Astronaut.io

“Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see”. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments. These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).”

IMG_0001

Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Developer Riley Walz made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos. Amazing.

Weird Gnosis

Weird Gnosis, a new, amazing project by IMPAKT:

“From the occult rituals of witchcraft to esoteric psychedelia, the online webproject Weird Gnosis takes you on a journey into some of the weirder parts of the web. With a selection of video and performance art, Weird Gnosis curates a dialogue with artists and thinkers whose practices radically disturb the familiar by invoking the truly weird.”

The side-effects that tends to get us

“The only appropriate response is the most profound ambivalence. That’s what we owe new technologies: we have to teach ourselves to be absolutely ambivalent about them, and mainly we have to teach ourselves to imagine their inadvertent side-effects. Because the inadvertent side-effects are the side-effects that tends to get us”

(William Gibson, 1997)