“Taken in the 1890s (most likely 1899) by biologist and photography pioneer Louis Boutan, it depicts Boutan’s Romanian colleague Emil Racovitza holding up a sign that reads ‘Photographie Sous Marine’ or ‘Underwater Photography'”.
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Octopus
“Octopus, by Trevor Paglen allows visitors from across the globe to virtually experience the London exhibition through a live web portal connected to cameras placed in the gallery. Online participants can observe visitors experiencing the work in person and can be “present” in the space by streaming their personal webcams on monitors displayed within the exhibition. As art spaces continue to grapple with visitor access in a post-COVID era, Octopus offers a new perspective on virtual engagement in the gallery space“
Marxist memes for TikTok teens
“The next generation of political radicals will have passed through some form of these online political spaces and will bring with them many of the oddities, peculiarities and baggage of internet subcultures”.
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Videoart in the wild
Pareidolia
“Driessens & Verstappen are fascinated by the idea that all the faces of all the people who have ever lived and will ever live, may be found within the enormous quantity of grains of sand existing on earth”.
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Winamp Skin Museum
It’s Rain in Games
Thirty minutes of rain from thirty games. Headphones recommended.
GayBlade
GayBlade is one of the first commercially-sold LGTBQ-themed video games, a role-playing romp for Windows and Macintosh occasionally referred to as “Dungeons and Drag Queens”. Once thought to have been lost, the game’s software was recently discovered and preserved – and is now available in the Internet Archive.
The First Webcam
“The first webcam ever was invented by lazy students at Cambridge University who didn’t want to waste a trip to the nearby coffee pot if it was going to be empty when they got there.”
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Reading the Media
Founded by a collective of radical media makers in 1981, Paper Tiger Television pioneered edutainment. Broadcast on public access television, the collective took a grassroots, DIY approach to media production that showcased how television was made through television, while critiquing corporate media and attempting to build a more equitable form of moving image. As one of the founders put it: “It is one thing to critique the mass media and rail against their abuses. It is quite another to create viable alternatives.”