Alternate Histories, Futurist Recipes and TikTok Psychos
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things I found
1. DALL.E meets Marinetti
W. David Marx and Roni Xu used DALL-e AI to generate imagery of the absurd cuisine from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1932 book The Futurist Cookbook. The results are fascinating.
2. The Lore Zone
The Lore Zone is a very interesting online research on “Memes → Memories → Micro-Mythologies”.
“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.”
3. Willy Wonka & Snowpiercer
My new favourite fan theory is the one that says that Snowpiercer is a sequel to Willy Wonka. It makes SO much sense :)
4. American TikTok Psycho
Just American Psycho, but with The TikTok Girl Voice. Aka the stuff of nightmares.
5. The Art of the Gag
I really enjoyed this video that unpacks the artistry of his Majesty mr. Buster Keaton.
6. China’s Borges
“For over a decade, a Chinese woman known as “Zhemao” created a massive, fantastical, and largely fictional alternate history of late Medieval Russia on Chinese Wikipedia, writing millions of words about entirely made-up political figures, massive (and fake) silver mines, and pivotal battles that never actually happened. She even went so far as to concoct details about things like currency and eating utensils.”
Read the entire story here.
7. September 5th, 2006
“Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman traces the significance of Facebook’s Newsfeed launch, from the initial rage it engendered to its precipitation of the algorithm-dominated status quo of current-day digital media. Prior to Newsfeed, early internet users had static profiles and had to consciously click and search for things on the site. Upon its launch, the blueprint for media inexorably changed: we were no longer explorers, searchers, discoverers—our very experience of time collapsed into an ever-shifting present; we became passive consumers of a digital feed algorithmically curated to our every trivial fancy. “
[streaming on DIS]
new entries on my bookshelf
Margaret A. Boden and Ernest A. Edmonds, From Fingers to Digits: An Artificial Aesthetic, 2019
Kate Eichhorn, Content, 2022
Matthew Ball, The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything, 2022
AA.VV., (re)programming – Strategies for Self-Renewal, 2022
Matteo De Giuli, Nicolò Porcelluzzi, Medusa. Storie dalla fine del mondo (per come lo conosciamo), 2021
Paolo Cirio, Monitoring Control, 2022
things I did recently
7-10th July - I went back to the mountains in Borca di Cadore to join Simposio. As always, the meeting was a blast: we slept in lovely wooden cabins, we met old and new friends, we gathered as a real community, we talked so much about the present and tried to recharge our batteries to deal with what’s coming. On July 8th, I gave a short speech about memory, hype and our fixation with the new. Here you can take a look at the slides I used.
1st July - Federico Nejrotti asked me a few questions for his cool Iceberg Newsletter.
20th June - Nicola Bozzi (Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College, London) invited me to an interesting seminar titled Representing and (re)Imagining Digital Crowds Beyond Data Reduction, which took place online on June 20th.
Taking my Instagram filters exhibition project “Art Layers” (2021) as a starting point, I analysed the different roles that AR filters can play in the context of today’s social media – from light, playful approaches to complex artistic experimentations on the topic of self-identity and reality perception.
A recording of the event is available on Vimeo.
17th June - We presented “And We Thought”, an artwork by Roberto Fassone, produced by Sineglossa, during a roundtable in Turin. Read more about the project here.
11th June - I wrote an article on Artribune about the most amazing artwork I encountered during this year’s Venice Biennale. You can read it here:
La seduzione dell’avatar. Lavinia Schulz e Walter Holdt alla Biennale di Venezia [ITALIAN] - [ENGLISH - GOOGLE TRANSLATE]
10th June - I had the pleasure to join Mariano Tomatis for the presentation of his book “Incantagioni” (NERO, 2022) in Rome. An audio recording is available.
the great wall of memes updates
The Great Wall of Memes is a research project in the form of a visual archive. I started it in 2012 and it’s the place where I collect images and memes that feel relevant. Click here to see the latest uploads.
That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.