𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑁𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑆𝑒𝑒 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐼𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑒𝑡

Against algorithms, feat. Onty & 'Ultra-Core Anxiety 2023'

Imagine you never get off the bus.

You visit a faraway city, see its monuments, a handful of sites, pass a few tourist shops, all from the upper deck of a tour bus. You never get off.

Afterwards, someone asks you how it was.

Fine, I guess?

But that’s life. The internet is the city we all live in, and algorithms mostly just give us a guided tour of the sites. The things we might like to see, gawk at, or buy. The choice is rarely ours. Despite seemingly limitless content, these intricate formulas base their presentations on a confined selection of data aligned with past preferences and behaviors. We get only a glimpse of the place.

Corecore is a movement of expression that defies that. Sometimes.

A genre characterised by an unpolished aesthetic, and what’s often a melancholy, sentimental tone. In its messy, mixed-media approach it draws from Dada, but it is defined by its normalcy: a presentation of reality that feels more raw and unfiltered than what you’re typically served on social media.

Ultra-Core Anxiety 2023 by Onty is an hour-long curation delivered in this spirit. There are shades of Adam Curtis in its passive eye, its elegant pairing of footage with soundtrack; undertones of Gaspar Noe in the strands of subtle dread. Every fragment suggests a narrative, a progression, that never happens. Like an anti-meme, it’s just for you, not for everyone. The catharsis never comes.

At a time when AI artists look to perfect fidelity to real footage, real footage is co-opted into an ultra-low-res dream. It’s simple, deliberate, 1:1… it never tries to elevate itself above its raw materials.

“Corecore” as a word is self-reflexive, a joke. It’s content that uses technology to show us how technology alienates us. Splices imagery on channels that usually make us feel shit, to let us know that we all feel a little like that. We have an endless vast internet that never quite connects us. We have language models that can funnel us infinite intelligence, except for the fact that, sometimes, they lie.

Every single day, we visit a city that we never really see.

The joke. It’s us.

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You can watch Ultra-Core Anxiety 2023 at Becoming Press here.

Go further:

Onty's essay on CoreCore

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