#24. No-Clipping Out of Reality
This week: Into the Backroom of the internet // Digital drag, the architecture of the metaverse and Dune's take on AI // Neuralink and the allure of brain computer interfaces // WAC Weekly and more ..
Hi everyone. Week 24! The double dozen!
This is going to be a transitional week. I’ve hit upon a vein of digital creativity I’m really excited about, and which I need to spend a lot more time exploring.
I’m calling this the “Backrooms of the Internet” - an authentically digital form of storytelling emerging out of gaming, YouTube filmmaking and some of the internet’s dark edges.
It will be a theme over coming weeks. And so today’s really an introduction.
This will be the last Creative R&D for a couple of weeks. I’m off on holiday. Just me, the family, an open bar and weird stuff on YouTube.
For today… let’s go.
ART! // The Backrooms of the Internet
Seven months of writing “Creative R&D” has changed my content habits, a lot.
Going out looking for the sharp edges of new creativity changes your relationship to the internet’s many algorithms. Content comes to me that I really doubt i’d have seen before - on art, on film, on tech, on games.
But this week I feel like I’ve broken into a different version of the internet, and found a whole universe of new rabbit holes to explore.
I’m going to call this the “Backrooms of the Internet”, and it’s a theme we’ll delve into more over the coming months.
It’s an exciting but challenging point where gaming and film-making connect directly with digital culture’s weirder sides - the collective creativity that starts out on Creepypasta stories, 4Chan boards and Reddit threads, brews in Wikis and explodes into YouTube videos and Instagram memes.
It’s a space I knew was there but I’m only just starting to figure out and it’s where a lot of the authentic creativity of the internet happens.
But it started by stumbling on VirtualCarbon, a YouTube filmmaker.
I was going to write today about Indie games, an area where there’s huge creative and technical innovation but very little mainstream visibility of what’s happening.
I’d been watching his beautiful film about indie games set in dying worlds, an exploration of a series of games I’d never heard of but which shared a sense of disquiet in their world-building.
The film is excellent, moving through abandoned spaces appearing out of darkness. It has a beautiful ambience and a strong soporific vibe.
From here I watched his film on indie game creator Yames, whose work is a highly distinct Lovecraft-ish horror, wyrd lore and alternative histories.
But looking at VirtualCarbon’s YouTube channel I made a left turn and ended up somewhere very different.
Whilst his recent videos are about video games, his earlier films take the visual language of late 80s and 90s video gaming - blocky, digitised, low-res - and tell stories at the cusp of conspiracy theories.
This was a kind of revelation, and an entry point into a totally different space.
This video was the red pill.
The first half hour is a telling of a story that’s had mainstream media coverage called the Ammanford Mystery. A Welsh couple, living above abandoned mines in a small Carmarthenshire town called Ammanford, start hearing screams at night. They try to track them down and recording the sounds and become convinced that the sounds are coming from the mines.
It’s a good story.
But it’s the way VirtualCarbon tells it that I found amazing.
He re-situates the story in an aesthetic world that sits exactly at the intersection of VHS and early digital found footage horror films and early 3d gaming like Doom, Myst, Silent Hill and more.
Processing archive photos and video clips, blocky computer graphics and the kind of looping ambient soundtracks familiar from both it’s a deeply coherent and convincing aesthetic universe.
And it’s when I realised this wasn’t a unique style to VirtualCarbon, but represented a whole new world of content that I got very excited.
There’s a whole well of this material, and I’m diving down to it.
We’re going to come back to it over the coming issues, but there’s something novel and a unique outcrop of internet culture happening here.
We’ll find it in the Backroom and the Deanverse. It will take us onto Creepypasta and Worlds.com.
And I feel like it’s just the start of really getting to grips with how tomorrow’s creativity emerges out of digital communities and cultures. And how these stories influence the real world in a disturbing way mainstream culture doesn’t really know how to do.
For this week i’ll leave you with this dive into an abandoned virtual world.
But there’s much more to come here.
Keep watching.
Your must-do in Web 3 // WAC Weekly
I’m totally delighted to have WAC Weekly as newsletter partners.
WAC Weekly is THE best place to keep up with what’s going on as Web 3 meets the Art ecosystem. A weekly call every Wednesday at 6 CET, it has an amazing revolving cast of speakers and projects.
It’s run by old friend and major maven, Diane Drubay. Register now - this season has a couple more months to run.
And look out for some exclusive content I’m making for Diane and WAC Labs over the coming weeks.
IDEAS! // What to do, read and see in Creative R&D
What’s happening in creativity and tech in the run up to Easter?
This piece on the way digital tech has effected drag performance is a good read. From the simple (access to info on where drag clubs are) to the drag performers like Petty Nonsense turning their bodies into beautiful technology hybrids
No, since you asked, I haven’t got to see Dune 2 yet. Yeesh, I only just watched 2/3rds of Oppenheimer and 1/3rd of Killers of the Flower Moon. But whilst it’s the film on everyone’s lips, it’s worth taking in Dune author Frank Herbert’s subtle take on AI
Architecture site ArchDaily has published this very long, very thoughtful and very good multi-part “Architecture of the Metaverse” essay series. This covers some serious ground - the intellectual framing and references to architectural history are really good.
- is quickly turning into a must read on the games industry. This dive into how a mobile game version of Monopoly has turned $2billion in cash revenues is eye-opening and brain-bending. Serious money.
Last up this week, another front in the AI vs IP wars. Jammable is a start-up which creates AI-powered voiceovers in the style of celebs and famous singers. From Homer Simpson to Angela Merkel it does pretty neat takes. But when it crossed into music. the music industry hit back. The Times tells the story of the BPI - the trade body for UK music - threatening to sue for songs made in the cyber-voice of Amy Winehouse. There’s a lot more of this to come, but guys, collaboration and experimentation is a better look than litigation.
TECHNOLOGY!! // Use the Force, Elon
I am not an Elon fan. Tesla’s are ugly and Space X is privatisation of a public good.
But, but, but.
This video from Neuralink, with a guy moving a digital chess piece using just “the Force”, or more practically, a brain computer interface (BCIs), is exciting.
Clearly, we have a long way to go for this to be anywhere near mass adoption, which gives us time to think about both the possibilities and the mammoth risks.
I’m not sure why.I like BCIs so much.
No doubt in part it’s to do with long conversations with my friend Ali Hossaini, who’s part of the IEEE standards group sweating on the principles and ethics of BCIs.
Or the brilliant residency he led at National Gallery X, Groupthink, which played with some of the potential for a collective “internet of neurons”:
I think in part it’s for the same reasons that I’m so intrigued by the new wave of AI devices that point towards a post-smartphone world. Smartphones have been so corrosive of our social domain over the last 15 years and I desperately want to get past them - even though plugging our brains straight into the internet undoubtedly comes with even more risks.
But it’s in part also because there’s a hopefulness you can attach to a technology that’s barely happened yet which is very different from the shock, disappointment or just plain boredom that mature technologies often cause.
It’s likely 10 years until we get to real consumer device BCIs. So we can still hope.
Until then: keep thinking 🤔