Digital Workers, Deadly Shakes and Blind Cameras
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things I found
1. Are We All NPCs?
You’ve probably heard about the NPC streaming trend on TikTok. There is something really creative and mesmerizing about those lives, but at the same time, they communicate a weird sense of sadness. This short film by Total Refusal is a bittersweet reflection on the figure of the NPC as a digital worker. The NPC (Non Player Character) is trapped in a loop, and the loop is hyper-capitalism, of course. Maybe - they suggest - it’s time we all start to glitch.
“NPCs are digital Sisyphus machines that have no perspective of breaking out of their activity loops. In the moments when the algorithm shows inconsistencies, the NPCs break out of the logic of total normality, and appear touchingly human.”
The full version is available on the New York Times website (paywalled).
2. AI, We Have a Problem
According to this Vice article, Discord’s captcha asked users to identify a ‘Yoko,’ a snail-like object that does not exist and was entirely invented by AI. Maybe we can easily save ourselves from singularity, after all. We can do it by feeding AIs their shitty data back.
3. The Grimace Shake is Dangerous
There’s a new delightful, horror trend on TikTok about the Grimace Shake by McDonalds. I love GenZ.
4. Legends Drinking Beer
I found a true gem. The legendary Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) in a weird adv for a Japanese beer brand (2007).
5. Blind Cameras
I just came across Paragraphica, an interesting project by Bjørn Karmann. It is a camera that uses location data and AI to visualize a “photo” of a specific place and moment. The viewfinder displays a real-time description of your current location, and by pressing the trigger, the camera will create a photographic representation of that description.
It reminded me of two similar new media art projects from past, that I also displayed in a couple of exhibitions I curated (in 2010 and 2012).
The first one is Blinks & Buttons by Sascha Pohflepp, a camera that has no lens. It tracks the exact time that the button is pushed, and then goes out and searches for another image taken at that exact time. Once the camera finds one, it displays the image in the LCD located on the back.
The second one is Matt Richardson‘s Descriptive Camera, a device that only outputs the metadata about the content and not the content itself.
6. Confusing Bots with Cheese
Confuse A Bot is an upcoming in-browser video game where all you have to do is convince the robots that literally everything is cheese. Here’s how creator Rajeev Basu describes the game:
“AI is only as good as its datasets. CONFUSE A BOT is a ‘public service videogame’ that invites players to verify images incorrectly, to confuse bots, and help save humanity from an AI apocalypse. While key figures in AI like Sam Altman have sounded the alarm many times, there has been little action beyond “lively debates” and petitions signed by high-ranking CEOs. Confuse A Bot questions: what if we put the power back into the hands of the people?
How the game works:
– The game pulls in images from the Internet, and asks players to verify them.
– Players verify images incorrectly. The more they do, the more points they get.
– The game automatically re-releases the incorrectly verified images online, for AI to scrape and absorb, thereby helping save humanity from an AI takeover. It’s that easy!”
things I did recently
July 18th - The new lay0ut magazine is out! Among other (amazing) things, you will also find the Italian translation of a text I wrote last year for Aksioma. Beware The Great Algorithm (and keep hacking).
June 30th - My article about art and artificial intelligence that came out on Artribune Magazine a few weeks ago, is now also available online (in italian).
new book update
The book is READY and is being printed as I write this. It will be out for NERO Editions (NOT) in September. I am gonna spoiler the cover as soon as I get my hands on the first copy (probably in late August).
new entries on my bookshelf
Garnet Hertz, Art + DIY Electronics, 2023
Vivian Asimos, Digital Monsters, 2020
Omar Kholeif, Internet_Art. From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs, 2023
Italo Calvino, Guardare: Disegno, cinema, fotografia, arte, paesaggio, visioni e collezioni, 2023
闯 Chuang, Contagio Sociale, 2023
McKenzie Wark, Raving, 2023
That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.