Tag: nightmare

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Islid lets you enter that curious half-asleep state while fully awake

Unnatural shapes, swirling colors, inexplicable lights, droning music, and a world that is constantly changing in texture and size: welcome to the hypnagogic state. You’ve been here before, probably. And, if I can let you in on a secret, I’m just about there right now. It may sound ridiculous, but everyone you have ever known has been there: even your grandmother, and hell, even your dog. That’s because, while it sounds like something your one uncle who’s really into the Grateful Dead might try to induce on the weekend for kicks, a hypnagogic state is actually just the feeling that takes over right…
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Manipulate shapeshifting hell in Mason Lindroth’s latest game

Mason Lindroth’s animations exist somewhere between the realm of a hellish nightmare, surreal art, and collages. It’s all those things, and also none of them. Lindroth’s repeated animated aesthetic is wholly unique—there’s nothing else like it (and in fact, he even hand-sculpts some objects from clay). And that’s why when he does something as “trivial” as VA DA, a new “animation/drawing program,” it still resonates. It’s wild and bizarre, like so many of his other works before it. A distorted conglomerate of gif-able lo-fi clipart VA DA, as described above, is a simple “drawing” program. You control a space with…
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Welcome to the terrifying virtual world of nightmare jazz

The intersection of jazz and grotesque virtual people needn’t exist. But it does—it’s too late to stop it now. The two distant subjects don’t meet anywhere else (to my knowledge) except on Swedish jazz student Simon Fransen’s YouTube channel. He has brought them together through common interest to a creative place of his own making that he says is “dedicated to jazz where nothing and everything makes sense!”  made to produce music out of pulling their bodies apart  What his “Jam of the Week” series entails is videos of (mostly) classic jazz songs rigidly recreated with sketchy and often sped-up electronic…
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Now we can all participate in the kitschy nightmares of Sonic fan art

Sonic is a gross island. His fans sit atop his belly and cast lines out into the vast pools of the internet, reeling in fetishes you’ve never heard of. The result is Sonic fan art: trashy Microsoft Paint sketches, dodgy amateur photoshops, and more creepy porn cross-overs than should ever be possible. There’s so much Sonic fan art that an internet pastime is typing your first name into Google Images followed by “the hedgehog,” and seeing yourself transformed into the ghastly Sonicverse. (It works because fans have created an unfathomable number of Sonic variants with alternative names—almost all names, it…