Alternative Search Engines, Infinite Furniture Stores and Medieval Peasants

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Jun 03, 2024

things I found

1. All About Computer Love
Artist Sara Martinez made an amazing interactive, console log essay “about love for computers, combating escapism and deactivating healing fantasies to face the world“. This is net art at its best.

2. Alt search engines
Elan Kiderman Ullendorff has put together a really interesting collection on alternative search engines. Considering Google’s tragic downward spiral, testing new tools is a must.

3. The Backrooms are (were) in Wisconsin
The origin of the Backrooms photo has been unveiled, after 5 years of search. Users not only found the exact location (Oshkosh, Wisconsin), but they also tracked down some photos of the room in 1967, when it hosted a furniture store. As soon as I heard the news, I got a little sad, but then I realized that it’s not that bad. The Backrooms are sculpted in our minds, hearts and nightmares forever. And the lore will keep expanding. Everywhere, in every direction, until the end of time.

Bonus link: this Google doc sums up 5 years of research. IT IS INSANE.

4. This would kill a medieval peasant
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]

5. meow mix
I could say soooo many things about this video, but I don’t wanna ruin it for you. Meow.

6. Found in Translation
Eric Drass, aka Shardcore, made this very interesting experiment with generative AI applications: “I arranged a form of Chinese-Whispers between AI systems. I first extracted the keyframes from a scene from American Psycho and asked a multimodal LLM (LLaVA) to describe what it saw. I then took these descriptions and used them as prompts for a Stable Diffusion image generator. Finally I passed these images on to Stable-Video-Diffusion to turn the stills into motion.”

things I did recently

May 2024 - May was all about book presentations. I had the pleasure of presenting the new edition of Videoarte & Arte (Postmediabooks), a seminal essay by Silvia Bordini, my professor, mentor, and perpetual source of inspiration. I also contributed to the launch event of Algorithms of Resistance. The Everyday Fight against Platform Power, by Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Trerè (MIT Press). Finally, I met with my old friend Marco Enrico Giacomelli in Rome to talk about his book Ma dove sono le opere d’arte?, published by Castelvecchi in 2023.

LAST BUT DEFINITELY NOT LEAST - From May 14th to May 17th I was in Ljubljana to present the english edition of my book Exit Reality! This book is jointly published by NERO Editions and Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art.

I gave a talk at ALUO, the Academy of Fine Arts, and also took part in a crazy, super-fun lecture performance with Total Refusal titled Let’s Play: Brexit Reality We met in a dystopian, imaginary, future London and discussed some of the book’s topics while playing the video game Watch Dogs Legion.

If you want to listen to the ALUO talk, the video-documentation is HERE.
Also, I compiled a PLAYLIST that goes with the book! You find it on Spotify.

April 2024 - For the second year in a row, I contributed with one lecture to “Questo mondo è tutto immagini”, a very interesting online course about Visual Culture. I also recorded an episode of a podcast called editorIA – i libri di chatGPT. You can listen to the episode on Spotify here.

March 2024 - I’ve been invited by Scuola Holden, in Turin, to teach a two-day course about online visual culture; and RAI Play published a TV interview I recorded back in December in Rome, you can watch it HERE.

Daydreams, Playable Nightmares and Out-of-Body Journeys

Aksioma published the english translation of this conversation Silvia Dal Dosso and I had last year. You can order the printed version or download the pdf here.

upcoming…

18th June 2024 - Arte Digitale - Online lecture hosted by Centro Scritture

20th June 2024 - Dalla Memestetica a Exit Reality - Lecture hosted by Scuola di Dottorato di ricerca in Storia dell'arte, La Sapienza Università di Roma

new entries on my bookshelf

Trevor J. Blank (curated by), Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, 2009
Francesco D’Isa, La rivoluzione algoritmica delle immagini. Arte e intelligenza artificiale, 2024
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, 2004
Legacy Russell, Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us, 2024
Claudio Kulesko, Al limite del possibile, 2024
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, 2024
Marco Giovenale, Oggettistica, 2024
Andrea Pinotti, Il primo libro di teoria dell'immagine, 2024
Valerio Bassan, Riavviare il sistema, 2024
Lukas Feireiss, Florian Hadler, Weak Signals New Narratives in Art and Technology, 2023
Ian Cheng, Fare Mondi, 2024
Emanuele Bevilaqua, Attenzione e potere, 2024
Juta, Gatto Pernucci, 2024

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.

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