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]

My Mulholland

A desktop documentary investigation of what it means to watch David Lynch films as a pre-teen and get lost in the image regime of the internet. Directed by Jessica McGoff in 2020.

Quoting the first Letterboxd comment by Ian Wang:

“captures the particular alienating strangeness of growing up on the internet like nothing else i’ve seen. for me (and i think for many of us who came of age in this era) the attachment i have to the online spaces i was raised in is queasy and intense. i’m endlessly indebted to those many strangers and friends who formed me, yet i can’t separate the things that nurtured me from the things i was sullied by. there’s no valence to it, is another way of saying this: i might know (again, as many of us do) that the internet is damaging my psyche, and i will still keep coming back and coming back and coming back because it’s been seared into me, because it’s how i communicate and consume and exist. my mulholland reflects the anxiety of that attachment precisely and intimately, captures the feverish, troubled curiosity of mcgoff’s teenage self with empathy and without judgement. so often this kind of film will veer into simple nostalgia, but mcgoff is careful, critical, refrains from any too-comforting resolutions or epiphanies that might come from this archaeology of her past self. instead she presents the confusion and the instability of that time in her life unvarnished, and leaves it to sit with us. it’s unsettling but it’s honest. this remains the kind of thoughtful, protean combination of the personal and the critical that i aspire to in my own work“.

Journaling in YouTube comments

Between 2020 and 2023, a user named @mrtortilla3895 commented every day under the same YouTube video, an upload of Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy. For 1,000 days, the comment section became his personal diary, written in public and read by hundreds of other users gathered in the same virtual space. His entire adolescence is documented and narrated in this unconventional space. Also, mrtortilla’s performance has inspired so many other users to start their own journals in the comments.
In these two videos (1 – 2) you can find more details about this incredible story.
Here is the original Debussy video upload.
Here is a spreadsheet containing the complete archive of @mrtortilla3895’s diary.

[via Depths of Wikipedia’s amazing talk]

DIY vs AI videos

Generative AI is taking over every corner of the internet. All kinds of content are imitated, replicated, remixed, and reinvented through AI. An unstoppable avalanche of images, videos, and text is submerging us.
I’ve been observing a specific reaction to this phenomenon that’s incredibly interesting: people trying to “fight” AI by attempting to recreate its content with physical objects and practical effects. I first saw this trend emerge in the field of ASMR and satisfying videos, but now people are recreating all sorts of slop. This response is giving rise to a new subgenre: a kind of artisanal content that deliberately imitates the artificial but, in doing so, emphasizes human skill and brings the craft element to the next level.”

Some great examples below.

To See What It Feels Like

In 1974, Thomas Nagel posed a deceptively simple question in his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?: what does it FEEL like to be another creature? Nagel argued that no amount of objective knowledge could grant access to an animal’s subjective experience. Half a century later, users on TikTok are testing that limit through performance, attempting “To See What It Feels Like” to be monkeys in rainforests, rabbits in cold English winter rain, chipmunks in a storm, polar bears on a glacier, underdeveloped hippos in the water, or lonely raccoons in a trash can.

 

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Un post condiviso da Valentina Tanni (@valentinatanni)

Slop Evader

Slop Evader, a browser extension for avoiding AI slop, by Tega Brain: “this is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022“.