My sense is that it will be difficult to succinctly explain what motivates this project. part of this is because the machinations are protean and ever shifting. The highest level view of the project is to say that motivating ideas include the role data centers play in mediating lives in the 2010s - 2020s, the role technologyt plays in accessing and producing history, the role change in technology facilitates change in ability to engage with the world (if at all), the way digital artifacting effects mnemonic space, the quality of music i've been referring to as crushing, the ways aural and visual distortion can function as soothing mechanisms, the warping (or non warping) role short form content playsdin mediating peoples lives, the way i've changed as a spectator throughout my life, a desire to reflect on forgotten memories in an expressly estranging manner. a sense of dissociation from place and time (related in parts to queerneess -- to queering), the subjugating role of the camera , the way the camera extends projects of coloniality et cetera. and other stuff thats probably escaping me right now
That it may be difficult to explicate satisfyingly does not mean I shouldn't try to speak on anything, though. I want to explain a little bit about where these videos come from. The footage is, more or less, all the video files I had stored in my Google Photos account dating back to I think around 2015 or 2014. This is where the title for each video comes from. The titles are essentially just the titles of the original video files. I say essentially because several of the videos have footage from multiple files. In cases like these where the footage all comes from the same day of shooting, I just used the title of the first video in the sequence. Titles that have an ellipses are when there is a significant time gap between the various material included in the video. This happens because I tried organizing the footage by style, color, et cetera, so sometimes there would be similarly styled videos from years apart from another (or there would be videos vastly different in style all filmed in close proximity to another; so I couldn't just clump by nearness).
Of the videos I've made so far, this series is definitely the most experimental -- in the literal sense -- thing I've done. I had used color correction a little bit in the Film Production classes I took in college (and for the videos I had done previous to this), but I never really got into the mud with it and tried to see how far I could take things. It's in this way, that I used this project as an excuse to experiment with what could be done. Sometimes this meant experimenting with matching visuals to a song (perhaps informed by the music video or album art associated with that song; perhaps informed by the vibes i got from the song). Sometimes this meant matching the visuals to other visual segments in the sequence (several of the videos are in aquariums, for example; but not all the aquarium lighting was the same; some of the tanks I guess had harsh blue lighting, so I tried to match that in one of my videos). Sometimes this meant having an idea for a visual and finding a song and video that would work to realize it (sometimes this meant taking several passes at a very similar idea). While for still others, this meant just clicking buttons and seeing what happens and repeating that process until I got something at least somewhat visually interesting. There were probably some flops in the process. What can you do :shrug: (oh, also, at some point in the time i was working on these, i got my hands on some LUTs, so i played around with those as well)
The last thing I'll speak on for the time being is where the music came from. The complicated answer is: that depends, it sort of evolved over time. But to provide a more satisfying answer, here are a couple of the sources I leaned upon: ... initially-initially, I was just using a lot of music from this bandcamp page: https://hrtbleed.bandcamp.com/music (the page has super inconsistent branding, so idk what to call it). I found the album emotional ambience by unsorted through a random furry music reviewer that popped up on my home page. I didn't watch the review, but it seemed like the person was saying that the album was interesting (anyways, he made a video about it), so i was like, cool, i'll check it out. I liked it a bit and had access to some amount of liquid cash at that point, so I went and bought the full discography from the bandcamp page. I think I've listened to all of the albums and songs by this point. Some of them stuck with me more than others. I especially liked the music by BLENDERG0R3 and ANGELGUTX. It was super bassy to the point where I internally labeled it as "crushing" music.
This same bandcamp page also led me to the next patches of music I went on to incorporate into my videos. Since I liked its music, I checked out the page's [recommended other music tab]. This is where I discovered Gemini workshops, Bape Fiends, and Gynx. I didn't latch on to Gynx's stuff right away, but I was instantly sold on Bape Fiends and Gemini Workshops. I bought Gemini Workshops' full discography and I bought Bape Fiends II and listened to them a bunch. Once again, both projects had bassy elements that tickled my brain in a particularly pleasing way. As such, I added them to the growing list of "crushing" music. Useful prehistory for the development of this internal label is that by this point I had already been listening to Black Dresses, Girls Rituals, and ADA ROOK's stuff a bunch a bunch. Trying to explain why I got so deep into this music to a friend, I once explained that I found it very soothing in a stimmy kind of way. The release of ADA ROOK's album "UNKILLABLE ANGEL" in January 2025 was one of the final things to make me say, okay, yeah, there is definitely something here, let me try to tease this out and piece together some of my thoughts on this stuff. This is when the label "crushing" emerged. To make the idea more legible, I created a playlist of some of the songs that I found the most stimulating in their distortiony bassy "crushing"-ness. (I don't know where the name "crushing" came from necessarily; part of it is because it feels like I'm being crushed when I listen to this stuff -- in a way where that's what I want; where it's like, please, I need to be crushed by a hydraulic press, my body won't work correct otherwise; looking to the past and the future, I find more and more that the label seems apt as variations of it keep/kept popping up in song or album titles for works that I feel fall into the category that I was trying to contour an image of -- e.g., "hand crushed by a mallet" by 100 Gecs from album 1000 Gecs, "crushed" by transgender lain clones from album recovering ancient artifacts from internet friendships).
bandcamp friday, rinse and repeat, and beyond
under construction 👷♀️
To learn more HTML/CSS, check out these tutorials!