Sunday Nobody

I don’t know why I haven’t come across this artist before. Sunday Nobody calls himself a “meme artist”, but what he does is actually a surprising mixture of conceptual art, performance art, viral video and extremely high level craftsmanship. You can watch his videos on TikTok and Instagram.

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.”

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Mestre Ensinador

“Me When I Was A Baby, also known as Whimsical Little Creature, refers to videos of the TikTok account MestreEnsinador1. It features videos of a flying white puppet wearing a green hat named Tiburcio. The name translates to “master teacher” in Portuguese, with the gnome puppet being referred to as a “forest being” by the TikToker in his comment sections. The videos often show the puppet flying and twirling, sometimes doing a little dance and sometimes undertaking mysterious rituals. Maestre Ensinador went viral in the fall of 2022 after a series of duets where people showed his videos to their younger siblings and tried to convince them that the puppet was them as a baby.”

“Tibúrcio is a strong gnome,” Jhonatan Oliveira says, once belonging to his late grandmother, “and that’s why I like it very much.” He remade the puppet’s body three years ago, before he began making the videos. His uncle appears with him in the first viral TikTok — he’s the one who took Tibúrcio out of the cruse, an earthenware vessel that Oliveira refers to as a buried treasure. “But, he is not a cash treasure, but a spiritual one,” he explains. “The inspiration to make the videos comes from God!”

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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”

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

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Paris Filter Trend

“A TikTok trend where users apply Instagram’s Paris filter numerous times to a selfie video of them posing while the song “Fancy” by Drake plays, the filter applied to the point where the video is obscured and washed out in pink and purple. The videos are often captioned “no filter,” a joke about people who post obviously edited photos online under the guise of being natural”.

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The age of shitpost diplomacy

“We came of age on Twitter, Tumblr, and 4chan, and still see the world through their frames. We find it harder and harder to distinguish the actual from the image; we struggle to disentangle perception management from problem management. This is what it looks like when the terminally online ascend to positions of real responsibility. Welcome to the age of shitpost diplomacy.”

THOUGHTS ON SHITPOST DIPLOMACY

The Internet Baboons

Photographers G.K. and Vikki Hart have something to teach about copyright and remix in the Internet age: “Yes, it would be nice if they made more money, but to make people laugh and for people to take it and use it their own way… you just can’t buy that