Vape-o-Gotchi

Rebecca Xun and Lucia Camacho built the Vape-o-Gotchi, a vape device that dies if you stop puffing.

There’s a big trend of parental locking yourself,” Camacho added. “I’m locked out of certain apps behind a password that Rebecca knows, so I don’t scroll Instagram too much. It would be cool if you could have that for nicotine.” But then, explained Xun, Camacho “found this Stupid Hackathon. And we were like, it’d be kind of funnier to be evil.” And with that, their “evil-mode” Vape-o-Gotchi, which instead rewards users for vaping, was born.

Game art mods are back

In 1995 we got Ars Doom, one of the very first examples of artistic modifications of videogames. Using the Doom II engine and Autodesk’ AutoCAD software, Orhan Kipcak and Reini Urban created a virtual copy of the Brucknerhaus’ exhibition hall in Linz and invited artists to submit virtual artworks that could be displayed in the new map. Armed with a shooting cross, a chainsaw or a brush the player could kill the artists and destroy all the artworks on display.

Between 1996 and 199 Palle Torsson & Tobias Bernstrup created the series Museum Meltdown,  three artistically modified videogames based on reconstructions of famous art museums (Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius and Moderna Museet in Stockholm). They used Duke Nukem 3D and Half Life.

In 1999 Florian Muser and Imre Osswald created NoRoomGallery, a mod level of Quake that reproduced the exhibition spaces of Hamburger Kunsthalle in Berlin.

Now, in 2025, Filippo Meozzi and Liam Stone gifted us with the delightful Doom Gallery Experience, “an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings”. No weapons this time, just glasses of wine and complimentary hors d’oeuvres.

BONUS: Here are is a text I wrote in 2005 about artistic modifications of video games (unfortunately, it’s available in Italian only).

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“.

 

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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.

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.

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

Occasional updates

A really cool website full of old Casio wrist camera photos taken more than 20 years ago:

“It’s an amazing thing that looks just like a normal watch, but has a nifty little built-in digital camera that lets you take lots of photos on the quiet – and then beam them to your computer! Expect occasional updates documenting my travels and drunken nights…“

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.”

The Grannies

The Grannies is a documentary short film created with/in Red Dead Redemption 2. A group of players — Marigold Bartlett, Andrew Brophy, Ian MacLarty, Kalonica Quigley & friends aka The Grannies — venture beyond the boundaries of the video game. Peeking behind the curtain of the game’s virtual world they discover a captivating and ethereal space that reveals the humanity and materiality of digital creations. Directed by Marie Foulston and edited by Luke Neher, the film was produced by Marie Foulston and Nick Murray.

[related reading: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Space Crone, 1976]

One Million Checkboxes

A webpage with one million checkboxes. Checking a box checks it for everyone, in real time.

[update via Garbage Day: “Teens hacked One Million Checkboxes into their personal r/Place. Nolen Royalty, who made the website, coded a few features to limit spamming, but he didn’t anticipate a group of teen coders building a program that was only visible when converting the checkboxes into pixels or binary code, which they used to link to their Discord and post shirtless GIFs of Jake Gyllenhaal. Turning the site into a real-time rickroll just before it shut down”.]