41: Little mucky gifts
On painting as feeling, this plotless life and groovy puppets
Hello,
My sister was murmerated a few weeks back. Tangled up in one giant bird organism. The starlings enveloped her as she flew on two wheels down a Devon lane. She paid the price, emerging from the experience covered in their mucky white gifts, like little Pollock splats.
Let’s play
First, this colour/memory game. Neat and nicely executed. Our household best was 9.96 on one colour, 44-ish out of 50.
Fun London thing, March 20 - April 18. ARCADE is at Hypha Studios, Euston Tower, as part of London Games Week. A month-long exhibition of interactive artworks, experimental film, sculptural simulations, speculative video games, browser-based open worlds and surreal tabletop role-play.
Rock Paper Scissors #1. I like these two twists on the classic mechanic. First, as a warm up for big groups: each loser in various one-on-one matches becomes a cheerleader for the winner, until it’s one giant group against another, each fronted by a single player. Satisfyingly dramatic and high energy.
Rock Paper Scissors #2. Secondly, as a group decision-making moment. Everyone holds a hand up: Rock = Rock solid. Paper = Good but needs some editing. Scissors = Cut it.
New balls, please. The campaign to remove London’s “No Ball Games” signs launched last year and this trailer is nice. If only every act of playful defiance resulted in such warm #feels.
Some “culture” bits
“Life is largely plotless.” Steven King on writing situations, not plots (via Stratscraps).
“Painting is but another word for feeling,” said Constable. I loved seeing the Turner, Constable and Rembrandt shows in one weekend back in 2015. This year, the cycle started again with Turner vs Constable at Tate Britain (now finished, soz). I always thought I preferred Turner, but it was nice leaving with a more balanced appreciation of their astonishing craft. These sound recordings take you to Constable’s stomping grounds.
The Invisible Director. “Cause a little organised chaos” is music to my ears. These are audio-led shows, much like Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemobs.
Look for god’s sake it’s a puppet playing groovy choons
Campfire by SHIMO. An ancient tradition updated for the “immersive” era. Scant details, but I suspect it’s storytelling plus AI (sorry).
Another newsletter, another Moment Factory link. Futuroscope (the French multimedia version of the Exploratorium, near Poitiers) is impressive for staying afloat so long in choppy entertainment-venue waters. Here they tackle the notorious challenge of encouraging strangers to collaborate. It appears to lack the meaningful depth that might drive repeat visits, instead prioritising Insta-glamour visuals, but such is the world we live in.
Meat sacks
With his “Enshitification” world tour now complete, Cory Doctorow picks a new target:
“AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”
His Reverse Centaur concept describes how we, human meat sacks, are destined to become enslaved by the machine, i.e. doomscrolling to pay Meta or bug-fixing janky code churned out by the beast.
Body Proxy by Tender Claws is the perfect pairing: artists doing what they do best and skewering modern life. The show won this year’s XR Jury Award at SXSW (another of their projects won the XR Audience Award last year). There is some detail here on what the experience entails. This review describes how it—
“…explores a more dystopian future which might be described as humans-as-a-service. Body Proxy presents a scenario in which humans are reduced to purely physical labor, and controlled by their AI masters.”
Right well I’m sorry. Another pairing. This failed experiment to have an AI agent run the vending machine made me laugh! From the Child’s Play article by Sam Kriss, a sweetly sad portrait of San Francisco tech bros.
“By the end of the experiment, it was emailing the building’s security guards, telling them they could find it standing by the vending machine wearing a blue blazer and a red tie.”
Small things
How much energy is it? Briefly useful and playing to the “What’s Worse?” conversation lots of us have in our heads. Things like: should I buy new (more efficient) or plough on with the old (less waste).
FFS Apple. Great takedown of the icon clusterf*** in Tahoe, the new Mac OS.
Hello, world
DropDeadGenerous. Good name. Kinda like The Boring Fund (small monies for boring stuff) or ARTCRY (fast, small grants) but bigger: $500 added to the pot for every 25 social media shares, up to $500,000. UK-based, despite the dollar signs.
Deviance is on the decline, no doubt in part because it is intentionally being made harder to function on the fringes. Relatedly, Resist and Unsubscribe is tracking the impact of collectively ditching platforms like Google and OpenAI.
Everything kept coming back to food whilst shooting season one of The Landing Films. It figures, given the projects are all land-based businesses, but there’s no harm saying it out loud. Nicole Negawetti does it succinctly on Planet Critical:
“Food is the most intimate way we can express our relationship with Earth.”
The Landing Films are at sound mastering stage and launching soon! Five films about the little places with big ideas. Subscribe on YouTube to catch the premiere!
2026 is tearing along. Devastating in places, but dappled with light if you choose where to point your eyes and your attention.
What’s happening in your world?
B.
PS - This little webapp from Alex helps you quickly make one-page, foldable zines. Fun activity for kids, big and small.
