Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer lost their charms half a century ago. In turn, the internet has allowed for human interaction on demand, 24/7 discussion and companionship, no one is ever truly lonely. The world population thinks they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream lives. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.

The latest technological developments would make possible the individual's unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. We can view stars and the rain from under a glass ceiling. We can move the mobile home to catch the sun. And we can ignore the disagreeable people and embrace the ones we like with friend's lists, Twitter subscriptions, blocking trolls on forums, and deleting unwanted comments. We have changed cosmis reality to self-censored reality.

Here are eight random Youtube videos

#1

IMG 2092 (via ReneeSaavedra)

Two girls give shout-outs to former classmen for eighteen minutes. They seem pretty young, the age given by Youtube says fifteen. One of them mentions graduation, but they couldn't mean high school graduation. Elementary graduation? Jr. high graduation? Did they move sometime after one of these graduations, or did their group of friends scatter so much that an eighteen-minute video is needed to list them all?

Whatever the logistics, this is an attempt to reconnect with those people. What's really interesting is that they never refer to anyone by their given names, instead calling them by their screen names. Looking at this girl's channel, these are most likely their Twitter names, they've done a handful of "Twitter Shoutout" videos before this. What is the value of such a name? On the one hand, the name given to you by your parents is the name recognized by law and pretty much anyone you'll interact with in the real world. On the other hand, a screen name is a personal identity, something completely constructed by that person's desires. In the real world, I am Daniel Gardner, that is the identity chosen for me, but on the internet, I choose to be Greg Stevens, that is the identity I have chosen for myself.

There is an often unspoken value given to screen names, even those like GitRDun94.

#2 (WARNING: GRAPHIC)

IMG 2092 (via stormynyghts1)

Students identify arteries on a dissected cat. David Lynch is quoted for loving natural phenomenon, and while working on his first film, Eraserhead, he called a veterinarian and asked if by chance he had a dead cat that Lynch could examine. The vet agreed to give him a recently put-down cat on the grounds that it never be used in the film. Lynch proceeded to perform an autopsy on it.

"It was unbelievable," Lynch said. "If you've ever seen Fellini's Roma... the organs inside the cat were brilliant colors, and as soon as the air got to the organs, the colors just started draining out right before your eyes... Just like when they opened up these things under the city, and these ancient things were perfect, and then the air starts getting to them and they start fading."

Air can be seen as a reminder of mortality. We need air to breath. When we stop breathing, we die. Air oxidates metals, it allows for rot, it seeps the colors away from paintings and breaks down statues. It is directly connects to entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. All beautiful things, even the magnificently evolved organic systems of a cat, drain away.

#3

IMG 2092 (via e3systechi)

A man uses a piece of paper to create wind to blow three tennis balls into a circle drawn on the floor. This seems to be a game of some sort, though what exactly the competition is is unclear. He does not seem to be competing with someone, nor does he seem to be in a rush, so he's not trying to get the best time in something nor does he have a deadline. He is merely manipulating tennis balls by fanning them with paper.

This is almost perfect followup video to a discussion on air as a symbol for entropy, and this seems to link it even further into the concept of chaos theory, the study of behavior in dynamic systems. It should seem very simple to wave a ball in a certain direction (it is obviously not a deterministic system, but it's a decent metaphor for one), but each wave of the man's hand is at a fractionally different speed and position then any other, and the balls seem to scatter in unpredictable directions, what should be a simple system breaking down before our eyes.

Alternate entry: Indians are taking away our tennis ball fanning jobs too!

#4

IMG 2092 (via chokingslowly)

Two college frat kids simulate gay sex. It's not just one guy play-humping another guy, the another guy has his pants down and his ass sticking out in the air. They broke out a cell phone and recorded this for the internet. These people are completely committed the joke of gay sex. And it's stupid, but it doesn't seem like there's any intended hatred in their actions.

I could be wrong, they could be homophobic shitheads, but the mere act of aping anal sex is not in itself hateful towards homosexuals. For straight males, the concept of two men making love is a very foreign concept, and it is easy to find humor in things that are removed from. This act of bare-bottom humping comes from the same place as when we do funny foreign accents or intentionally garble hard-to-pronounce words. It doesn't come from hate for these things, it simply comes from a lack of proper understanding.

What I'm saying is, I don't feel nothing wrong with a little bump and grind.

#5

IMG 2092 (via bk3breathless)

Asian students are walking and talking into a cell phone camera. Of course, without context and an inability to understand the language, the narrative of the video shifts almost violently with ever piece of new information. Their location remains unexplained, it looks like some kind of warehouse, but why would these kids be there? They don't appear to be employees? Then about two minutes in, we discover there's an American girl named Kayla following them. Is she a foreign exchange student, and they're picking her up in a low-end airport? They don't seem to really care that she's there, she's forgotten almost as soon as she's introduced.

Then they run into another American girl, who mentions Cedar Point, a theme park in Ohio. Wait, are the ASIAN kids foreign exchange students? Did their families move here? How are these four related to each other? The main guy working the camera seems like a bit of a ladies man, wrapping his arm around the cute short-haired girl with the glasses, the girl in the blue jacket, and this new American girl, calling her very cute. You go, kid with braces! I will never understand the context of your existence, but still, you go!

#6

IMG 2092 (via ryanleonhardt)

A man films a portion of his baseball card collection with intent to sell it. I'll admit, I never could understand the interest in baseball cards, as by the time I had my own source of disposable income, I didn't NEED baseball cards. The main technical function of baseball cards is to index and summarize players of the game, they are flashy cataloging tools. While my interest in baseball has gone up and down over the last twenty years, even if I was a huge fanatic of the sport, by the time I COULD buy baseball cards on my own, I had easy access to the internet, where I could pictures and up-to-date batting averages at any time.

This was also when the idea of "baseball cards as investment" was dying, so there was no value in it. At least when Pokemon cards lost their value, you could still play a game with them. However, it didn't occur to me the more retroactive function of baseball cards, that of time capsules. They are not just pictures of a certain player at a certain time, they are the mathematical values of that player at that certain time, nostalgia through math. One can measure the seasons on how many runs Jose Canseco had at any given time. It has more then just proof of physical presence, it's an artifact that provides scientific proof of one's existence, and the existence of baseball bats with "fuck face" written on them.

#7

IMG 2092 (via chrisandsierra2008)

Karaoke in a bar. In 2009, artist Andy Thomson created an art piece called "Karaoke Theory" that was displayed in the Light Projects exhibition building in Victoria, Australia. There were two main components to the piece. First, a film projection of an old floor fan, projected onto a false wall from which a real fan blows airs. Second, a sound loop of a person singing (almost moaning) what appears to be an annoyingly pretentious lyric. The sung lyric is in fact phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s treatise on the visible and the invisible, a key philosophical text that interrogates theories of visuality and cognition. Thomson deliberately butchers the recitation of this text by having a tone-deaf singer warble their way through it. He does this, not because of a compulsion to parody its content or lampoon French structuralism, but because he wants to critically examine the space between content and its mechanism of communication. AKA, karaoke.

By actively hindering an elision of form and contest, the artist sought to create what he described in conversation as "a tissue of disemblances," a collapse of reality whereby two fields of perception collide. This space of uncertainty is a challenge the fixity of "the real." It is a challenge not only of what we know, but how we come to know it.

#8

IMG 2092 (via CecileRuheMusic)

Nice hat.