Computer desktop performance art
Chia Amisola’s thoughts on the internet
What’s the last project you saw that made you think “dang, I wish I’d thought of that?” (sounds rhetorical, but I’d love for you to send me yours). For me, it’s Sharing Screen, the Living Web Institute’s series of Zoom calls with internet artists, where they explore their own work via screenshare. This week’s was with Chia Amisola.
I really connect with Amisola’s work – not just because of the amount of clouds and window tabs involved in it, though that’s clearly an aesthetic I’m into, but because of the unusual tempo of it.
They create performance art via computer desktops, and there’s often a level of friction built in. Their piece Cloudwatching is only available during the day; Stargazing, only at night; and their work If You Knew Me Would You Love Me, can only be accessed by giving the right answer to a yes-or-no question (try putting in “maybe”).
“Everything is about capturing people’s attention, but what if you made work that is spread out, fragmented everywhere?” they said of their thought process on the call. “I’m thinking of the internet as a space, rather than this ambient, ubiquitous thing that is everywhere, enveloping, demanding our attention all at once.”
I could fill this whole newsletter up with tabs of their work, but I’ll let you explore that on your own – below are some other treats that have been slowing down my computer this week:
The Mubi method
Efe Çakarel, founder of the arthouse cinema streaming platform, explains his curation approach
GenAI’s social side
Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology dissect how chatbots can be used to facilitate human-to-human connections
Art and code
You can watch seven creative technologists present their work on this stream of New Inc’s Demo event from last week, (it starts at 3:48), you’re welcome
Reaching out, circling back
This communal online experience (best done on mobile) just asks you to swipe lines across the screen, but you’ll also see the touches of past visitors – it’s weirdly kinetic
A new AI voice
Play around with the dev demo for OpenAI’s text-to-speech model
Choosing to walk
I read some lovely writing advice on Rayne Fisher Quann’s Substack from earlier this year, she compares writing to walking: “When you choose to walk, you choose not to pursue immediate gratification or even comfort but simply to expand the number of things that might happen to you.” But makes some great points about outsourcing writing to AI
Brainrot as art
Similar to our piece on controllism, Günseli Yalcinkaya argues that brainrot has roots in Dadaism
