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.

6. 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

1. 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.
   

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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”.

   

5. 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.

Share Loading...

1. Cave Story
An anonymous internet user completed a project they’ve worked on since 2009: a rap album that’s also a detailed walkthrough of the game Cave Story. Amazing work. The internet is still alive, and no amount of automation can kill pure nerdiness. Listen and watch here.

2. The Sheffield Freezer
A Sheffield Co-op’s freezers have become an internet sensation after a Reddit user described their collective hum as “an electrical gong bath.” The harmonious drone sparked a full-on debate: was it tuned to C# major? Could you hear the opening of Nothing Compares 2 U in the electronic buzz? The clip blew up on X and now we also have a 10-hour ambient YouTube video. Of course.

3. AI and writing
Great video essay about AI and writing by josh (with parentheses):
“As an English professor, I hear people at every level talking constantly about the use of AI in writing, but nobody seems to be talking about the thing that matters most: AI cannot write. Writing has language, and writing has communication, but the communication does not live inside the language. This is a video essay about what writing is. Meetings of the mind with Stephen King, Gertrude Stein, Lewberger, Max Teeth, CyberGrapeUK, and others--but by necessity not with ChatGPT.”

4. My Mulholland
A desktop documentary investigation of what it means to watch David Lynch films as a pre-teen and get lost in the image regime of the internet. Directed by Jessica McGoff in 2020.

Quoting the first Letterboxd comment by Ian Wang:

“captures the particular alienating strangeness of growing up on the internet like nothing else i’ve seen. for me (and i think for many of us who came of age in this era) the attachment i have to the online spaces i was raised in is queasy and intense. i’m endlessly indebted to those many strangers and friends who formed me, yet i can’t separate the things that nurtured me from the things i was sullied by. there’s no valence to it, is another way of saying this: i might know (again, as many of us do) that the internet is damaging my psyche, and i will still keep coming back and coming back and coming back because it’s been seared into me, because it’s how i communicate and consume and exist. my mulholland reflects the anxiety of that attachment precisely and intimately, captures the feverish, troubled curiosity of mcgoff’s teenage self with empathy and without judgement. so often this kind of film will veer into simple nostalgia, but mcgoff is careful, critical, refrains from any too-comforting resolutions or epiphanies that might come from this archaeology of her past self. instead she presents the confusion and the instability of that time in her life unvarnished, and leaves it to sit with us. it’s unsettling but it’s honest. this remains the kind of thoughtful, protean combination of the personal and the critical that i aspire to in my own work“.

5. Journaling in YouTube comments
Between 2020 and 2023, a user named @mrtortilla3895 commented every day under the same YouTube video, an upload of Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy. For 1,000 days, the comment section became his personal diary, written in public and read by hundreds of other users gathered in the same virtual space. His entire adolescence is documented and narrated in this unconventional space. Also, mrtortilla’s performance has inspired so many other users to start their own journals in the comments.
In these two videos (1 – 2) you can find more details about this incredible story.
Here is the original Debussy video upload.
Here is a spreadsheet containing the complete archive of @mrtortilla3895’s diary.

[via Depths of Wikipedia’s amazing talk]

6. DIY vs AI videos
Generative AI is taking over every corner of the internet. All kinds of content are imitated, replicated, remixed, and reinvented through AI. An unstoppable avalanche of images, videos, and text is submerging us.
I’ve been observing a specific reaction to this phenomenon that’s incredibly interesting: people trying to “fight” AI by attempting to recreate its content with physical objects and practical effects. I first saw this trend emerge in the field of ASMR and satisfying videos, but now people are recreating all sorts of slop. This response is giving rise to a new subgenre: a kind of artisanal content that deliberately imitates the artificial but, in doing so, emphasizes human skill and brings the craft element to the next level.”

Some great examples below.

7. Strange.website
Strange.website is a wonderfully weird and poetic internet place. Just go explore it.

8. momaspeed.run
Florida artist Brennan Wojtyła saw Matt Herzog’s YouTube MoMA speedrun, completed in just over 20 minutes, and decided to beat it.
[via]

things I did

Martina Leva from C plus C (an online magazine run by the students of the School for Curatorial Studies Venice) interviewed me about my research and past curatorial activity. You can read the article in english here. Also in italian here.

Philip Di Salvo hosted me in his radio segment Overnight on Radio Raheem. We talked about my latest book Antimacchine. Listen here (in italian only).

I also talked about the book with Vincenzo Cosenza (Vincos Talks) and with Francesco Zappino (L’Indolente Podcast), both in italian.

This piece I wrote back in January for Artribune Magazine is now also available online: Cosa si prova a essere un animale? Esperienze di bodystorming tra arte e social media [in italian]

Also, I turned 50 and I’m officially a crone. I made this self-portrait cake to celebrate.

upcoming…

17 March 2026 - Conversazioni con la macchina, presentazione online, Libri in Accademia, ABA Frosinone

18 March 2026 - Exit Reality: spazi liminali e backrooms”, Seminario online, Università di Camerino

18 April 2026 - Torino, Circolo dei Lettori | Biennale Tecnologia

20 April 2026 - Torino, IED

7-8 May 2026 - Seeing with Machines: Aesthetics, Education and Semiotics of AI Images, Unimore, Reggio Emilia

That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.

Share Loading...

1. To See What It Feels Like
In 1974, Thomas Nagel posed a deceptively simple question in his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?: what does it FEEL like to be another creature? Nagel argued that no amount of objective knowledge could grant access to an animal’s subjective experience. Half a century later, users on TikTok are testing that limit through performance, attempting “To See What It Feels Like” to be monkeys in rainforests, rabbits in cold English winter rain, chipmunks in a storm, polar bears on a glacier, underdeveloped hippos in the water, or lonely raccoons in a trash can.

2. Fake courtesy machine
Amedeo Capelli of Stoccafisso Design built an amusing wooden automaton that, when cranked, repeatedly types “I hope this email finds you well“. I love that it sometimes makes typos.

3. Narrative String Theory
Narrative String Theory is collecting all known instances in film & TV of bulletin boards covered with investigatory items, “walls and floors littered with paperwork by obsessives“. By Shawn Gilmore. [via]

4. Epstein in VR
EpsteinVR: A full 3D model of Jeffrey’s Upper East Side mansion (and more), generated using Apple’s new SHARP Gaussian Splat model. Fascinating and disturbing.

5. Childhood Creativity and Memes
This interesting article by Allegra Rosenberg explains that the viral “67” meme is just the newest expression of a long, lively tradition of children inventing and circulating their own playful lore, just like the rhymes, jokes, and games that folklorists Iona and Peter Opie documented in mid-20th-century Britain.

6. Open Reel Ensemble
Open Reel Ensemble, a Japanese experimental music group, plays reel-to-reel tape recorders as musical instruments. Spectacular example of artistic technological misuse.

7. Slop Evader
Slop Evader, a browser extension for avoiding AI slop, by Tega Brain: “this is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022“.

8. Ambience Antarctica
Everyone knows that I’m only able to write books with cold, polar sounds in my headphones. Specifically, these sounds. So, for me, Ambient Antarctica, a website “for people in Antarctica, whether physically or otherwise” is a dream come true. They stream music, images and random trivia.

things I did

As most of you know, my latest book, “Antimacchine. Mancare di rispetto alla tecnologia” (Antimachines. Disrespecting technology, Einaudi, 2025) came out last November 18th. The first presentation took place in Rome, on December 19th, in a very special venue called Liminal Space: an artist’s studio, an exhibition space, and an open lab for creative experimentation with technology. Joining me to talk about the book were my amazing friends and colleagues Donatella Della Ratta and Andrea Natella.

Downstairs, the Liminal State collective (Gregorio Comandini and Saverio Villirillo) created a brand-new interactive installation that directly engaged with the themes of my essay. It’s called CR3P4, an experimental performative lab that invites participants to crack open and closely examine obsolete technological devices. Visitors are encouraged to vent their anger and frustration on tech by hammering devices, throwing them against the wall, and tearing them apart. It functions as a laboratory and a rage room, but also as a reactive environment in which every impact is choreographed through bursts of light and sound, amplifying the cathartic power of the destructive ritual.

Here are some articles about the book (in italian).

21/11/2025 – Rai Radio 3
29/11/2025 – L’indiscreto
1/12/2025 – La Repubblica Italian Tech
4/12/2025 – Globalist
5/12/2025 – Sentieri Selvaggi
5/12/2025 – Selezionatissimo
9/12/2025 – L’indiscreto (estratto dal libro)
12/12/2015 – Poetarum Silva
13/12/2025 – Artribune
14/12/2025 – Pensiero secondario
15/12/2025 – Domus Web
18/12/2025 – Artribune
18/12/2025 – John Cabot University News
19/12/2025 – Il Corriere della Sera | 7
22/12/2025 – L’indiscreto
23/12/2025 – Il Post
2/1/2026 – Pulp Libri

upcoming…

January will be a busy month!

From January 11 to 16 I’ll be in France for my first international book tour. Audimat Éditions published Exit Reality last Spring (the French edition is: VIBES LORE CORE – Esthétique de l’évasion numérique, Audimat 2025 - translated from Italian by Willy Lachaize) and invited me to talk about the book through a series of presentations and workshops. I’ll be in Paris on January 11 and 12, in Nancy on the 13th, and in Lyon on the 14th and 15th. Here’s the full list of events:

January 11 – Paris
5:30 pm – Talk with Guillaume Heuguet | Librairie Cahier Central
January 12 – Paris
10:00 am – 1:00 pm – Workshop | ArTec – Campus Condorcet
January 13 – Nancy
4:30 pm – 6:30 pm – Talk | École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Nancy (ENSAD) – Campus Artem
January 14 – Lyon
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm – Talk | École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (ENSBA)
January 15 – Lyon
6:30 pm – 7:30 pm – Talk | Hotel71

Back in Italy, on January 23, Fabiola Naldi will host me at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna for a talk, and on January 30 I’ll be joining “Celebrità di internet e studiosi di meme” for the second time. It’s the best offline show for chronically online people! In Rome, at Mercurio Pigneto — tickets here (don’t miss it).

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.

BONUS VIDEO (Happy 2026!)

That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.

Share Loading...

1. Infinite Reddit Image Search
Infini.wtf is a visual search engine created by a small team of indie developers. It uses AI to let you browse through 1,178,691 images, GIFs and videos pulled from Reddit. I don’t think I’ll be getting out of this any time soon. All my plans for the next five years are officially at risk.

2. A search engine for lore
Lore is a search platform for people to research and discover internet obsessions. The founder is Zehra Naqvi and you can sign up for early access here. [via]

3. The 6 Pound Phone Case
The 6 Pound Phone Case is chunky, dense, and made of stainless steel. It’s designed to be inconvenient, and encourage less phone use. Would you buy it?

4. Mallworld
I just fell into the Mallworld rabbit hole. Apparently thousands of people on Reddit, TikTok and other platforms are sharing their dream experiences and they claim to have visited the same place. Some are even drawing detailed maps of it. This place is Mallword and it is a sort of gigantic liminal space with shops, airports, playgrounds, hotels and other buildings. But the heart of the world is – of course – the oniric version of your typical American mall, where people get lost and disoriented. Mallworld is a sort of narrative container that merges vaporwave, liminal spaces, the backrooms, dreamcore and This Man all together.
“Ever dreamed of this place?”

5. Syrmor
YouTube creator Syrmor uploads his VRChat encounters with random strangers, who open up about themselves and share intimate details of their lives while hidden behind their avatars. Some of the videos are incredible touching. Unfortunately, the latest upload is from two years ago, I can’t believe I haven’t come across this before. [via + via]

6. WorldGrow
Researchers have created WorldGrow, an AI system that generates endless 3D environments by stitching together procedurally created rooms and hallways. “Photorealistic and structurally consistent” spaces you can theoretically walk through without end. Welcome back, backrooms. [via]

7. The original poster
Speaking of the Backrooms: YouTuber Mctoran claimed to have interviewed Black August, the author of the original post on 4chan. I don’t know if it’s really him (nobody can prove it), but the interview is incredibly insightful and inspiring. So even if it’s just another piece of lore, it’s worth a listen.

8. Working inside Skyrim
Can I work my 9-5 Job from Inside Skyrim, a wonderfully ridiculous experiment by YouTuber habie147.

things I did

NEW BOOK - On November 18th my new book came out in Italian. It’s called “Antimacchine. Mancare di rispetto alla tecnologia” (Antimachines. Disrespecting technology) and it explores the value of unexpected, improper, and unconventional uses of technological tools. Anyone who knows me won’t be surprised as I’ve been talking about these practices for more than twenty years. Yet, this is the first time I’ve really pulled everything together in one place. The book, published by Einaudi in the Maverick series, is packed with art, hacking, activism, DIY, appropriationism, punk energy, and sheer madness. For now it’s only available in Italian, but I hope to share news about an English translation soon.

Speaking of translations, I’m happy to announce that Exit Reality - already out in Italian, English, French, and Greek - will be released in Spanish next spring!

I wrote a short essay for this wonderful solo show by artist Miguel Martin at VOLT Gallery in Eastbourne (on view until 14 December 2025). If you’re in the area, go visit!

Marion Dupont from Le Monde interviewed me about the influence of digital platforms and algorithms on cultural trends and taste. They even made a digital portrait of me…

Clémentine Mercier from Libération, instead, asked me to comment on the phenomenon of AI Slop. You can read the article here (in French).

Matteo Corradini and Giovanni Manzoli invited me onto their video podcast Ingiocabile (in italian). Two good reasons to watch it: 1) I appear from the waist up inside a cathode-ray TV, Max Headroom–style. 2) You can hear me answer my all-time favorite question (sarcasm alert), the one that’s been haunting me my whole life: What is art? Joining me is the amazing Giulia Trincardi.

upcoming…

I’ll be presenting Antimacchine in Rome in late December (more details soon), and I will also fly to France for an Exit Reality (Vibes Lore Core) book tour in January, organized by Audimat éditions (venues and dates in the next newsletter).

That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.

Share Loading...

1. Flusser Experience
A version of Vilém Flusser‘s “Towards a Philosophy of Photography” that you can watch and listen to. Originally produced as a three cassette audiobook, it is read by Ian James alongside binaural brainwave patterns, field recordings, product unboxings and other treats. ASMR adjacent, headphones recommended. [via]

2. Dream Recorder
The Dream Recorder AI is a device designed to transform fragmented dream recollections into replayable visual sequences: “Wake up, say your dream out loud, and watch it come to life as an ultra-low definition dreamscape”. [via]

3. Dutch Golden Age Art in Minecraft
Manofdutch uses Minecraft to build landscapes and architecture inspired by Dutch Golden Age paintings. They are absolutely stunning. [via]

4. Stage 5 simulacra slop
“Faced with reality’s increasing obsoletion, from generative AI, to reality TV and faux authentic brands, POSTPOSTPOST (aka Al Hassan Elwan) applies Baudrillard’s 4 stages of Simulacra and dares to manifest what lies beyond, when meaning has all but collapsed”. [via]

5. Astronaut.io
“Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see”. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments. These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).”

6. Visions of Heaven and Hell
“Visions of Heaven and Hell was a three-part documentary broadcast in the UK in 1994, which examined and extrapolated social changes brought about by new technologies, but also touched on wider themes of biotechnology, virtual reality, population density and pandemics.” Featuring (among others): William Gibson, Stephen Hawking, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Tilda Swinton, Nick Land. [via]

7. Send Me to Heaven
The mobile game Send Me to Heaven (2013) involves throwing your phone as high in the air as you can. The creator, Petr Svarovsky, said he made it with the hope of destroying as many iPhones as possible, but Apple banned it from the App Store. You can still play it on Android phones, though.

8. Total Pixel Space
In his short film Total Pixel Space, filmmaker and musician Jacob Adler employs generative AI to explore the nature of digital images.

things I did

I had a great time in Zurich for the React and Respond. Image Cultures under Platform Capitalism conference (October 2-4). I gave a short talk on ASMR and satisfying videos, including the new AI-generated versions and the incredible “handcrafted” productions that are emerging in response. While I was at it, I also generated a couple of unsettling clips inspired by one of the most satisfying yet disturbing works in the history of art: Object by Meret Oppenheim.

The Story of Italian Brainrot – Collective Musings on a Meme Wave
Francesco Barchiesi and Geert Lovink have put together an essay on Italian Brainrot, which is a really useful starting point for anyone who wants to try to understand this strange phenomenon of contemporary visual culture. Many Italian voices in the piece: besides mine, you’ll find Daniele Zinni, Silvia Dal Dosso, Noura Tafeche and Albert Figurt.

Online Aesthetics and the Backrooms
Kendal Beynon interviewed me as part of her PhD research. We spoke about digital aesthetics, internet folklore and online communities. The full conversation has just been published on Unthinking.Photography, The Photographer’s Gallery’s online resource that explores photography’s increasingly automated, networked life.

First Person Dreamers on Pixel.02 [italian]
I wrote a short essay called First Person Dreamers. Le relazioni pericolose tra sogni e videogiochi for the second edition of Pixel, a publication dedicated to video games that explores different sides of contemporary game production. Fifteen authors (including journalists, content creators and game studios) are paired with fifteen artists. My piece is accompanied by an original illustration by Micro Tenko.

Is it Real or is it Cake? Exploring the Weird World of Web Culture and AI Art
Media Whatever Podcast | Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at the University of Warwick | with Chris Bilton and Carolina Bandinelli.

Algoritmi imperfetti | Dall’inconscio collettivo alla collaborazione uomo-macchina
Podcast interview with Ugo Galassi [italian].

upcoming…

I’ve got a new book on the way! Can’t spill the details just yet, only that it’s coming out on November 18th with Einaudi, in the Maverick series, in Italian. Dropping a very cryptic hint right here.

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.

Share Loading...

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.

Share Loading...

1. The Toaster Project
This crazy work is from 2009, but somehow I just came across it. It’s called The Toaster Project. British designer Thomas Thwaites decided to recreate a mass-produced toaster from scratch (literally), extracting raw materials and processing them himself. The TED Talk about the project is also great.

2. IMG_0001
Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Developer Riley Walz made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos.

3. Dreamy interfaces
Telematic Dreaming was originally produced by Paul Sermon in June 1992 for the annual summer exhibition entitled ‘Koti’ at the Kajaani Art Gallery in Finland, linked via videoconference to the Tele Gallery in Helsinki. This full-length 40-minute documentary includes interviews and rare line-out recordings from the opening ceremony.

4. Brainrot Video Theory
I found a website that converts any PDF into a brainrot TikTok style video: memenome.gg. This was originally an academic essay discussing the meaning and usage of the word “art”. I don’t really have any comment to add, except that this is the AI art we need (and probably deserve).

5. The best artist you’ve never heard of
Cabel Sasser of Panic gave an amazing talk at XOXO Fest 2024. The presentation is about a little-known artist named late Wes Cook. Incredible artist, unmissable video.

6. Every webpage deserves to be a place
Matt Webb added a new feature to his website called cursor party. It lets web visitors see other people’s cursors on his site. And they can chat with each other and share text highlights. “It’s a miracle that we can feel togetherness over the internet. And yet! And yet!”. This is the internet I fell in love with, almost thirty years ago <3

7. all text in nyc
all text in nyc is a search engine that enables exploration of New York City’s urban landscape through text. Brilliant online project by Yufeng Zhao.

8. Occasional updates
A really cool website full of old Casio wrist camera photos taken more than 20 years ago: “It’s an amazing thing that looks just like a normal watch, but has a nifty little built-in digital camera that lets you take lots of photos on the quiet – and then beam them to your computer! Expect occasional updates documenting my travels and drunken nights…”.

things I did

Exit reality: introduzione alla realtà e a tutte le sue alterazioni, Più Libri Più Liberi, Roma - December 8th 2024
Aestheticisation of the Damaging Effects of Social Media and Doomscrolling - VAI Ireland online, Dublin - November 19th 2024
Vita e lavoro nell’epoca degli algoritmi: estetiche di internet e forme di resistenza, Bookcity Milano 2024 - November 14th 2024
NOTTE NOT, Brancaleone, Roma - November 8th 2024
La realtà per davvero, Festival Letteratura, Mantova - September 7th 2024

RADIO SAPIENZA - Intervista a Valentina Tanni, December 8th 2024 (ITALIAN)

things I wrote

Preda di forti emozioni | Prey to strong memes [MUdec United - ITA/ENG]
Corps à l’écran : court essai sur les mèmes performatifs [Hybrid Journal - FR]
La casa di Hermes. Corpi e schermi nello spazio [Afterword of “City of Legends” - ITA]
A New Start [Harper’s Bazaar Italia - ITA]
La strana ossessione di internet per gli gnomi [Lucy sulla Cultura - ITA]
Inhabiting the Paradox [Christoph Büchel - Fondazione Prada - ENG]
The Door That Won’t Open [Neural - ENG]
Battute sulla soglia. Una collezione di meme liminali [Charge Zine - ITA]

I’m proud to announce the release of the Greek edition of my book Exit Reality, published by the amazing Topovorosbooks | Translated by Sasha Romanou | Edited by llan Manouach | Cover image by Jared Pike.

upcoming…

TIME FOR SPOILERS. A lot of cool things are coming up: in mid-January I’ll be at the Centre for Digital Inquiry (University of Warwick) to livestream an episode of CDI-TV, an experimental initiative dedicated to the exploration of digital media culture through hybrid streaming. With Michael Dieter and Carolina Bandinelli.
On January 24th you can meet me in Rome at Liminal Space, a brand new transmedia arts venue run by the Liminal State collective. We have been working on a secret project for months: an immersive exhibition called THE LAMP (the title is a bit of a spoiler in itself). On February 5th I’ll be in Bologna at MAMbo for the opening of the group exhibition “Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo”, curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni, presenting the brand new version of The Great Wall of Memes (IT WILL BE HUGE).
Last but not least, I wrote a new little book that is almost ready to be launched (out March 26th).

BONUS MERCH: THE EXIT REALITY HAT!

Outdoor 4-season hat in recycled polyester ripstop. With each wear, reality fades and pure imagination takes flight. By NERO Editions.

That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.

Share Loading...

1. Into the space ship, Granny
The Grannies (2019) is a documentary short film created inside Red Dead Redemption 2. A group of players — Marigold Bartlett, Andrew Brophy, Ian MacLarty, Kalonica Quigley & friends aka The Grannies — venture beyond the boundaries of the video game. Peeking behind the curtain of the virtual world they discover an ethereal space that reveals the humanity and materiality of digital creations. Directed by Marie Foulston and edited by Luke Neher.
It made me think of my favourite Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, The Space Crone (1976).

2. Sensing, more than reading
Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content is a great article by Caroline Busta, don’t miss it. I extracted this essential quote:

“But what if, for better or worse, this non-reading mode is a form of adaptation: an evolutionary step in which we’ve learned to scan, like machines, for keywords and other attributes that allow for data-chunking, quickly aligning a piece of content with this or that larger theme or political persuasion? What if, in a time of infinity-content, a meta reading of the shape and feel of content has become a survival skill? The ability to intuit a viable meaning via surface-level qualities—ones that are neither text nor image but a secret third thing—is now essential for negotiating our sprawling information space. Perhaps we’re tapping into a more primal human intelligence.”

3. The Quasi Robots
In 2008 Nicolas Anatol Baginski made the “Quasi Robots”, a family of autonomous, disabled machines that are design to provoke emotional response. Probably the weirdest piece of robotic/ai art I’ve ever encountered.

4. 500,000 JPGs and no plans
Eryk Salvaggio made this delightful video piece inspired by a Reddit post. It encapsulates the generative AI frenzy so well.

I’ve got 20,000 jpgs and no plans
I’ve 30,000 jpgs and no ideas
for what to do with them
I’ve got 40,000 jpgs on a hard drive
what do you guys do with all these pictures

5. Oh, Ballard
One of the dozens incredible predictions by J.G. Ballard. This comes from the 1977 essay “Future of the Future”, published on Vogue.

6. Cyclops: a speculative reality artwork
Cyclops, by Trevor Paglen, is a networked performance, collaborative narrative, and alternate-reality-game designed to be played by groups of people working together across the word.

“Paglen’s interactive speculative reality artwork, titled CYCLOPS, takes the audience on a journey through the world of 1960s-era CIA mind control experiments, psychological operations, and unexplained historical anomalies. For this new work, the artist drew inspiration from Ed Ruscha’s Rocky II sculpture hidden in the Mojave Desert; collisions of facts and fictions in Benjamín Labatut’s book When We Cease to Understand the World; and Internet-era enigmas such as the “Cicada 3301” project.”

7. I laughed, I cried, It became a part of me
I struggle to find the words to describe this. I’ll just copy-paste one of the comments below the video: “I laughed, I cried, It became a part of me.”

8. Generative AI is shaping reality
AI generates images of non-existent stuff all the time. But people want stuff, so they order it, and those images turn into reality. Welcome to the era of AI-assisted e-commerce aka AI-shaped reality.

[Having taken orders, Chinese factory must actually make massive AI slop gorilla sofas]

9. Virtual creatures evolving
I’m currently working on a new book on artificial intelligence and art, and I took some time to deepen my knowledge about genetic algorithms. If you’re wondering what they are, I suggest that you start here. You will be mesmerized by Karl Sims digital creatures.

things I did recently

Last May I went to Ljubljana to present the english edition of my book Exit Reality, published by NERO Editions and Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art.
While there, I took part in this super-fun lecture performance with Total Refusal titled Let’s Play: Brexit Reality We met in a dystopian, imaginary, future London and discussed some of the book’s topics while playing the video game Watch Dogs Legion.
Now the full documentation of the event is online, and you can watch it here.

On the same topic (the content of my book), I recorded a few audio interviews, that you can access below:

1. (un)real data podcast, hosted by Neja Berger and produced by AKSIOMA [ENG]

2. Radio Študent interview by Lea Sande [ENG]

3. Tisana all’Arancia podcast, hosted by Giulio Bruschini [ITA]

4. Inutile Arte podcast, hosted by Antonio Belfiore [ITA]

I also contributed to these online articles:

1. Italian edition of Vanity Fair, article by Viola Francini e Anna Maniscalco
2. Dazed magazine. article by Günseli Yalcinkaya

upcoming…

7h September 2024 - I’ll be in Mantova, hosted by Festivaletteratura, for an event I’m really looking forward to: a conversation with Edoardo Camurri and Nicolò Porcelluzzi. The title is “La realtà per davvero”

12th September 2024 - My essay “The Great Algorithm” will be republished in this incredible anthology, published by Aksioma and edited by Daphne Dragona and Domenico Quaranta. The list of contributors is astounding, I’m so honoured to be included!

The PostScript^UM Anthology (2010–2023)
Essays on Art, Technology, Society and the Environment
PRE-OREDER HERE

new entries on my bookshelf

Silvio Lorusso, What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion, 2023
James Bridle, Modi di essere: Animali, piante e computer: al di là dell'intelligenza umana, 2022
Honor Levy, My First Book, 2024
Tom Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy: The Art of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, 2004
J. G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors, 2012
Edoardo Camurri, Introduzione alla realtà, 2024

BONUS IMAGE

That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.

Share Loading...

1. All About Computer Love
Artist Sara Martinez made an amazing interactive, console log essay  “about love for computers, combating escapism and deactivating healing fantasies to face the world“. This is net art at its best.

2. Alt search engines
Elan Kiderman Ullendorff has put together a really interesting collection on alternative search engines. Considering Google’s tragic downward spiral, testing new tools is a must.

3. The Backrooms are (were) in Wisconsin
The origin of the Backrooms photo has been unveiled, after 5 years of search. Users not only found the exact location (Oshkosh, Wisconsin), but they also tracked down some photos of the room in 1967, when it hosted a furniture store. As soon as I heard the news, I got a little sad, but then I realized that it’s not that bad. The Backrooms are sculpted in our minds, hearts and nightmares forever. And the lore will keep expanding. Everywhere, in every direction, until the end of time.

Bonus link: this Google doc sums up 5 years of research. IT IS INSANE.

4. This would kill a medieval peasant
Walked Out Niemans is an experimental videogame developer. They also have a weird (and hypnotizing) TikTok account. I don’t know exactly what is going on here, but something is. The most relevant comment under this YouTube videos states: “This would kill a medieval peasant”. [via webcurious]

5. meow mix
I could say soooo many things about this video, but I don’t wanna ruin it for you. Meow.

6. Found in Translation
Eric Drass, aka Shardcore, made this very interesting experiment with generative AI applications: “I arranged a form of Chinese-Whispers between AI systems. I first extracted the keyframes from a scene from American Psycho and asked a multimodal LLM (LLaVA) to describe what it saw. I then took these descriptions and used them as prompts for a Stable Diffusion image generator. Finally I passed these images on to Stable-Video-Diffusion to turn the stills into motion.”

things I did recently

May 2024 - May was all about book presentations. I had the pleasure of presenting the new edition of Videoarte & Arte (Postmediabooks), a seminal essay by Silvia Bordini, my professor, mentor, and perpetual source of inspiration. I also contributed to the launch event of Algorithms of Resistance. The Everyday Fight against Platform Power, by Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Trerè (MIT Press). Finally, I met with my old friend Marco Enrico Giacomelli in Rome to talk about his book Ma dove sono le opere d’arte?, published by Castelvecchi in 2023.

LAST BUT DEFINITELY NOT LEAST - From May 14th to May 17th I was in Ljubljana to present the english edition of my book Exit Reality! This book is jointly published by NERO Editions and Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art.

I gave a talk at ALUO, the Academy of Fine Arts, and also took part in a crazy, super-fun lecture performance with Total Refusal titled Let’s Play: Brexit Reality We met in a dystopian, imaginary, future London and discussed some of the book’s topics while playing the video game Watch Dogs Legion.

If you want to listen to the ALUO talk, the video-documentation is HERE.
Also, I compiled a PLAYLIST that goes with the book! You find it on Spotify.

April 2024 - For the second year in a row, I contributed with one lecture to “Questo mondo è tutto immagini”, a very interesting online course about Visual Culture. I also recorded an episode of a podcast called editorIA – i libri di chatGPT. You can listen to the episode on Spotify here.

March 2024 - I’ve been invited by Scuola Holden, in Turin, to teach a two-day course about online visual culture; and RAI Play published a TV interview I recorded back in December in Rome, you can watch it HERE.

Daydreams, Playable Nightmares and Out-of-Body Journeys

Aksioma published the english translation of this conversation Silvia Dal Dosso and I had last year. You can order the printed version or download the pdf here.

upcoming…

18th June 2024 - Arte Digitale - Online lecture hosted by Centro Scritture

20th June 2024 - Dalla Memestetica a Exit Reality - Lecture hosted by Scuola di Dottorato di ricerca in Storia dell'arte, La Sapienza Università di Roma

new entries on my bookshelf

Trevor J. Blank (curated by), Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, 2009
Francesco D’Isa, La rivoluzione algoritmica delle immagini. Arte e intelligenza artificiale, 2024
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, 2004
Legacy Russell, Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us, 2024
Claudio Kulesko, Al limite del possibile, 2024
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, 2024
Marco Giovenale, Oggettistica, 2024
Andrea Pinotti, Il primo libro di teoria dell'immagine, 2024
Valerio Bassan, Riavviare il sistema, 2024
Lukas Feireiss, Florian Hadler, Weak Signals New Narratives in Art and Technology, 2023
Ian Cheng, Fare Mondi, 2024
Emanuele Bevilaqua, Attenzione e potere, 2024
Juta, Gatto Pernucci, 2024

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.

Share Loading...

1. The scintillating scotoma
Claire L. Evans wrote a great article about the “scintillating scotoma”, a visual disturbance related to migraines. I had this a couple of times and it looks exactly as described. A terrifying but also extremely fascinating experience.

“Writing about these bizarre and horrifying perceptual phenomena, the late Oliver Sacks observed that migraines ‘show us how the brain-mind constructs ‘space’ and ‘time,’ by demonstrating what happens when space and time are broken, or unmade.”

2. Voice In My Head
Kyle McDonald & Lauren Lee McCarthy developed an AI system that can replace your internal monologue: “With the proliferation of generated content, AI now seeps constantly into our consciousness. What happens when it begins to intervene directly into your thoughts? Where the people you interact with, the things you do, are guided by an AI enhanced voice that speaks to you the way you’d like to be spoken to.”

3. Life: a user’s manual
I was just reminded by a student of this powerful performance by Michelle Teran: “Moving through the city streets with a video scanner reveals a hidden layer of personal fragments and stories which are broadcast by the private owners of surveillance cameras. The accumulation of these autonomous yet synchronous acts contributes to an invisible ad-hoc network of media permeating the socially codified spaces of our urban environments: the café, the apartment building, the store, the parking lot, and the street. Life: a user’s manual is a shared experience in visualizing the invisible. Together with the participants, Michelle Teran walks through the streets with a wireless surveillance camera scanner and broadcasts the images on a TV monitor.”

[via + via]

4. Entropophone
In the work “Entropophone | La qualité de l’air” by artist Filipe Vilas-Boas, the anonymous video stream of a surveillance camera is transformed into a musical score.

[via]

5. MyHouse.wad
My House (a.k.a. MyHouse.WAD) is a single-level PK3 for Doom II using the GZDoom source port that was released on March 3, 2023.It was designed by Steve Nelson (Veddge).

6. Dreams and the internet
“Don’t you think dreams and the internet are similar? They’re both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents.”

From Paprika (2006).

7. In the Name of the Place
In the 1990s, a group of radical artists called the GALA Committee smuggled political messages into Melrose Place. This story is WILD.

“Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl.”

[via]

8. Sunday Nobody
I don’t know why I haven’t come across this artist before. Sunday Nobody calls himself a “meme artist”, but what he does is actually a surprising mixture of conceptual art, performance art, viral video and extremely high level craftsmanship. You can watch his videos on TikTok and Instagram.

things I did recently

December 9th 2023 - I had the pleasure of presenting Exit Reality at Più Libri Più Liberi in Rome with Matteo Corradini, in a literal backroom (see picture for reference).

February 10th 2024 - EXIT REALITY | LIMINAL ROME: Oltre la soglia, al centro dei desideri, Teatro delle Bellezze, Roma. This was the launch event of .expub, a Creative Europe research project exploring the idea of “expanded publishing”, conceived by Nero Editions (Rome), Institute for Networked Cultures (Amsterdam), Aksioma (Ljubljana), and Echo Chamber (Brussels). I engaged in a dialogue with my friend Priscilla De Pace on the topics of liminality, memory, internet aesthetics and the perception of reality.

February 22nd, 2024 - Architettura è spazio digitale, M9 Museum, Mestre. With Simone Sfriso, TAM Associati.

February 23rd, 2024 - Exit Reality a Spiazzi, Venezia, organized by Arnia Nomade, with Davide Tolfo.

BEST NEWS OF THE MONTH: MEMESTETICA IS OUT IN ENGLISH!

Translated by Tijana Mamula and published by NERO Editions. On the cover, the legendary CATT by Eva & Franco Mattes.
BUY THE BOOK HERE

upcoming…

On May 15th I’ll be in Ljubljana, presenting the English edition of Exit Reality, during an incredible live event with Total Refusal. The first Let’s Play book launch! Info here.

new entries on my bookshelf

Klaus Podoll, Derek Robinson (curated by), Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience from Within, 2009
Anna Watkins Fisher, The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance, 2020
Matteo Lupetti, UDO – Guida ai videogiochi nell’Antropocene, 2023
Walter Scheirer, A History of Fake Things on the Internet, 2023
Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence, 2023
Tiziano Bonini, Emiliano Trere, Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power, 2024
Lorenzo Fantoni, Vivere mille vite: Come i videogiochi ci hanno cambiato il futuro, 2023
Bret Easton Ellis, Le schegge, 2023
Alice Scornajenghi, Atti Puri, 2023
Emanuela Cocco, Trofeo, 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.

Share Loading...

The Wizard of AI
Alan Warburton made this very interesting video essay about the cultural impacts of generative AI. Using creative workflows unthinkable before October 2023, he takes us on a colourful journey behind the curtain of AI – through Oz, pink slime, Kanye’s ‘Futch’ and a deep sea dredge – to explain and critique the legal, aesthetic and ethical problems engendered by automated platforms.
Alan also made some other memorable video essays in the past, like Goodbye Uncanny Valley (2017), Fairytales of Motion (2019) and Spectacle, Speculation, Spam (2016).

2. Connections
I just discovered my new (old) favourite documentary series. It is titled Connections and it was aired by the BBC in 1978 an 1979. The series was written, and presented by British science historian James Burke. “It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention, and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology.”
And to my immense surprise and delight, I also read that the series is coming back, 45 years later, with a brand new season.

3. The Library of Babel in VRChat
A programmer named Mahu recreated the layout of the Library of Babel, as described by Jorge Luis Borges as an infinite home for every possible book, in the virtual reality platform VRChat.

“The Library does things that are only possible in virtual reality,” explains Mahu. “It contradicts the laws of euclidean coordinate systems, allowing you to seamlessly traverse what I call fractal space. So in a way my take on the library is perhaps more infinite than Borges’ had imagined.”

[via + via]

4. Something in the suburbs
Fantastic AI assisted video by David Chance Fragale. Music by Warinhari.
“Things had gotten a little strange in the suburbs. If you had a camera you could even try to keep track of them.”
[thanks Claudio for the tip]

5. Internet Artifacts
Neal Agarwal is back with a new entry for his collection of entertaining tiny websites. Internet Artifacts is a virtual museum of artifacts from early Internet history. Funny, educational and immensely nostalgic.

6. Literally No Place
Hello baby dolls, it’s the final boss of vocal fry here. Daniel Felstead’s glossy Julia Fox avatar is back. Last time she took on Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. Now she takes us on a journey into the AI utopian versus AI doomer cyberwarfare bedlam, exploring the stakes, fears, and hopes of all sides. Will AI bring about the post-scarcity society that Marx envisioned, allowing us all to live in labor-less luxury, or will it quite literally extinguish the human race?

Literally No Place, brand new video(art) essay by Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung.

7. This is serious we could make you delirious
A lovely PSA commercial for kids about the dangers of pills. Produced in the 1980’s by the Poison Control Center. The song is titled “We’re Not Candy!”

We could make you delirious (delirious).
You should have a healthy fear of us (fear of us).
Too much of us is dangerous (no no no no).

Doctors tell the pharmacies (pharmacies)
Types of pills that you will need (you will need).
And they know the harm that we can be (we can be)
If we’re not taken carefully (no no no no).

We’re not candy (believe us!)
Even though we look so fine and dandy.
When you’re sick we come in handy, but
We’re not candy… ohhh, no.

things I did recently

BOOK PRESENTATIONS (September/December) - I had the pleasure of presenting Exit Reality at NERO Editions in Rome with Andrea Natella, at Modo Infoshop with Fabiola Naldi, at Libreria L’Ornitorinco in Firenze with Francesco d’Isa, at COX18 with Giada Arena (AUDIO AVILABLE), at ESC in Rome with Valerio Mattioli (VIDEO AVAILABLE), at NABA in Rome, with Priscilla De Pace, and at Memissima Festival, in Turin with Mariano Tomatis.

Here is some press about the book, including a few interviews:

Linus, 01/10/2023 - REVIEW
Heavy Meta, 7/10/2023 - AUDIO INTERVIEW
Film Tv, 8/10/2023 - REVIEW
Il Tascabile, 10/10/2023 - REVIEW
Il Foglio, 12/10/2023 - REVIEW
Esquire, 14/10/2023 - REVIEW
Doppiozero, 16/10/2023 - REVIEW
L’Indiscreto (Classifica di Qualità – 9° posto categoria saggistica), 16/10/2023
Wired, 20/10/2023 - INTERVIEW
Corriere della Sera | Login, 30/10/2023 – PDF - INTERVIEW
Domani, 30/10/2023 - REVIEW
Link Idee per la TV, 2/11/2023 - INTERVIEW
Linkiesta, 16/11/2023 - INTERVIEW
Altri Animali, 22/11/2023 - REVIEW
Pulp Magazine, 23/11/2023 - REVIEW
Quants Magazine, 24/11/2023 - INTERVIEW
Repubblica Torino, 27/11/2023 - INTERVIEW

Also, MEMESTETICA IS OUT IN SPANISH! published by Turner Libros.

upcoming…

December 9th 2023 - Exit Reality book presentation at Più libri, più liberi, Roma
Early 2024 - Memestetica comes out in ENGLISH! More info very soon

new entries on my bookshelf

Vladan Joler, Black Box Cartography. A critical cartography of the Internet and beyond, 2023
Immersion: Les origines 1949-1969, Exhibition Catalogue, 2023
Matteo Grilli, Muori Romantica, 2023
Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris, 2023
Erik Davies, Techgnosis, 2023
Jenny He, Tim Burton (a cura di), The World of Tim Burton, 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.

Share Loading...

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.

Share Loading...

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.

Share

1. The worst volume control interfaces in the world
In 2017, a group of developers hilariously competed for who could create the worst volume control interface in the world. Enjoy this amazing list compiled by user 0xDesigner on Twitter.

2. Same Energy
“We believe that image search should be visual, using only a minimum of words. And we believe it should integrate a rich visual understanding, capturing the artistic style and overall mood of an image, not just the objects in it.”

Same Energy is a visual search engine developed by Jackob Jackobson.

3. Walking robots are cute
From one of my favourite subreddits, Shitty Robots, a lovely “contest of walking robots”.

4. The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AF
“Welcome to the post-post-post-truth AI world. You know it’s not real. But you have to eat some bread in order to survive. But there is more out there. Synthetic Personalities awaits you at the door. The Future will be weird AF.”

The Ultimate AI CoreCore Experience, provided by Silvia Dal Dosso.

5. Early Computer Art is the Best Computer Art
Amy Goodchild published this cool article on early computer art (50s and 60s). I always show these artworks and experiments to my students because, after all these years, they still feel amazingly fresh and interesting.

6. The Stuntman
Ormer Locklear was a stunt pilot who made movies for Hollywood. This pic is from his second movie (The Skywayman, 1920) which he was the star of and did his own stunts for. He pulled this stunt off successfully, but he died doing a different stunt on the last day of filming. They used the footage of his crash in the movie. The movie is currently lost.

7. I am a surgeon: classic internet meme art

8. Flowers Blooming Backward Into Noise
A short animated documentary by Eryk Salvaggio on how AI image generation works, and the entanglement of composite photography, statistical correlations, and racist ideologies.

9. The Battlestation Experience
Frankly, I don’t really know what’s going on here.

things I did recently

June 3rd - RadioRAI3. A3 il formato dell’arte - radio interview about AI & art (italian)
June 2nd - 7 Corriere della Sera - interview about AI & images (italian)
May 20th - Memestetica presentation @ Ammasso - Off Topic, Torino
May 18th - Dialoghi artistici con la macchina – Speciale Artribune Magazine (italian)
April 14th - Podcast Still Online - interview (italian)
May 10th - Celebrità di internet e studiosi di meme - Base, Milano [check my contribution here: “The Weird Subreddits Iceberg”]
April 2th - UNREEL. A door to alternative realities - The Gate, Bergamo e Brescia

This giant video-portal hosts my latest exhibition (actually, there are 2 portals, one in Brescia and one in Bergamo). It’s called UNREEL and I made it with the collaboration of so many amazing people. It’s up until the end of June.

UNREEL. A door to alternative realities - The Gate, Bergamo + Brescia

Videos by: Giusy Amoroso, Elodie Anglade, Convivial Studio, Drake Cappi, Fantamagico, Illo Studio, Jacksachs, Dirk Koy, Marble Mannequin, Emanuela Quaranta, Sam Rolfes, Sagans, Gabrielle Salonga, Matteo Scappin, Simone Vezzani

Production and Art direction: Gummy Industries
Curator: Valentina Tanni
Motion Design: Bax Studio
Commissioned by: Consorzio Stargate BGBS2023

upcoming…

You might have noticed that I haven’t sent this newsletter in a while. There is a simple explanation for that: I spent the last few months writing like crazy (realistic picture below). I just delivered the first draft of my new book to the publisher and I’m currently working on revisions and fine tuning. It will be out in October for NERO Editions (NOT).
Also, the English edition of Memestetica is almost ready (we are working hard on that, too), and I signed a contract for the Spanish one. Can you believe that?
Last but not least, another very exciting news: next fall I’ll be teaching a new course at John Cabot University in Rome. On which topic, you may ask… (drumroll)…. Well, it’s MEME CULTURE AND AESTHETICS.

NEXT IN LINE: Simposio (Borca di Cadore) - July 6th-9th

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.

Share

1. Michael Jackson on Fire
I could watch Bobby Fingers’ videos all day. This time, he made a diorama of when Michael Jackson’s hair caught on fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial in 1984. But believe me when I say that this isn’t remotely the most interesting thing about this film…

2. Roblox Car Crashes
I just found out that Roblox Car Crash Videos are a thing: “also known as BeamNG Roblox, refers to videos of car crashes taken in the video game Roblox, edited to replicate real-life dashcam car crashes by downgrading the quality and adding audio from car crash videos”. This trend is insanely weird (and good).

3. The LOL Verifier
The LOL Verifier is a device that sits between your keyboard and your computer and only lets you type “lol” if you’ve truly laughed out loud. Bringing authenticity to the least authentic place: the internet. Great project by Brian Moore.

4. Learning to Learn
Since people talk so much about “machine learning” these days, I think we should go back to the basics and listen to the people who first began to investigate the idea. Here is the amazing Gordon Pask, English cybernetician and psychologist, interviewed by the BBC in 1974. Here you can find one of his best writings, here is a good article about his concept of “maverick machines”, and here is a video lesson about him by Paul Pangaro.

5. Smashing Things
This must be one of my favourite performance artworks of all time: Jimmie Durham, Smashing (2004): “Wearing a suit, Jimmie Durham sits behind a desk like a bureaucrat performing his duty: smashing things. In an orderly manner, a person goes in, delivers an object, Durham smashes it with a prehistoric stone tool, violently but impassively. He stamps and signs a piece of paper as receipt and gives it to the same person, who goes off-scene. The same order of events is repeated several times during 92 minutes. This video-performance was part of Durham’s teaching residency at Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy, in 2004.” – source

6. Beware of the Gnomes
I’ve been hearing about gnomes A LOT lately – even garden gnomes! – in the context of paranormal and horror stories. This painting by Woodrow White sums up the mood of this trend very well. Here is the video-inspo for the painting.

7. The Shape of All Stories
In this amazing lecture writer Kurt Vonnegut diagrams the shape of all stories: from Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” to “Cinderella”. Please watch it. [via]

8. Never Let Yourself Feel Bad
A good description of this video by Jack Stauber can be found in the comments: “This man literally take his nightmares and turn them into awesome songs”.

things I did recently

STUFF YOU CAN READ, HEAR AND WATCH

March 28th - Sottolineature Podcast - interview about Memestetica (in italian)
March 23rd - The Square - TV interview about Memestetica on Sky Arte (in italian)
March 16th - Supernova #87 / Menti Esplosive on Radio Raheem - Interview on Artificial Intelligence and Art (in italian)
March 17th - Alla Scoperta del ramo d’oro - TV interview on Artificial Intelligence and art on RAI3 and RAIStoria - Watch it on RAIPLAY (in italian)
March 9th - Perché un’immagine diventa meme - MELE Podcast interview (in italian)

AND OTHER STUFF…

March 29th - Questo mondo è tutto immagini - online course
March 22nd - Valentina Tanni: dal primo modem a Memestetica - Talk at Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma - Scuola di Nuove Tecnologie dell’Arte
March 3rd-5th - Hacking AI. Usi impropri di intelligenze artificiali - Workshop at La Scuola Open Source, Bari
March 1st - Premio Paul Thorel - selection committee
February 3rd - Salto nel vuoto. Arte al di là della materia. Exhibition Catalogue - Bergamo, GAMeC - a cura di Lorenzo Giusti, Domenico Quaranta. I wrote texts about Evan Roth, Elisa Giardina Papa, Vladan Joler, Mark Lombardi, John F. Simon Jr, Ai Weiwei e Addie Wagenknecht (in italian).

new entries on my bookshelf

Alex Kitnick, Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde, 2021
Marco Enrico Giacomelli, Ma dove sono le opere d'arte?, 2023
Enrico Monacelli, The Great Psychic Outdoors. Adventures in Low Fidelity, 2023
James Ballard, All That Mattered Was Sensation, 2019
Alva Noë, Strani strumenti: L'arte e la natura umana, 2022
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 2008
David Toop, Oceano di suono: Musica ambient e ascolto radicale nell’era della comunicazione, 2023
Tommaso Guariento, Miti, meme, iperstizioni, 2022

my website is officially 20 years old. let that sink in

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.

Share

1. This is What I call Extreme Art
Cat Graffam recreated Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio using Kid Pix Studio, a bitmap drawing software released in 1995. Using THE MOUSE. It was kinda painful to watch, but really amazing.

2. The Salt and the Women
Eryk Salvaggio is an interdisciplinary design researcher and new media artist. I’ve been following his work for years and I am always amazed by the quality of his writings. Lately, he has published a series of great articles on AI and art on his Substack newsletter, Cybernetic Forests. He also made a fascinating film assembling music produced by mushrooms, text from GPT3 and images from Stable Diffusion. The title is The Salt and the Women (read more about it here).

3. The Internet Aesthetics Spiral: #corecore
Yes, you read that right: there is a new trend named CORECORE. According to KnowYourMeme, “Corecore refers to an aesthetic that’s prevalent on TikTok under the hashtag “#corecore,” specifically within so-called NicheTok circles of NicheTokers, that plays on the -core suffix by making a “core” out of the collective consciousness of all “cores.”
Things are clearly spiraling out of control in the world of Internet Aesthetics. And this feels more like a parody than a new style or mood. Anyway, the best article I found about this thing is here.

Share Loading...

4. Ghostwriter
Designer and engineer Arvind Sanjeev created Ghostwriter, a one-of-a-kind repurposed Brother typewriter that uses AI to chat with a person typing on the keyboard. The “ghost” inside the machine comes from OpenAI’s GPT-3, a large language model that powers ChatGPT. The effect resembles a phantom conversing through the machine.

4. Meet Mestre Ensinador, the Whimsical Little Creature of TikTok
“Me When I Was A Baby, also known as Whimsical Little Creature, refers to videos of the TikTok account MestreEnsinador1. It features videos of a flying white puppet wearing a green hat named Tiburcio. The name translates to “master teacher” in Portuguese, with the gnome puppet being referred to as a “forest being” by the TikToker in his comment sections. The videos often show the puppet flying and twirling, sometimes doing a little dance and sometimes undertaking mysterious rituals. Maestre Ensinador went viral in the fall of 2022 after a series of duets where people showed his videos to their younger siblings and tried to convince them that the puppet was them as a baby.”

“Tibúrcio is a strong gnome,” Jhonatan Oliveira says, once belonging to his late grandmother, “and that’s why I like it very much.” He remade the puppet’s body three years ago, before he began making the videos. His uncle appears with him in the first viral TikTok — he’s the one who took Tibúrcio out of the cruse, an earthenware vessel that Oliveira refers to as a buried treasure. “But, he is not a cash treasure, but a spiritual one,” he explains. “The inspiration to make the videos comes from God!”

[via + via]

5. If you die in the game, you die in real life
Palmer Luckey, the man who created the Oculus rift, made a VR Headset that kills the user If they die in the game.

“The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me – you instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it.  Pumped up graphics might make a game look more real, but only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game.  This is an area of videogame mechanics that has never been explored, despite the long history of real-world sports revolving around similar stakes.”

6. Jolene +
I am in love with this uncanny cover of Jolene, released by Holly Herndon (voice by Holly+ AI, visuals by Sam Rolfes).

7. Affinity to Infinity
Jean-François Lyotard coined the expression “affinity to infinity” to describe how contemporary art, techno-science and capitalism share the same tension towards infinity (infinite progress, growth, production).
The scariest and also the most fascinating thing about AI powered content generators is that they can go on producing content forever. In infinite variations. Without any human intervention. For example, here you can listen to “An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek.” And here you can watch a never-ending sitcom where characters speak to each other using GPT-3.

new entries on my bookshelf

Eduardo Navas, The Rise of Metacreativity: AI Aesthetics After Remix, 2022
Pamela McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence and the Work of Harold Cohen, 1991
Sara Benaglia e Mauro Zanchi, Le insidie delle immagini, 2022

things I did recently

Roberto Fassone – And We Thought III - Read the text (in italian)
Palazzo Vizzani, via Santo Stefano 43, Bologna
promossa da Alchemilla e Istituzione Bologna Musei | MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna

Digital World: Arte digitale
November 12nd - RAI SCUOLA - Watch the interview on Raiplay (in italian)
with Matteo Bordone

Il rettangolo elettrico - Bookcity
November 17th 2022 - NABA, Milan - VIDEO (in italian)
With: Guido Tattoni, Vincenzo Cuccia, Simone Sarasso, Vincenzo Filosa, Sabrina Saporiti, Valentina Tanni, Mauro Martino

La rivoluzione algoritmica dell’arte
November 4th 2022 - La Portineria / Online talk - VIDEO (in italian)
With: Fabrizio Ajello, Francesco D’Isa, Alessandro Y. Longo, Gregorio Magini, Valentina Tanni.

upcoming

February 14th - Colori e mestieri delle Arti Multimediali - Conferenza presso Accademia delle Belle Arti di Roma

March 3rd-5th - Hacking AI. Usi impropri di intelligenze artificiali - Workshop @ Scuola Open Source, Bari

exciting news

The brand new edition of my book Memestetica is finally out! With a new chapter, a super preface by Alessandro Ludovico and… FOUR different cover artworks. Also, the english edition will be out later this year 🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛. Also n.2: I’m working (very hard) on a new book... Everything by NOT - NERO Editions.

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.

Share

1. Corners are scary
Cornerfolk is a single-episode analog horror short movie. It tells the story of a man who believes strange entities are using his home as a sort of nexus when passing through dimensions. Fascinating idea and cool video.

2. A neural network that mimics a video game
Ollin Boer Bohan made an interesting experiment involving videogames and AI: “I made a playable Pokémon overworld. It looks (mostly) like a normal video game, and you can try it in your web browser here. Although this looks like a video game, I did not write any game code. This program is actually a neural network mimicking a video game.”

3. Something called the internet
“Kate Bellingham reports that an exciting new interconnected world – a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and ever film ever shot will be at our fingertips – is tantalisingly close. The information superhighway will be a high-capacity digital communication network, which in time could revolutionise the way we shop, socialise and work”.

Originally broadcasted 29 April, 1994 on BBC

Share Loading...

4. AI for detecting cluster munitions
VFRAME is an organization that researches and develops state-of-the-art computer vision technologies for human rights research and conflict zone monitoring. It is developed and maintained by Adam Harvey in Berlin with contributions from Jules LaPlace, Josh Evans, and a growing list of collaborators. During the winter/spring of 2022 VFRAME and T4T partnered to develop a 3D model of the 9N235 submunition that has frequently appeared in the war in Ukraine. This model is being used to create synthetic training data for object detection algorithms and high-accuracy 3D printed replicas for benchmarking purposes.

5. Everyone lives out a fairytale as a template script
Artist Ian Cheng looks at the way that the work of psychiatrist Eric Berne changed the way that he thought about human personality when it came to creating the AI simulations that inhabit his work. On Elephant: “Obviously we take different paths, but Berne believed that everyone lives out a fairytale as a template script that they’ve cast themselves into with the help of their parents. Most people aren’t satisfied with the script that they’re unconsciously barreling down. It might be a mismatch: maybe your parents had old fashioned values; maybe the culture you grew up in radically shifted in your teens, which alters the relevance of your life script.”

6. The Follower
Dries Depoorter‘s “The Follower” project combines AI, open access cameras, and influencers to show behind the scenes of viral shots—without them knowing.

7. Passage a l’acte
I don’t know how it’s possible that I didn’t come across this masterpiece before. Passage a l’acte, by Martin Arnold (1993) “makes a simple breakfast scene from To Kill a Mockingbird look like a surrealist nightmare“.

new entries on my bookshelf

David J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, 2022
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi, 2021
Francesco D’Abbraccio e Andrea Facchetti (a cura di), AI & Conflicts. Volume 1, 2021
Cecilia Guida e Roberto Pinto (a cura di), Le relazioni oltre le immagini, 2022
Katy Hessel, The Story of Art without Men, 2022
John Roberts, Art, Misuse and Technology, 2022
Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, 2008
Mattia Salvia, Interregno, 2022
Chris Stedman, IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives, 2020
Caterina Tomeo e Claudia Attimonelli (a cura di), L’elettronica è donna, 2022

things I did recently

On October 25th I took part in a conversation organized by Blitz Valletta. We presented “Here’s how I did not see what you wanted me to see” (2022), a brand new online artwork by Matthew Attard, commissioned by Blitz in the context of the "Open" Digital Residency program. Click here to see the project or here to see the video.

On October 14th, I gave a talk in the context of the conference “No(u)s mèmes”, CNAM, Paris, Salle des textiles, Paris. The title of my paper was “The era of non-sense. Weirdness, absurdism and surrealism in internet memes”.

On October 8th, I was in Pisa at the Internet Festival, to present Vincenzo Susca’s book, Tecnomagia (Mimesis, 2022). The conversation was live streamed and you can watch it here.

On September 30th I went to Milan for Artevisione, an interesting series of events organized by Care/of. I took part in a roundtable titled “Beyond Data”, moderated by Claudia D’Alonzo.

On September 22nd I made this fun webinar on the use of memes in class: Formazione su Misura - Meme culture a scuola: le potenzialità didattiche dei meme.

A fews excerpts from Memestetica (NERO Editions) came out in German in this cool magazine called Montage AV. The theme of the issue is "Messy Images."

exciting news!

Last week I signed a book contract 📖. I’m writing a new essay that will be out for Nero NOT next year. Also, a brand new Italian edition of Memestetica will be available in January, with an extra chapter and a preface! The English edition will be also out in 2023.

upcoming events

November 4th: La rivoluzione algoritmica dell'arte - online talk
November 17th: Il rettangolo elettrico - Bookcity @ NABA, Milano
November 18th: Memestetica @ Marx Now 2.0 - Che Guevara, Roma
November 25th: Ammasso by NOT, Roma (more info soon)
December 6th: Media, arte, pubblici nell'ecosistema digitale, Università degli Studi di Catania

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

P.S. I WANT THIS SWEATER

That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.

1. Life On The Internet
There are very few things I enjoy more than listening to people of the past talking about technology (and the future). So I’ll be spending the next few days watching this: “a 13-part television series covering aspects of the Internet in 1996 to introduce to a general audience. Called ‘Life on the Internet’, the series was hosted by Scott Simon, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, and covers the state of online life at the time”.

2. The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme
“This is not a hall of shame. the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers. Hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.”

3. Drunk Mel Gibson Arrest Diorama
I won’t spoil anything about this. Just trust me and watch the entire thing. SOUND ON.

Share Loading...

4. The Happiness Box theory
“The Happiness Box theory posits that sufficiently advanced civilizations don’t swarm out into the universe, they implode into virtual worlds of their own making. If you could gain the ability to upload consciousness into simulated realities that are functionally indistinguishable from physical reality, why would you bother to climb into a physical spaceship to outwardly explore?” [via]

5. VR and psychedelics
According to this research, in David Glowacki’s VR experience, Isness-D “participants can partake in an experience called energetic coalescence: they gather in the same spot in the virtual-reality landscape to overlap their diffuse bodies, making it impossible to tell where each person begins and ends. The resulting sense of deep connectedness and ego attenuation mirrors feelings commonly brought about by a psychedelic experience.” The study, involving 75 subjects, showed that Isness-D offers an experience near indistinguishable from 20 milligrams of psilocybin or 200 micrograms of LSD.

6. Fiberglass Mold Graveyard
“The Fiberglass Mold Graveyard of Sparta, Wisconsin is a zoo full of discarded animal-creature-and people-shaped molds. This field of plastic carcasses lies behind the FAST building, aka the Fiberglass Animals, Shapes, and Trademarks workshop. Both spooky and wondrous looking, this field of gigantic molds, left behind from various projects, has become an art installation in itself.” [via]

new entries on my bookshelf

Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, 2018
Adrienne L. Massanari, Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit, 2014
Mark Coeckelbergh, AI Ethics, 2020
Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art, 2006
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, 2016
Grafton Tanner, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave And The Commodification Of Ghosts, 2016

things I did recently

I wrote a short essay for this wonderful publication by Futures Photography:

"HYBRIDS: Forging New Realities as Counter-Narrative aims to explore the new atmosphere of trans-disciplinary experimentation across divergent fields and sectors in the arts. We asked ourselves this: how is the act of narration evolving with the waves of counter-narratives that have flooded our knowledge systems, and what kinds of narratives might we need where we are heading? The book, edited by Salvatore Vitale and Saba Askary presents a collection of essays, interviews and visual responses to four points of departure: “The Speed of Narratives”, “An Evolution of Reality”, “Giving, Taking and Stealing the Right to Narrate” and “A Textured Future”. With texts and works by Morehshin Allahyari, Valentina Tanni, Max Pinckers, Tj Demos, Hoda Afshar, Alan Butler, Jean-Vincent Simonet and Nina Mangalanayagam among others.”

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.

Share Loading...

1. DALL.E meets Marinetti
W. David Marx and Roni Xu used DALL-e AI to generate imagery of the absurd cuisine from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1932 book The Futurist Cookbook. The results are fascinating.

2. The Lore Zone
The Lore Zone is a very interesting online research on “Memes → Memories → Micro-Mythologies”.

“The way we remember the events that happen on the internet is different than reading a book. Information circulates and gets stored in a way that incorporates personal narratives as documentation, combining textuality with elements of oral storytelling. Bits of text and image serve as artifacts that help piece together complex narratives. The Lore Zone seeks to help us all understand new interesting ways of reading, writing, and remembering the internet.”

3. Willy Wonka & Snowpiercer
My new favourite fan theory is the one that says that Snowpiercer is a sequel to Willy Wonka. It makes SO much sense :)

4. American TikTok Psycho
Just American Psycho, but with The TikTok Girl Voice. Aka the stuff of nightmares.

5. The Art of the Gag
I really enjoyed this video that unpacks the artistry of his Majesty mr. Buster Keaton.

6. China’s Borges
“For over a decade, a Chinese woman known as “Zhemao” created a massive, fantastical, and largely fictional alternate history of late Medieval Russia on Chinese Wikipedia, writing millions of words about entirely made-up political figures, massive (and fake) silver mines, and pivotal battles that never actually happened. She even went so far as to concoct details about things like currency and eating utensils.”
Read the entire story here.

7. September 5th, 2006
“Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman traces the significance of Facebook’s Newsfeed launch, from the initial rage it engendered to its precipitation of the algorithm-dominated status quo of current-day digital media. Prior to Newsfeed, early internet users had static profiles and had to consciously click and search for things on the site. Upon its launch, the blueprint for media inexorably changed: we were no longer explorers, searchers, discoverers—our very experience of time collapsed into an ever-shifting present; we became passive consumers of a digital feed algorithmically curated to our every trivial fancy. “

[streaming on DIS]

new entries on my bookshelf

Margaret A. Boden and Ernest A. Edmonds, From Fingers to Digits: An Artificial Aesthetic, 2019
Kate Eichhorn, Content, 2022
Matthew Ball, The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything, 2022
AA.VV., (re)programming – Strategies for Self-Renewal, 2022
Matteo De Giuli, Nicolò Porcelluzzi, Medusa. Storie dalla fine del mondo (per come lo conosciamo), 2021
Paolo Cirio, Monitoring Control, 2022

things I did recently

7-10th July - I went back to the mountains in Borca di Cadore to join Simposio. As always, the meeting was a blast: we slept in lovely wooden cabins, we met old and new friends, we gathered as a real community, we talked so much about the present and tried to recharge our batteries to deal with what’s coming. On July 8th, I gave a short speech about memory, hype and our fixation with the new. Here you can take a look at the slides I used.

1st July - Federico Nejrotti asked me a few questions for his cool Iceberg Newsletter.

20th June - Nicola Bozzi (Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College, London) invited me to an interesting seminar titled Representing and (re)Imagining Digital Crowds Beyond Data Reduction, which took place online on June 20th.
Taking my Instagram filters exhibition project “Art Layers” (2021) as a starting point, I analysed the different roles that AR filters can play in the context of today’s social media – from light, playful approaches to complex artistic experimentations on the topic of self-identity and reality perception.
A recording of the event is available on Vimeo.

17th June - We presented “And We Thought”, an artwork by Roberto Fassone, produced by Sineglossa, during a roundtable in Turin. Read more about the project here.

11th June - I wrote an article on Artribune about the most amazing artwork I encountered during this year’s Venice Biennale. You can read it here:

La seduzione dell’avatar. Lavinia Schulz e Walter Holdt alla Biennale di Venezia [ITALIAN] - [ENGLISH - GOOGLE TRANSLATE]

10th June - I had the pleasure to join Mariano Tomatis for the presentation of his book “Incantagioni” (NERO, 2022) in Rome. An audio recording is available.

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.

Share Loading...

1. The virtual body as an encoded aesthetic artefact
“The Subject Changes is a poetic live simulation of a capricious character, endlessly shape-shifting while negotiating his/her ambiguous world. The character sets out on an indefinite dérive – a frantic exploration – where fragile relationships with the world-cum-stage and its occupants are established or broken down.”
Created by Vienna based Depart (Leonhard Lass and Gregor Ladenhauf).

2. Essai d’ouverture
Essai d’ouverture is a 1988 short film by French director Luc Moullet. It’s about a man and his many bizarre approaches to opening a Coca-Cola bottle.

3. Heaven banning
”Heaven banning” is not real, nor are the articles that people are sharing about it. But it is a fascinating concept nonetheless, that can be read as an extension of the Dead Internet Theory. According to some sources, it is just a resurrected joke post from HackerNews.

4. AI and the future of image-making
I recently got an invitation to test the MidJourney beta, which is an amazing new AI app that generates images from text inputs. I’ve been playing with it for a while but I also spent hours just watching other people using it in a dedicated Discord server. It was a very funny and interesting experience and I got some amazing visual results, especially when I came up with the idea of feeding the algorithm a literary input instead of a merely descriptive sentence. Here are some images the app produced based on some famous books incipits.

[P.S. if you’re interested in learning more about how these systems work, I suggest you watch this very good video by VOX.]

PROMPT: imagine/ The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. – William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984

PROMPT: imagine/ It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. — George Orwell, 1984, 1949

PROMPT: imagine/ “Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. – Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away, 1986

5. When a harm ends, how can we make Amends?
In his latest work “Amends”, artist Kyle McDonald is auctioning three sculptures – from which the proceeds will pay to mitigate the historical emissions of three major art NFT marketplaces. The sculptures are both digital renders and physical handcrafted glass blocks, each filled with a material used for carbon removal and prevention. But they will only go on sale when Ethereum (finally? actually?) transitions away from proof-of-work. And the sculptures will be shipped to the owners of the NFTs—if they burn their NFT.

6. VRChat, the Metaverse People Actually Like
I really enjoyed watching this video published on People Make Games YouTube channel. It gives an amazing perspective on the topic of virtual worlds beyond hype and corporate bullshit.

new entries on my bookshelf

Ben Davis, Art in the After-Culture, Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy, 2022
Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, 2015
Nicolas Bourriaud, Inclusioni, Estetica del capitalocene, 2020
AA.VV., Videoarte in Italia. Il video rende felici, 2022

things that are coming soon

10th June 2022 - “Incantagioni”. Book presentation with Mariano Tomatis. Rome, Teatro India

17th June - And We Thought / Food Data Digestion, an AI project by Roberto Fassone, Torino. Talk with Roberto Fassone and Federico Bomba.

20th June - Representing and (re)Imagining Online Crowds Beyond Data Reduction - Online talk, curated by Nicola Bozzi - King’s College, London

7-9th July - Simposio 2022. Non è la fine del mondo, Borca di Cadore - Talk & Workshop

things I did recently

15th May - Tecnocene. Il potere dell’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità digitale, Bologna. Talk with Marco Mancuso, Bianca Cavuti and Amerigo Mariotti - VIDEO AVAILABLE

25th May - I wrote a new text for the PostScriptUM Series by Aksioma. The publication is part of the 4th instalment of the “New Extractivism” programme, with the amazing Ben Grosser. The title of my essay is “The Great Algorithm”.
Read it as a 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗣𝗗𝗙 or print on demand in English and Slovenian: aksioma.org/the-great-algorithm

That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.

Share Loading...