#02 – The superinternet.world as is
The Marsèll Paradise Party Aftermath
The publication represents the current state of the superinternet.world as of Feb. 29, 2024, drawn to date by 72 artists and designers.
Animationseries2000, Anna Magni, Anny Peng, Chiole, Christopher Bonk, CIANG, Cinzia Zenocchini, Clelia, Clusterduck, Daniel von Bothmer, DEARVITTO, Dinamo, Dissenso Cognitivo, Fat Gomez, Federico Floriani, Francesca Albergo, Gabriele Calvi, Ginevra Boni, Gio Pastori, Giulia Lineette, Giuliano Buttafuoco, Holly Heuser, Joe Tuggle Lacina, Judy Rhum, Karol Sudolski, la cessa, Lamby, LaTigre, Leonardo Romano, Lil Peeolo, Luca Napoli, Marco Lastrada, Maria Chiara Moro, Martin Lacko, Martina Sarritzu, Massimiliano Vitti, MissGoffetown, Moriz Oberberger, Nick Öhlo, Nicola Campri, Noemi Vola, Nomaebravo, omermosseri, Paolo Gentili, Pietro Mazza, Pommo, Restlessh0urs, Robin Vehrs, Shut Up Claudia, Simone, Socially Awkward, Solomostry, Squizzy P, Stay Stoned, steaci, Steiner & Wolińska, Studio Tonnato, suzsenne, Víctor Arce (lxtxcx), Woc, x_x, Xiaotong Liang, XSO, Yunbomu, Zipeng Zhu.
The Superinternet Foundation, composed of Silvia Dal Dosso, Gabriele Donini, Pablo Galbusera, Pietro Parisi, Stefano Redaelli, and Giacomo Scandolara, warmly thanks all those who have suffered trauma and found some healing while in their rooms.
How did you feel while you were painting in the room in one sentence?
“While I was drawing the room I felt like I was in free-fall like Alice down the well”
Holly Houser
“Charmingly trapped. it was like colouring while being drunk <3”
Alex Valentina
“I felt myself in the flow”
Domenico Carnimeo
“As in a worldbuilding experiment if MSpaint was our only means to survive”
Clusterduck
“As i was drowning in a drone epileptic dream”
Dissenso Cognitivo
“Painting the room felt not at all like trying to start painting on a white piece of paper. It felt joyfully playful and liberating, probably also because there was no eraser. It became addictive to hang out there, like playing a good computer game and creating it at the same time. There were also moments when it felt like being observed while playing a secret game, haha.”
Animationseries2000
“When I started thinking about the superinternet.world room, I knew I had few tools at my disposal. But not so few! Which completely displaced me... But at the same time I felt amused and challenged. Participating in this was a dose of happiness in these dark times. As a lover of the analog world, I would never think I would say it, but instead I say it: long live the internet!”
Luigi Piccolo
“Dizzy. As the drawing cursor is always at the center of the screen, unlike in a painting software, but much like in a FPS game. It's like with each paint stroke you are forced to jerk your head and I did paint a lot and very fast, so there were severe headaches. No regrets tho :)”
Martin Lacko
In this strange world, receiving a room is a shock for many. The room appears entirely empty, with six white walls and four doors on each side. Only one brush is available, in the form of a silly square. The first unsettling realization, especially for illustrators, occurs when they find out that it is not the brush that is moving, but the room itself. Some walls are easier to draw on, while the floor and ceiling are nearly impossible due to the room’s spinning motion, the Cartesian circumfluctuation of the cube. This detail makes it impossible to use graphic tablets or any sort of touchscreen. The poor drawing person is forced by the interface to paint with a mouse, from the desktop.
If the frustration is not enough, here comes the offensive approach to the color palette. The colors are saturated, plain, ugly. They are even fewer than those available on MS Paint. The drawing person accidentally draws a line on a small misshapen drawing which she had managed with extreme difficulty to make, resizing the brush, sweating, calculating pixels, hesitantly moving that mess of a room. And that's where the difficulty turns into trauma. There is no control Z. The only way back will be to reconstruct that ugly and deformed drawing with manual restoration.
Here, however, something clicks, a new but also very old emotion. The drawing person goes back to childhood, and with joy, reading the sparse instructions on the interface, discovers that she can use a color picker. But then – she says to herself – my life doesn't suck so much. And from here, it's all downhill. The drawing person realizes that the interface offers the possibility of choosing from the entire existing color spectrum, even writing HEX on a tab. What a fool, how could she not see that before? No one now in that room would ever dare trouble her!
The drawing person likes to stay inside a cube. She begins to play with perspective, builds some trompe l'oeil, realizes that every pixel of color can be arranged in an exactly geometric way, becomes obsessed, decides to fight the centrifugal motion of the room with pointillism, realizes that once the room is made it will be visited by who knows who and when, and so she turns it into a time capsule, writes messages for the future, or prepares traps, many doors, many corridors, or even—as in the case of one of the 72 rooms currently painted and printed in this book—create a little man who can shit on your head.
The current state of the superinternet.world is the evolution of a project from the old web, known as superinternet.space, which initially consisted of a single room that was drawable in multiplayer and is as of today still accessible online. It originated from the feedback and actual need of many drawing people and regular .space users who desired a private space for their own. A room protected from those trolls who could randomly delete everything in a few clicks, with their abnormal enlarged silly brush. A small room, a little corner away from the horrible chaos that the social web had become, an ugly and poor digital sistine chapel of the soul, that if you spend a lot of time in it, can become beautiful and very complicated.
From that point onward—and once technology made it possible—the idea of creating an ever-expanding world inhabited and built by artists and drawing people from all over the World emerged. The .world exists to remind us that the platforms in which we find ourselves spending many hours of our lives, are not our only chance for sociality, and that immersiveness does not depend on the power of one's graphics card, but on emotional involvement.
The .world is, at the end of it all, a small experiment in favor of love.
Quando sei qui con me
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