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 text in nyc” is a search engine that enables exploration of New York City’s urban landscape through text. Brilliant online project by Yufeng Zhao.
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…“
Ana Min Wein (Where am I From)? is a short movie by Nouf Aljowaysir, where she talks about her origins and identity while in conversation with an AI program. A beautiful meditate on identity, migration, and memory.
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That’s what generative AI should be about.
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I struggle to find the words to describe this. I’ll just copy-paste one of the comments below the video: “I laughed, I cried, It became a part of me.”
AI generates images of non-existent stuff all the time. But people want stuff, so they order it, and those images turn into reality. Welcome to the era of AI-assisted e-commerce aka AI-shaped reality.
[Having taken orders, Chinese factory must actually make massive AI slop gorilla sofas]
I’m literally mesmerized by Karl Sims‘ digital creatures.
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.”
William Anastasi, Transfer, 1968
Video and music by Eryk Salvaggio, inspired by a Reddit post.
I’ve got 20,000 jpgs and no plans
I’ve 30,000 jpgs and no ideas
for what to do with them
I’ve got 40,000 jpgs on a hard drive
what do you guys do with all these pictures
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]
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”.]
Harold Cohen, Becky Cohen, Penny Nii, The First Artificial Intelligence Coloring Book, 1984. Read the foreword here.
Cyclops, by Trevor Paglen, is a networked performance, collaborative narrative, and alternate-reality-game designed to be played by groups of people working together across the word.
“Paglen’s interactive speculative reality artwork, titled CYCLOPS, takes the audience on a journey through the world of 1960s-era CIA mind control experiments, psychological operations, and unexplained historical anomalies. For this new work, the artist drew inspiration from Ed Ruscha’s Rocky II sculpture hidden in the Mojave Desert; collisions of facts and fictions in Benjamín Labatut’s book When We Cease to Understand the World; and Internet-era enigmas such as the “Cicada 3301” project.
Featuring documents, videos, and other archival materials produced between the 1950s and early 1970s, CYCLOPS requires active engagement and participation. Users are tasked with reconstructing events, deciphering codes, conducting open-source intelligence investigations, and analyzing music, literature, and poetry to move through a work that is part treasure-hunt, part historical unfiction, and part cybersecurity challenge. In this way, CYCLOPS teaches many of the skills behind Paglen’s own investigative practice, exploring how a clandestine history of research into psychological operations, mind control, and paranormal phenomena has shaped media and politics of the present moment. This networked, collaborative experience spanning the digital and physical worlds can be accessed online at cyclops.sh.”
One of the dozens incredible predictions by J.G. Ballard. This comes from the 1977 essay “Future of the Future”, published on Vogue.
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In 2008 Nicolas Anatol Baginski made the “Quasi Robots” a a family of autonomous, disabled machines that are design to provoke emotional response. Probably the weirdest piece of robotic/ai art I’ve ever encountered.
thank you, internet.
Walked Out Niemans is an experimental videogame developer. They also have a weird (and hypnotizing) TikTok account. I don’t know exactly what is going on here, but something is. The most relevant comment under this YouTube videos states: “This would kill a medieval peasant”.
[via webcurious]
