Internet Nuggets // Link Roundup #1
Below are a handful of neat things I found on the internet in the past few weeks. This particular batch covers art, video games, and music. Since it's my blog I get to share my interests. Those are the rules.
Enjoy!
Tiny Disclaimer (click to expand)
The bulk of these sites were found through the kagi smallweb explorer. This is a pretty flawed way of finding new sites (lots of sifting through AI hucksters) but otherwise I would never have found them.
GameScenes, Rä di Martino, Pascal Greco, Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel
I stumbled upon GameScenes.org and through it, the details of an interesting exhibition named Kodrok by Rä di Martino. Honestly, I think I like the concept for the exhibit more than the execution, though one of the larger images does succeed on the stated premise for me.
The project grows out of a research trip to Beirut and to Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon, where the artist photographed gaming rooms and nearby everyday interiors, informal gathering points marked by precarity, and by the social need to keep something going.
GameScenes also pointed me towards an interesting game art event in Switzerland I am too far and too late to attend. However! Through this event, I learned about the works of both Pascal Greco and Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel who screened films. I'm quite interested in both of their art, although much of their work isn't freely available. I hope to track it down eventually but I worry I'll forget. Either way, all of the art I could find (photos, trailers, clips, etc) was very cool.
GameScenes seems very interesting on its own too. I hope I can keep remembering to check in on it every once and a while to see what events are going on (especially ones with online components I can attend).
Laura Michet's Arcade Archival
In this post, Laura Michet explores a modern Dave and Busters and documents what the hell's even going on there these days. In particular, the Cyberpunk 2077 arcade game was a real oddity to learn about.
SISTRA
This blog suggested I listen to SISTRA's new single Double Edged Sword. Luckily enough, it was actually up my alley! I rooted around their other music, but this newest single was the most My Jam. It's a reminiscent, slow, dance pop song that gets my head bobbing (can you tell I'm not comfortable with describing music?). Fortunately, in the time since the original blog post and this one, SISTRA has released the song on YouTube for us non-streaming folks. I do wish they had some way to buy the song for keeps but c'est la vie.
BANG BANG by IVE
I'm really bad at it, but I try to pay attention to the world of k-pop music videos for moments like these. I do like k-pop! But a lot of it can be impenetrable as an outsider. I tend to stick to the names I recognize and let Youtube introduce me to any new songs. This time, it was IVE's newest song, BANG BANG.
I have heard of IVE before. I really liked their duo of singles After LIKE and LOVE DIVE, so I was curious to see what their newest song was like.
It's good! The music itself is an interesting power-pop/club mix that I'd be happy to add to a workout playlist. HOWEVER, more than just the song, the music video is just so visually stunning. The video is an unyielding barrage of incredibly well composed, interesting shots delivered direct to your eyes, lockstep with the overwhelming tempo of the music. It's such a treat.
Conclusion
I'm still trying to find my balance for blogging. It's possible this was too long and should've been split into individual posts, but I don't think I have enough to say about each topic to really warrant that. Realistically, all I have to add to these are "hey! look at this! it's cool!", hence the roundup format.
It would be nice if I could make this a habit. I'm trying to track these sorts of internet nuggets more since it feels nicer to document them rather than let them bounce off my attention/memory.
Either way, I hope you found something new and interesting! If you know of similar internet goodies that you think I would like, send them to me!
-Saul