Posts Tagged → art

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).


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]

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.”

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.

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.

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“.

 

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.