Platform Farlands, Remote Cat Feeders and AI Shoggots
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things I found
1. Cybernetics Image Library
Great resource, fascinating interface.
“Browse and contribute images of all kinds: diagrams, schematics, photos, graphic elements, and other visual fragments. Each image is linked to a record in the Cybernetics Library catalog or integrated from the project’s original are.na channel. Image tags and collections are inherited from the Cybernetics Library’s LibraryThing catalog. Collections are groups of resources based on previous library activities.”
2. Welcome to the TikTok Farlands
Minecraft Far Lands were a math bug at the edge of the generated world. The further you went, the more reality broke down. TikTok has its own version: doomscroll long enough and the algorithm takes you somewhere strange, a periphery of surreal, absurdist and sometimes plain scary content. It’s the latest incarnation of a very long aesthetic tradition in meme culture (YouTube Poop, weirdcore, analog horror, deep fried memes, glitch art, weirdtok), but updated to fit the brainrot era.
3. Feed The Cat
A developer turned his cat feeder into a public website where anyone can watch live and feed real cats remotely from anywhere in the world.
From his Reddit post: “I started off the project in june because I was unemployed and wanted to recreate the hello street app with my own cat. I wanted to be able to feed him remotely and watch him eat when I was not home but I also liked the idea of anyone being able to feed him and see him too. The website now features multiple cameras in different locations with cats, including a cat shelter I managed to collaborate with. There is a global cooldown for feeding so that the cats don’t get overfed. It also features a radio with some music I carefully curated”.
4. Shirt generator
This website pulls random articles from the internet, take their lead images, grab the 16th and 56th words from the text and put that on a t-shirt. And you can buy it. [via]
5. Shoggoths and AI
Memes that tie Lovecraftian imagery of formless monsters to contemporary Large Language Models. A curated collection by the one and only Bruce Sterling. If you don’t know what a Shoggoth is, you can read this and this.
Vintage Obscura
This online radio pulls tracks directly from a dedicated subreddit (/r/vintageobscura) and only plays music recorded before 2000 with fewer than 30,000 views on YouTube. My new obsession.
things I did
Pietro Lafiandra interviewed me about the backrooms mythology and other weird stuff from the internet. Our conversation is on the printed edition of Film TV this week (in italian). Exit Reality’s beautiful cover is in there too.
On May 27th, Matteo Corradini and I presented Kane Parsons’ film Backrooms at Cinema Troisi in Rome. It was an intense and fun evening, during which I had the chance to meet a lot of my amazing readers. Exit Reality was also there, just reprinted by Nero Editions (the book has been briefly out of stock but it will be available on all online stores very shortly).
After the screening, many people asked me to comment on the movie. It was released just a couple of days ago (and not worldwide), and I don’t want to spoil the experience for those who haven’t seen it yet. I’ll say just one thing: I like to think of it as another piece of lore (a very good one!), adding to what already exists and what will keep being created online. Another piece of the incredible collective narrative that people have been building together for years. And I think — and hope — that Parsons sees it the same way. The people who’ll walk away disappointed are the ones who expected the absolute cinematic masterpiece, something that could stand above everything else. But we live in a different world now. Forget the self-contained, immortal masterpiece idea. Welcome the dispersed, collective, mutant, ever evolving nature of contemporary art.
The Spanish edition of Exit Reality is out! It’s published by Caja Negra and is titled “Estéticas liminales. Vaporwave, backrooms, weirdcore o como la cultura de internet está enrareciendo la realidad”. On the occasion of its release, I went to Madrid and took part in the event “Redes, portales, laberintos. Seminario en torno a las promesas incumplidas de internet”, at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. The talk and the conversation with Sara Barquinero have been recorded and are available on YouTube.
On May 8th I spoke at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia for the conference Seeing with Machines: Aesthetics, Education and Semiotics of AI Images, Unimore, Reggio Emilia. I presented a research I am working on (still in progress) on AI-generated satisfying and ASMR videos. If you’re curious, here are the slides I used during the talk (images and videos only). The title is “Shell Content. Satisfying Content and Impossible Pleasures”.
Anna Pompermaier & Cenk Guzelis (a.k.a Me and Other Me) invited me to speak on their amazing video podcast. We met in a virtual 3D space full of floating images, which is of course the ideal setting for talking about my research. If you want to watch the video conversation, you find it here. It’ also on Koozarch both in audio and text form.
And finally, a few texts I wrote:
Intrappolati nelle Backrooms [ITA]Narrativas como hongos [ESP]
Gli artisti italiani e l’intelligenza artificiale. Uno sguardo oltre la coltre dell’hype [ITA]
Il ritorno del gusto nell’era delle intelligenze artificiali [ITA]
Cosa si prova a essere un animale? Esperienze di bodystorming tra arte e social media [ITA]
upcoming…
6 June 2026 - Future Archaeology and Digital Artifacts | Festival for Art in Digital Contexts and Public Spaces, FMR Linz
7 June 2026 - L’arte, l’immagine e lo sguardo al tempo dell’intelligenza artificiale, Memoria Festival, Mirandola
22 June 2026 - Content Machines, Distant Gallery
11 July 2026 - Aqua Talks @Videocittà, Roma
That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.