I’ve always had a soft spot for websites that let you explore the world. The first is Windowswap, which does exactly that: it collects the views people see from their homes all over the planet. Then there’s the classic Mapcrunch, which teleports you to a random spot using Google Street View. And Drive & Listen, which takes you on virtual drives through cities around the world, with dashcam footage and live local radio.
Today I found the train version. It’s called Railpass and it turns your screen into the view from a carriage seat, using more than 500 hours of YouTube footage shot all over the world.
Do yourself a favour: swap the feed for a window.
Posts Tagged → internet
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“.
momaspeed.run
Momaspeed.run by Brennan Wojtyła
“When Matt Herzog uploaded his MoMA speedrun on YouTube, completed in just over 20 minutes, Florida-born artist Brennan Wojtyła decided to attempt to traverse the entire museum in an even shorter time.”
[via]
Working inside Skyrim
Can I work my 9-5 Job from Inside Skyrim, a wonderfully ridiculous experiment by YouTuber habie147.
Mallworld
I just fell into the Mallworld rabbit hole. Apparently thousands of people on Reddit, TikTok and other platforms are sharing their dream experiences and they claim to have visited the same place. Some are event drawing detailed maps of it. This place is Mallword and it is a sort of gigantic liminal space with shops, airports, playgrounds, hotels and other buildings. But the heart of the world is – of course – the oniric version of your typical American mall, where people get lost and disoriented. Mallworld is a sort of narrative container that merges vaporwave, liminal spaces, the backrooms, dreamcore and This Man all together.
“Ever dreamed of this place?”
Sensing, more than reading
Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content: great new article by Caroline Busta.
“But what if, for better or worse, this non-reading mode is a form of adaptation: an evolutionary step in which we’ve learned to scan, like machines, for keywords and other attributes that allow for data-chunking, quickly aligning a piece of content with this or that larger theme or political persuasion? What if, in a time of infinity-content, a meta reading of the shape and feel of content has become a survival skill? The ability to intuit a viable meaning via surface-level qualities—ones that are neither text nor image but a secret third thing—is now essential for negotiating our sprawling information space. Perhaps we’re tapping into a more primal human intelligence.”
Dreams and the internet
“Don’t you think dreams and the internet are similar? They’re both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents.”
From Paprika (2006).
Internet Artifacts
Neal Agarwal is back with a new entry for his collection of entertaining tiny websites. Internet Artifacts is a virtual museum of artifacts from early Internet history. Funny, educational and immensly nostalgic.
The Internet Aesthetics Spiral: #corecore
“Corecore refers to an aesthetic that’s prevalent on TikTok under the hashtag “#corecore,” specifically within so-called NicheTok circles of NicheTokers, that plays on the -core suffix by making a “core” out of the collective consciousness of all “cores.”
[via]
Something called the internet
“Kate Bellingham reports that an exciting new interconnected world – a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and ever film ever shot will be at our fingertips – is tantalisingly close. The information superhighway will be a high-capacity digital communication network, which in time could revolutionise the way we shop, socialise and work”.
Life On The Internet
“A 13-part television series covering aspects of the Internet in 1996 to introduce to a general audience. Called “Life on the Internet”, the series was hosted by Scott Simon, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, and covers the state of online life at the time”.
Veggietales predicts modern internet humour
This is way TOO accurate.
Can Data Die? The Story of the Lenna image
Why One of the Internet’s Oldest Images Lives Out Without its Subject’s Consent.
[via]
The Metaverse Won’t Involve Mark Zuckerberg
“Zuckerberg will still be working on his smart home screens, Habbo Hotel rip-off Zoom calls, and budget Apple Watches, while young people are busy actually building a new internet, haphazardly, out of protocols that are free, easy-to-use, and the most convenient — Bluetooth, WiFi, video calls, free messaging clients, open source maps, QR codes, and the blockchain. And we will interact with this new metaverse on devices that we already own for a while. Then, slowly, new features will be added to help us interface with it better. Wireless bluetooth earbuds, smart watches, and phones will become more seamlessly integrated. They’ll have longer batteries, faster charging, brighter screens, better cameras, more wellness tools, and maybe eventually small projectors. We will create new user behaviors that companies will have to adapt to and then facilitate.
And there is no version of that where Facebook, or Meta, will be a key player. It is simply too big for them to dominate and, more importantly, it is already happening on Twitch, on Discord, and on TikTok. Zuckerberg is right. The metaverse is here, but it is has already left Facebook behind”.
The Birth of the Internet Archive
“25 years ago, the entire World Wide Web was only 2.5 terabytes in size. Most connections were dial-up, important records were stored on tape, and a young engineer named Brewster Kahle was working on a revolutionary project—a way to archive the growing Internet.
Filmed by Marc Weber for the Web History Project, this video showcases the Internet Archive’s very first web crawl in 1996. In 2001, the project was made accessible to the public through the Wayback Machine. Today, the Internet Archive is home to more than 588 billion web pages, as well as 28 million books and texts, 14 million audio items, and 580,000 software titles, making us one of the world’s largest digital libraries.”
[via]
The Dead Internet Theory
“TLDR: Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.”
The Museum of the Fossilized Internet
“This museum was founded in 2050 to commemorate two decades of a fossil-free internet and to invite museum visitors to experience what the coal and oil-powered internet of 2020 was like. Gasp at the horrors of surveillance capitalism. Nod knowingly at the plague of spam. Be baffled at the size of AI training data and lament the binge culture of video streaming”
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
A very interesting and necessary reflection on the difficulties of being our true selves online in 2019. And a good description of the never ending tension between the will to hide (and be safe) and the need to participate (and be exposed). Be sure to also read part II.
William Gibson and the ambivalence towards technology
William Gibson talks about the Internet in 1997, BBC’s The Net…
(Post)Modem painting
Paintings by New York-based artist Jeanette Hayes. More here and here.
It looks like typing
“There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.”
[via dayofthedreamweavers]
Memes against censorship
“China’s censors are blocking words like “today” and “June 4″ from social media as part of the country’s yearly chore to block any reference to the anniversary to the Tiananmen Square massacre 24 years ago. And though the Chinese are running a sophisticated and tight censorship ship, they’re having a bit harder time blocking memes.”
Read full article here.