Deadly games, Fictional Stills and Sycophantic Machines
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things I found
1. Map of Reddit
Andrei Kashcha made an impressive website that maps Reddit. It visualizes 116K subreddits and 1.5B comments (Nov 2024-March 2025). An interactive exploration of community connections across the platform. I could literally spend the rest of my life browsing this.
2. Vape-o-Gotchi
Rebecca Xun and Lucia Camacho built the Vape-o-Gotchi, a vape device that dies if you stop puffing.
3. lookcaitlin
This Tumblr blog hosts a crazy good selection of images pulled from Internet Archive (circa 1977 – 1997). Beware, this is a serious rabbit hole. [via]
4. Fictional Videogame Stills
I recently visited the Electric Dreams exhibition in London and I got to see this incredible work by Suzanne Treister. I knew about it, but I had never seen the entire collection before. Do yourself a favour and discover the amazing Fictional Videogame Stills series here.
5. Stimulation Clicker
This is a piece of internet art. Click at your own risk.
6. 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).
7. This user
A userbox (commonly abbreviated as UBX) is a small colored box designed to appear only on a Wikipedian’s user page as a communicative notice about the user, in order to directly or indirectly help Wikipedians collaborate more effectively on articles.
Kristin Merrilees published a very interesting article about them in her Substack. You can read it here.
8. The Future Is Now Finally Weird AF
Silvia Dal Dosso’s amazing video trilogy is finally complete. And the future surely IS Weird AF.
9. Macchine Adulatrici (Sycophantic Machine)
You know that flattering, annoying tone of ChatGPT? Marco Cadioli made a video about it. It’s called “Macchine Adulatrici (Sycophantic Machine)”. The audio is composed of all the phrases the model used to “guide” the author during the creation of the video itself. If you ask me, this is definitely the romantic hit of summer 2025.
things I did
THE LAMP - exhibition, Liminal Space, Rome
CDI TV Livestream, Warwick University - talk [VIDEO - ENG]
Più libri più Laguna – Edoardo Camurri e Valentina Tanni - talk [VIDEO - ITA]
Crash Talk | AI & Arte - podcast interview [AUDIO - ITA]
Linea C - live podcast, Rome [VIDEO - ITA]
Is AI Art Net Art? - panel, Biblioteca Hertziana, Rome [VIDEO - ENG]
Machines That Fail Us - podcast interview [AUDIO - ENG]
Le monde numérique nous habitue à la simulation - interview [TEXT - FR]
La Prima Cena - exhibition, Parrocchia dei Santi Pietro e Paolo, Ascoli Piceno
L’estetica della Rete. Sospesi tra reale e virtuale - article, La Biennale di Venezia
L’uomo è davvero padrone dell’Intelligenza Artificiale? - interview [TEXT - ITA]
Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo - exhibition, MAMbo, Bologna
EXIT REALITY IS OUT IN FRENCH!
I’m proud to announce the release of the French edition of my book Exit Reality, published by the amazing Audimat éditions | Translated by Willy Lachaize
VIBES LORE CORE - Esthétique de l’évasion numérique de Valentina Tanni
CONVERSAZIONI CON LA MACCHINA [BOOK - ITA]
I wrote this little book on a topic that’s very close to my heart, as you can probably tell from the cover (thank you Mara Oscar Cassiani for the image!). It is published by Edizioni Tlon in the amazing Urano series curated by Francesco D'Isa.
That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.
Quante chicche, commento mentre ascolto la hit delle Macchine Adulatrici, c'è qualcosa dei primi Massimo Volume...