts in history. This video was filmed in 2006, and almost instantly became a viral hit across the internet. I think this is the source of inspiration for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire furniture store in the Kane Parsons’ Backrooms movie.

Welcome to the TikTok Farlands

Minecraft Far Lands were a math bug at the edge of the generated world. The further you went, the more reality broke down. TikTok has its own version: doomscroll long enough and the algorithm takes you somewhere strange, a periphery of surreal, absurdist and sometimes plain scary content. It’s the latest incarnation of a very long aesthetic tradition in meme culture (YouTube Poop, weirdcore, analog horror, deep fried memes, glitch art, weirdtok), but updated to fit the brainrot era.

Feed The Cat

A developer turned his cat feeder into a public website where anyone can watch live and feed real cats remotely from anywhere in the world.

From his Reddit post: “I started off the project in june because I was unemployed and wanted to recreate the hello street app with my own cat. I wanted to be able to feed him remotely and watch him eat when I was not home but I also liked the idea of anyone being able to feed him and see him too. The website now features multiple cameras in different locations with cats, including a cat shelter I managed to collaborate with. There is a global cooldown for feeding so that the cats don’t get overfed. It also features a radio with some music I carefully curated“.

Cybernetics Image Library

Great resource, fascinating interface.

“Browse and contribute images of all kinds: diagrams, schematics, photos, graphic elements, and other visual fragments. Each image is linked to a record in the Cybernetics Library catalog or integrated from the project’s original are.na channel. Image tags and collections are inherited from the Cybernetics Library’s LibraryThing catalog. Collections are groups of resources based on previous library activities.”

The Sheffield Freezer


“Anyone noticed how nice the freezers sound in the eccy road co-op?” someone wrote on the Sheffield Reddit page in January. “It’s like all the fans have been carefully tuned to the calmest droning chord ever, it’s like being in an electrical gong bath.”
Earlier this week, another Redditor shared a video of the freezers in all their aural glory, later earning a huge second audience when reposted to X. A debate ensued. Was it tuned to C# major? Could you hear the opening of Nothing Compares 2 U somewhere in the electronic hum? “I think it’s developed a slight discordant edge over the last couple of months,” one Reddit user wrote. “It’s ageing like fine wine.”

And now, of course, we also have a 10 hour ambience video on Youtube….

[via the guardian]