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.
Posts Tagged → internet culture
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“.
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“.
Syrmor
YouTube creator Syrmor uploads his VRChat encounters with random strangers, who open up about themselves and share intimate details of their lives while hidden behind their avatars. Some of the videos are incredible touching. Unfortunately, the latest upload is from two years ago, I can’t believe I haven’t come across this before.
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.'”
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
All Currently Known Backrooms Image Information
Lore Island at the end of the internet
For the final chapter of Shumon Basar’s Lorecore Trilogy (read the first part here, and the second here), the curator collaborated with Y7, a duo based in Salford, England, who specialize in theory and audiovisual work. Here is the result.
Here, according to a neologism from “The Lexicon of Lorecore,” the zeitgeist is taken over by “Deepfake Surrender”—“to accept that soon, everyone or everything one sees on a screen will most likely have been generated or augmented by AI to look and sound more real than reality ever did.” Y7 and I also agreed that, so far, most material outputted from generative AI apps (ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney) is decidedly mid. But, does it have to be?
The Lore Zone
“The way we remember the events that happen on the internet is different than reading a book. Information circulates and gets stored in a way that incorporates personal narratives as documentation, combining textuality with elements of oral storytelling. Bits of text and image serve as artifacts that help piece together complex narratives. The Lore Zone seeks to help us all understand new interesting ways of reading, writing, and remembering the internet.”
The Lore Zone. A very interesting online research on “Memes → Memories → Micro-Mythologies”
Heaven banning
Heaven banning is not real, nor are the articles that people are sharing about it. But it is a fascinating concept nonetheless, that can be read as an extension of the Dead Internet Theory. According to some sources, it is just a resurrected joke post from HackerNews.
Dracula Daily
“Dracula Daily is an email newsletter by Matt Kirkland that sends you a chapter of the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, written as a series of dated diary entries, news clippings, letters, etc., in realtime on the actual date of each entry between May 3rd and November 10th, the dates between which the novel takes place. The newsletter launched in May 2021 and became increasingly popular during its 2022 run, particularly on Tumblr, where it caused memes and posts about Dracula to trend.” – more info here
[via]
Reddit Place 2022
Place is a collaborative project and social experiment hosted on the social networking site Reddit that began on April Fools’ Day 2017 and was revived again after five years on April Fools’ Day 2022.
Reddit Place (/r/place) – FULL TIMELAPSE 2022
Open-source intelligence
“Under the pseudonym Intel Crab, University of Alabama sophomore Justin Peden has become an unlikely source of information about the unfolding Ukraine-Russia war. From his dorm room, the 20-year-old sifts through satellite images, TikTok videos, and security feeds, sharing findings like troop movements and aircraft models with more than 220,000 followers on Twitter. Peden said that his posts have reached 20 million people and his follower count has increased by over 50,000 people over the past month, according to his Twitter analytics.
Today, Peden is one of the most prominent open-source intelligence (OSINT) figures on Twitter”.
[via]
Web Tapestries
Eva Ostrowska (b.1989) is a French visual artist whose mixed media work offers critiques of social dynamics and romantic relationships using a raw and unapologetic combination of humour, sarcasm, and irony. Ostrowska provides a commentary on love and relationships in the digital era, the dissonance of which is made even more impactful through the use of ancient mediums such as weaving and knitting to depict modern digital realities like the text message.
When Guys Turn 20
For the past several years, artist Joshua Citarella has targeted his research-based practice on the political behaviors of the young and very online. Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman has similarly used his documentary practice to investigate emergent political modes like Seasteading. Together in When Guys Turn 20, they explore how users across the political spectrum deploy memetic tactics on social media, as well as how the rhetoric and reality of Silicon Valley diverge.
Cycling through a variety of locales and roles (teacher, Twitch streamer, prisoner, Sith Lord), Citarella narrates online political methods and mechanisms of propaganda. From MMORPGs as a proof-case for socialism to the tricks of meme extremists to the problems of Big Tech, When Guys Turn 20 offers a behind-the-servers glimpse into various expressions of platform capitalism.
[via DIS]
Nothing to see here…
If you happen to be in Milan before July 12th, go and take a look at this little project I’m working on…
“Nothing to see here is an exhibition in two parts and a discussion on art and visual culture in the era of the Internet at the Milan branch of the Istituto Svizzero, from 30 May through to 12 July 2013.
The initiative, curated by Valentina Tanni and Domenico Quaranta, is articulated as a moment of reflection on the status of images in contemporary society. The global diffusion of computers and the Internet, that supplied a vast number of users with the access to tools to produce and distribute images, has triggered a real explosion of creativity at every level. A multiform and undefined visual universe is the result – made of irregular, amateur cultural products, anonymous and collective creations, memes and viral videos – that often seem to evoke and repropose languages and practices that are linked to the avant-gardes, both historical and recent. Nothing to see here wishes to offer an overview of this irregular and vital movement, that takes place outside the institutional circuits and is slowly giving shape to a new culture, that radically questions professionalism in the art practice and forces us to rethink the creative activity and its role in society.”
More info here
Lol
The Story Of Bow & Arrow. Reloaded
Image by Systaime. And here is the original performance.
3d printed memes
How conceptual art influenced the World Wide Web
“In the information society, the world is the frame. Art, in these conditions, has the potential of being “received” by millions of people at the same time, without a hierarchy of reception.”
– Joseph Kosuth, 1968.
She Has a Hot Ass. How conceptual art influenced the World Wide Web. On Citizen Brooklyn
[thanks domenico!]
Rothcons
Not Sure if Art
Aled Lewis, Post post-modern ironic art for a cynical world. 297 x 420 mm (11.7 x 16.5 in) 5 colour screen print on Sirio 350gsm. Signed, numbered edition of 50. Lovingly hand-made in London, England for the “Memes” group show
I Miss My Pre-Internet Brain
Douglas Coupland, I MISS MY PRE-INTERNET BRAIN (from Slogans for the Early Twenty-First Century), 2012
Nyan Waits
Thank you, Internet. No, really.
Keyboard Cat Toy
[via buzzfeed]
Are LOLCats and Internet Memes Art?
I’d say yes.
Art in the Era of the Internet
“The internet has intensified connections between people across the planet. In this episode we take a look at the impact of this new interconnectivity on the art world. Traditional funding models are dissolving, new forms of expressing ownership have arisen to accomodate for remix culture, and artists are finding ways to connect physical art experiences and traditions to the internet. In the digital era, the experience of art from the perspective of the artist and the art audience is shifting rapidly, and bringing more people into the creative process. “