Astronauts, filters and organic smiles
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things I found
1. The Depths of Wikipedia
Depths of Wikipedia is an Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok account dedicated to highlighting strange, obscure and interesting facts from Wikipedia. It is run by Annie Rauwerda, a college student at the University of Michigan. Amazing resource.
2. A new, impressive AI tool for image creation
Artificial intelligence company OpenAI has released its latest creation, called DALL-E2, an AI system based on the use of generative adversarial networks. DALL-E2 can turn simple text descriptions into incredible photorealistic images. The first version was already quite impressive, but the update is much more interesting. Check some sample images here.
3. Organic Smiles Cereal Commercial
Organic Smiles Cereal Commercial is an analog horror video with a great backstory. The author is Nathan Frost.
“On August 23rd, 2015, a user posted on a message board and asked ‘what’s a scary story that freaked you out when you were younger?’, and a user responded by saying ‘My grandfather used to always tell me a story about a commercial test screening that he and his friends went to when he was younger. He always told me that it was a Cereal advertisement from a company called Organic Smiles. I’ve looked up the brand and it literally does not exist. He said that the commercial had distorted-faced mannequin women and long blood faces. He didn’t watch the whole thing as he ran out of the theater crying but his friends did watch it all and were absolutely traumatized by it. Later that year he said all the people who attended that screening went missing. At the time I totally believed it but now I realized that he had to have been screwing with me, but he always had a serious look on his face when he told me about it.
The response at the time didn’t gain much traction until a year later on September 4th when the same user that posted the story said they found the supposed commercial on film tape that was mailed to him somehow. Later that day the user started posting screenshots of it showing its authenticity and proving it was real. Other users were getting excited and many were highly anticipating it.”
4. BeReal. The social app that promotes radical authenticity
“The app’s premise is simple: Each day, every user worldwide gets a simultaneous, cartoonish notification, ‘⚠️ Time to BeReal ⚠️ 2 min left to capture a BeReal and see what your friends are up to!’ Opening the app prompts you to snap a photo, which captures your front and back camera (no access to the camera roll) and posts to a simple chronological feed of friends’ posts which you cannot view until you’ve added a photo yourself.” Read the article on Dirt.
5. Reddit Place 2022
R/Place is a collaborative project and social experiment hosted on the social networking site Reddit that began on April Fools’ Day 2017 and was revived again after five years on April Fools’ Day 2022. Over 6 million users contributed to the project. In the final stage, everything slowly disappeared, “like tears in rain”.
6. #nofilter
The Paris Filter Trend is a TikTok trend where users apply Instagram’s Paris filter numerous times to a selfie video of them posing while the song ‘Fancy’ by Drake plays. The filter is applied to the point where the video is obscured and washed out in pink and purple. The videos are often ironically captioned ‘no filter’.
7. A very good Plato meme
new entries on my bookshelf
Eugene Thacker, Rassegnazione infinita, 2022
Carlo Antonelli, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, FUORI!!!, 2021
Nick Land, Nessun Futuro, 2022
Kevin Driscoll, The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media, 2022
Joanna Zylinska, The Future of Media, 2022
miscellaneous news
Memestetica will be out in English later this year. We are currently working on the translation! ***happy cat face***
I’ll be in Venice for the Biennale’s opening. Expect some heavy posting on Instagram between April 19th and 23rd.
The first online artist residence by Blitz Valletta is over. Steph Foster’s new video production will be online soon.
I had the pleasure to collaborate with artist Roberto Fassone on his latest project “And We Thought”, a fascinating artwork that bridges art, artificial intelligence, food and psychedelics, produced by Sineglossa. It will be launched in Turin on April 20th.
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 this week. Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.