Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The Demon Barber of Peep Street

Best diorama of the day: "The Demon Barber of Peep Street."

Nice work from Patrick Colgan.

(via Oddee)

Chernobyl's scary graffiti art

Graffiti artists have done some spooky work in Chernobyl.  It's the faces, like this one:

Or this:

Scary art used to uncanny effect in describing real-life horror.

The first one is from The Big Picture, which also has an interesting, sometimes grim variety of other images in honor of the meltdown's anniversary.  The second is via English Russia; ditto.

Spam from the dead

The dead live on through digital afterlives, but none are as awful as posthumous spam.  This describes the uncanny experience of receiving junk email from a person you know to have died.

For example,

My father in law tragically passed away just about two years ago…and a few months ago I helped my mother in a law go through the process of having his account AOL closed down. Now he’s spamming people from his mail book and it’s causing, to say the least, some emotional distress. When my wife first told me about it I figured that she’d gotten a one in a trillion blast spam that used his account, but the TO: line had all people he knew, so someone, somehow has gotten this account back alive.

Blood scents for sale

The vampire craze continues with the launch of blood-themed perfume. That's a quartet of scents, each assigned to one blood type.

Or, as the site says:

A, B, AB and 0, retrace the evolution of manhood through time and its record of information, history and mutation, so well kept in the vital flushing of blood. [oh yes?]

BLOOD CONCEPT is a mystic ritual with no flowers to be found: deep as primeval Africa in 0‚ aromatic as the scent of familiar land in A, bold as unpredictable itineraries in B, bold and sharp as a metropolitan skyline in AB.

Ending each time with the same subtle and mysterious note: a metallic vague suspicion

All clear?

Naturally, vampires fans are interested:

Merticus, a 32-year-old Atlanta man who self-identifies as a vampire... [and a] founding member of the Atlanta Vampire Alliance and Vampire Community News, Merticus favors O-positive as his drink of choice.

(thanks to Jesse "Red" Walker)

Neck bomber, the comedy

The Erie collar bomber real-life Gothic story has its movie.  Weirdly, it's a comedy.  30 Minutes or Less fictionalizes the incident, as this summary has it:

Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) is a small town pizza delivery guy whose mundane life collides with the big plans of two wanna-be criminal masterminds (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson). The volatile duo kidnaps Nick and forces him to rob a bank. With mere hours to pull off the impossible task, Nick enlists the help of his ex-best friend, Chet (Aziz Ansari). As the clock ticks, the two must deal with the police, hired assassins, flamethrowers, and their own tumultuous relationship.

Erieblogs* has a NSFW trailer:

(thanks to Tanya)

*Erieblogs is one of the early community blogs, an important pioneer.

God speed you! black president

God speed you! black president is an eerie mashup combining two audio sources:

God Speed! You Black Emperor's post-rock classic, F# A# Infinity, and pitch-shifted clips from President Barack Obama reading his first memoir, Dreams from My Father

The results are brooding, sometimes surprising. 

Guy explains it all here.

More Facebook anxiety

Another week, another story about Facebook and privacy anxiety.  This time it's about a Minnesota man who used social hacks to coax users out of their private data.  He

contacted women online and duped them into providing him with personal information that allowed him to hack their Facebook and other accounts. After hacking a Facebook account, prosecutors say Noirjean would pose as the owner to make contact with that person's friends and try to gain access to more computer accounts.

What was the perp's motive?  One local attorney "said he doesn't know Noirjean's motive, but said it wasn't money."  which is nicely ominous.

How successful was he?

The criminal complaint said his computer contained 92 separate folders with photos of women, and 235 email addresses with what appeared to be the answers to security questions for those accounts.

The combination of con, sex, and self-fuelled growth is a fine one for generating fear.

(via Ed Webb's giant brain)

Why zombies now?

Why are zombie stories so popular now?  One commentator has an explanation based on current American culture, focusing on the Walking Dead tv series.

The show provides what some Americans feel, "a sense of disorientation, fear of the future and nostalgia for a long-gone past."

That sounds general enough, but Bowden is careful to draw some boundaries around it.  For one, "the interest here is no longer anti-consumerist digs or celebrating the destruction of the arrogant follies of mankind."  

For another, there's a modularity or adaptability to these anxieties, flowing between metaphor and culture:

[T]he strength of the television adaptation seems to lie in the infinite malleability of the zombie... Whether they act as a metaphor for the rise of China, the Tea Party-supporting public, the liberal elite waging war on homely American values or plain old guts-loving villains is really up to you...

That sense of nostalgia is a potent one.  The zombie story is now old, older still if we date it back to the 1930s.  Portraying a zombie is now an act of cooking up historical comfort food.

Facebook storytelling around a serial killer

A digital storytelling angle has morbidly appeared, as the new Long Island serial killer case develops. Some people are creating Facebook accounts for the deceased victims, giving them posthumous life stories.

Facebook pages have been created for all eight women, along with missing New Jersey native Shannan Gilbert.
The strangest connections are among the Atlantic City victims. All four profiles are "friends" with one another on Facebook. One of them, Molly Jean Dilts, is also friends with Amber Lynn Costello, a Long Island call girl who was found in a shallow grave on Gilgo Beach in December. The Costello profile's only friends are Dilts and a profile named "Jane Doee."

This follows the classic blog/Facebook digital storytelling form of character-based narration.

Sometimes there's only minimal work, like this one:

There's also a related form, extending the single-character model across others, a kind of extension and remix strategy:

Someone, or a group of someones, is taking creepy role-playing to the next level, though, by using their fake profiles to comment on a memorial page for another local murder victim, Anne Marie Fahey, who was killed by her lawyer lover in 1996. ...:

"we were all killed by the Capano's.""We are still waiting for justice. We were found in November 2006 in Mays Landing, NJ," the posting read.
Immediately beneath Dilts' comment, a blank Facebook profile with the name "Colleen Marie" said the following:
"They should also be looking at them in connection with 4 . . . girls found in Babylon NY. If something happens to me it is because I knew what they did back then and I know what did to you girls. I think I'm next."

It's like Lovely Bones, but more closely anchored to the real world.

There are other social media responses to the killings, including a rap video (described) and a blog.

(via Steven Burnett)

Hidden machine learning

Is there a subterranean current of machine learning R+D?  Here's a hint of that idea, from a good O'Reilly interview:

machine learning research mirrors the way cryptography research developed around the middle of the 20th century. Much of the cutting edge research was done in secret, and we're only finding out now, 40 or 50 years later, what GCHQ or the NSA was doing back then. I'm hopeful that it won't take quite that long for Amazon or Google to tell us what they're thinking about today.

This isn't inherently uncanny or disturbing, no more so than usual business pratices in a competitive environment.  But the combination of factors is intriguing, and could amount to some anxious stories: machine learning (fears of autonomous machines), secrecy (sometimes unsettling), hints of deep power (NSA example).

(via Ed Webb, I hope)