Masked Figures, Visual Rivers and Lore Islands
Loading - 14
things I found
1. The PriceMaster
Please take some time to watch this incredible piece of performance art. On Saturday, February 10, 2001, in Denton, Texas, a group of friends held a garage sale where all of the (absurd) prices were determined by “The Price Master“, a mysterious masked figure on a tiny stage.
This review on Letterboxd describe this little gem really well (via BroBible):
Very surreal and very unnerving little piece of public access gold focused on a stoop sale as performance art in Denton, Texas, around 2001. My friend texted me the link and said “If you have five minutes, check this out,” and I ended up watching all 30 minutes of it. Shot on a handheld video camera, vérité style, it documents unsuspecting customers finding themselves at a stoop sale in which nothing is labeled with a price and a strange figure, the Pricemaster, dictates outrageous prices for everything when inquired. “Five… HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS!”
I also appreciated the Marshall McLuhan‘s quotes at the beginning:
“Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or counter situations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly.”
“Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment–of what’s really going on–affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.”
[thanks Claudio for pointing me to this video]
2. Lore Island at the end of the internet
For the final chapter of Shumon Basar’s Lorecore Trilogy (read the first part here, and the second here), the curator collaborated with Y7, a duo based in Salford, England, who specialize in theory and audiovisual work. Here is the video result.
Here, according to a neologism from “The Lexicon of Lorecore,” the zeitgeist is taken over by “Deepfake Surrender”—“to accept that soon, everyone or everything one sees on a screen will most likely have been generated or augmented by AI to look and sound more real than reality ever did.” Y7 and I also agreed that, so far, most material outputted from generative AI apps (ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney) is decidedly mid. But, does it have to be?
3. Well Wishes My Love, Your Love
This short animated film is absolutely mesmerizing.
Newly orphaned and freshly wounded from a loss, a boy lends his friend a prosthetic arm for the day. The friend records the limb being exposed to different textures and materials, documenting the process. As the moon inches closer and closer towards the sun, the friend sees something unusual reflected on the water’s surface… What will become of the limb, and of the video recordings?
Animation and music by GABRIEL GABRIEL GARBLE
4. River: a visual connection engine
Max Bittker made a CLIP-based image browser, similar to same.energy. I could explore this thing forever. [via]
things I did recently
The wait is over. The book is finally out. «EXIT REALITY | Vaporwave, backrooms, weirdcore e altri paesaggi oltre la soglia» is available in bookshops and online stores. Published by NOT / NERO Editions. This one’s in Italian, but an English version will be also available in a few months (Spring 2024).
It's a book I'm very attached to; I wrote most of it in 2023, but I've been putting ideas in it that have been swirling around in my head for a long, long time. It's my love letter to the internet, but more importantly, it's my personal way of celebrating all the internet friends of the world, every community, large and small, who come together online every day (and night) to share pieces of their humanity. It is also, in a way, an invitation to rethink artistic production in a choral and collective sense. It is no coincidence that the book is dedicated to two friends who have worked on this idea all their lives and who have unfortunately left planet Earth in recent months: Salvatore Iaconesi and Luigi Pagliarini (I miss you both so much).
Here are some articles and interviews about the book (in Italian, for now):
Che Fare, 6/09/2023 - book excerpt
Fahrenheit Radio3, 11/09/2023 - radio interview, with Graziano Graziani
Medusa, 13/09/2023 - book review, by Nicolò Porcelluzzi
Artribune, 14/09/2023 - book review, by Matteo Lupetti
Matteo Fumagalli YouTube Channel, 21/09/2023 - book video-review
L’isola deserta Radio3, 23/09/2023 - radio interview, with Chiara Valerio
La Notte podcast, 26/09/23 - podcast interview, with Francesco Pacifico
And here is the list of the presentation events already scheduled (more to come):
29th September 2023
Modo Infoshop, Bologna
20th October 2023
Libreria L’Ornitorinco, Firenze
21st October 2023
COX18, Milano
15th November 2023
Esc, Roma
24-25th November (TBC)
Off-Topic, Torino
new entries on my bookshelf
Simone Santilli, My favourite game. Fotografia e videogioco, 2023
Alva Noë, Imparare a guardare. Dispacci dal mondo dell'arte, 2023
Tommaso Ariemma, Dark Media. Cultura visuale e nuovi media, 2022
Laura Tripaldi, Gender Tech. Come la tecnologia controlla il corpo delle donne, 2023
Taylor Lorenz, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, 2023
Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others, 2020
Carla Lonzi, Sputiamo su Hegel e altri scritti, 2023
George Wylesol, 2120, 2022
Francesco Pacifico, Il capo, 2023
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.