The Sheffield Freezer


“Anyone noticed how nice the freezers sound in the eccy road co-op?” someone wrote on the Sheffield Reddit page in January. “It’s like all the fans have been carefully tuned to the calmest droning chord ever, it’s like being in an electrical gong bath.”
Earlier this week, another Redditor shared a video of the freezers in all their aural glory, later earning a huge second audience when reposted to X. A debate ensued. Was it tuned to C# major? Could you hear the opening of Nothing Compares 2 U somewhere in the electronic hum? “I think it’s developed a slight discordant edge over the last couple of months,” one Reddit user wrote. “It’s ageing like fine wine.”

And now, of course, we also have a 10 hour ambience video on Youtube….

[via the guardian]

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“.

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]

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.

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.

 

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Un post condiviso da Valentina Tanni (@valentinatanni)

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“.

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]

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]

 

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 event 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?”