Do Not Research is now accepting submissions for the next issue. In the meantime, we’re making some changes to our site.

THE MANIC AMERICAN
HUMANIST SHOW
Public Works Administration
March 10th - March 26th

Using the language of consumer culture

Imag(in)ing Digital Wilderness

‘Influencers,’ ‘content creators,’ ‘bloggers,’ ‘vloggers’ and ‘posters,’ drive traffic to social media platforms. The majority of producers are not compensated by the platforms that profit from their labour.

Religion is on the rise in the ‘cool’ places of the internet.

(Multi-User Shared Hallucination) is a term derived from the field of online text-based role-playing games.

Transcript from the DNR film program (03/16/22).

A site-specific exhibition organized by Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe with Boo-Hooray.

Transcript from the DNR film program (09/22/22).

Without the political possibility of yesterday, counterculture has suffered. This is a transcript of a talk presented at Unsound 2022 -- a survey of a decade of Post Internet Art.

The goal of Austin Police Department Decruitment Initiative is simple: we aim to convince members for the Austin Police Department to quit their jobs, and to discourage new recruits from joining.

A radio play exploring online identity and community formation through a collection of short stories, testimonies, and autofictions.

Behind the Slides: Jak Ritger reflects meme analysis after his presentation at Unsound 2022 and shares his research materials.

The visceral build of femcel z-dolls online activity in order to bypass the gaping void of our ruling socio-economic superstructure and its triggered transgressive irl urges.

A series of corporate guidelines leaked to the artists during their investigation into online content moderation.

How Zyzz, TikTok and the Pandemic led to the creation of the SARM Goblin.

TIME is a body of work consisting of 27 pen plotter prints on the page spreads of old issues of Time magazine from the waning years of the 20th century, spanning from 1979 to just after 9/11.

In November 2011, after an over 12 year long killing spree, the existence of Neo-Nazi terror cell NSU (Nationalist Socialist Underground) was first reported on by German mainstream media.

Interactive installation exhibited in the basement of a local off-space gallery consisting of a CD rack with 77 conspiracy theories, displayed on 77 different pieces of foam board that together form an iceberg shape, 77 plexiglass arrows, and 77 web pages linking to conspiracy theories. Based on The Chart of Truth meme.

We are artists who have been contracted to contribute work on the future of museums.

A pregnant woman goes out shopping for clementines, only to find the world changed in an unpleasant way.

Everyday Carry (EDC) is a collection of useful items that are consistently carried on person every day.

A newsletter written by Bradley (cousin from Missouri).

To the user who tried to interact with this from Lagos Nigeria, I’m sorry I tapped “This wasn’t me”.

Shoutout all the posters.

A body of work centered around the visual latent space of the Feels Guy, aka Wojak.

Backyard enchantresses and cyberfairies of technoculture.

Understanding ideology better can help us take better creative risks.

A short documentary introducing Gen Z voices on the ethical debate about childbearing during the climate crisis.

Part three of the Longforms series

A durational roleplay series co-founded by Jan Berger, Katharina Hantke, Nikolaus Kockel & Nora Schön.

A member of an elite military team, Squall is forced into a conflict beyond imagination. To survive, he must contend with a desperate rival, a powerful sorceress and his own mysterious dreams. — (Square 1999)

Jacquard woven tapestries of 3D modelled scenes. They take their compositions from sections of the Apocalypse Tapestry, commissioned by Louis I in the 14th Century.

Social democracy, democratic socialism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, insurrectionary anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism... Discovering this vast ideological terrain was thrilling.

The Birth of the Reflexive Mockamentary Film Genre.

Hideous men with autocratic tendencies, an honest father-and-son talk in the age of post-truth, taylor swift and oil fields

Audio installation originally for 4 speakers in quad audio from the bathroom of the Do Not Research group show at lower_cavity gallery in Holyoke, Western Massachusetts in the Spring of 2022

An analysis of the crying selfie

A collaborative exhibition at University of California

A continuation of my devirtualized memetic image-objects

A series of modular sculptures examining the erasure of context that occurs via image aggregation

Mixed media artworks utilizing unclassified, Delimited, & FOUO (For Official Use Only) documents from various branches of the United States Military

An oil painting depicting a geographical diagram of landforms on one pangaeic continent

When Nostalgia Becomes Cliché, The Fashion World Should Follow

oliveoil aka butterflysafezone.substack.com

The lone Bitchute User, having learned of the liquidation of human inhabitants throughout the nation, decides to expose the NPCs for what they are.

14 minute short film. An unemployed Gen-X musician navigates the summer of 2020 by doom-posting on social media and at the local graffiti spot in the woods.

These videos draw content from the dark spaces of the internet, conspiracy theories and chat room archives.

Why wait for a group photo to find out you’ve been leaning in towards the people you love (a weak trait)?

Abstract memetic symbols used in esoteric and spiritual meme subcultures.

An exploration into getting rich quick online.

co-created with DALL-E2

The video essay has emerged as a dominant form on YouTube.

A new version of a famous real estate board game, organized by two axes: economic (left–right) and social (authoritarian–libertarian).

Gift of Independent Council For Social Understanding

An illustrated video transcript of a conversation between the artist and GPT3.

An email exchange between myself and a GPT-based language learning model.

New memes are like prayers and spells. Posting them is like a ritual.

Two children of two politicians, One Democrat, One Republican, Both Addicted to Crack.

The history of a shining future.

A series of mixed media watercolors.

Two-channel video. An inquiry into the roots and rhetoric of what Natascha Strobl terms German “radicalized conservatism.”

It’s Like Cows And Mice

Spirituality and the algorithm

The impracticality of A͎C͎T͎I͎V͎E͎ ͎A͎R͎T͎ is the impracticality of liberation, of êñlïgh†êñmêñt.

Dungeon Master, Witchtok Reality Shifter, Martian Colonist and Haptic-Crypto-Landian

Suite of images produced via Stable Diffusion, upscaled with Gigapixel AI

Digital Social Space, Game Engines and Phenomenal Collapse

Every niche internet micro-celebrity in Cyberspace has reposted your dystopian satire meme about Posthuman Andrew Tate-Bot’s Robux-based virtual forex trading course (0.005 BTC).

A brief and nowhere near comprehensive guide to my unfortunate cyber-existence.

Screen based performances that use digital objects

A feature film about an E-Girl, a soy boy, and the horrors of fandom.

Do Not Research presents a screening of video works that explore niche internet subcultures and the strange experience of being online today; queer furry militias, UFO’s, conspiracy theories, anonymous message boards and memetic transmission.

'Do Not Research 2021 - 2022' reproduces written works from the blog: 143 posts by 110 contributors in the past 11 months.

The first in person exhibition of the Do Not Research community.

A reflection on the first IRL exhibition of work by the Do Not Research community.

"In late 2018, I began a secret 18 month long project to infiltrate and positively influence radical online Gen Z communities."

A short film that transforms the chat-room of a porn-forum into a techno-feudal court

Orcs, goblins, guns, genuine 3rd class relics and e-girl shrines. A series of sculptures produced as if by an unseemly extremely-online genius

Caleb Cain surveys the schizo-posting online ecosystem, identifying tendencies and tropes of the scene while revealing the underlying desires beneath these poster's apocalyptic, Millenarian desires

K8 Howl researched feminism, “List-N,” Cleantok, and created a list of the essential products in her home.

Morgane Billuart investigates Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, the 'insufficient technology of the body,' and the possibilities of Femtech. Moving beyond the fluctuations of the body, we begin to see a world that Donna Haraway may have dreamt of — mixed with nuances of Silicon Valley.

Set to Philip Glass, cut and spliced together, a composition of videos sourced simply from Vyssotsky's Liked-Posts on social media becomes a portrait of the online space Vyssotsky occupies

A response to "The Left is Not a Concept" written by Benedict Cryptofash and published in The Platypus Review Issue #142. It is an exploration into the recent phenomenon of "post-" or "anti-Left" Marxism.

Is this socialism or do you want me to live in the pod and eat the bugs?

A heroically deep-dive into a far-right party that meets, organizes and holds marches in Roblox

A contextual map of the broader far-right Roblox community from the Valkists, as discussed Sam Stewart's "The Rise and Fall of The American Valkist Party"

Collages and texts exploring the genesis of Jak Ritger's COLLIDER

A descent down a hellacious feed presenting all possible ends of humanity and the Earth

A dense fog in the San Fernando Valley cancels a meeting of UFO hunters and causes an unexpected tragedy in the nearby mountains.

A thorough analysis and critique of the Instagram Infographic trend

In the last 30 minutes of our final reading-group meeting covering Srnicek's Platform Capitalism, participants were encouraged to make an over-hyphenated-speculative scenario based on the themes of the book.

A narrative game in which your choices shift your placement on a DnD alignment chart and political compass

Our film program coordinator Tomi Faison sits down with Theo Anthony, director of All Light Everywhere (2021).

Mike Pepi revisits an old argument -- a defense of museums against those who wish to replace them with databases -- in a new wave of techno-optimism

An analysis that introduces mimesis as a masterkey to karaoke, fan videos, and TikTok.

A selection of sculptures devirtualizing images, personalities, and rare brand-crossover drinks

A short film inspired by a short 4chan post. The life of a NEET unravels

Two prose-pieces by Sean Jewell, exploring supply chain problems and the importance of the hyphen to contemporary identity

A critique of Josh's Politigram and The Post-Left and his broader research methods

A tour through the tired institutions, and a look at the platforms and communities that seek to replace them. Is another art world possible?

Reuben Dendinger guides us through the Gillian Wearing exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum.

A future-compass for the intersection of cuteness and war-crimes, neoteny and insurrection

9/11, The Last Mimzy, and a childhood realization of the gift of prophecy

Livin' on a Prayer and incredibly complicated alternative medicine sold by a Bon Jovi-led MLM/cult

Part 2 of a thriller for the age of the gig-economy. "The app knows where I am, she reassured herself."

Part 1 of a thriller for the age of the gig-economy. "The app knows where I am, she reassured herself."

A vision of precariatized information workers in a dying world framed by the trashed prosperity of the old world

'A series of large oil paintings of life-sized, hyper-realized roses in scenes of environmental concern,' inspired by Holly Jean Buck's After Geoengineering

WHOLEEARTHBELOWME is a sound piece that explores Heaven as it pervades our cultural consciousness

Strategies of Opaque Authority in Kabbalistic Scholarship and 4chan Greentexts

Some visual art and writing by DJ Meisner, and "you, the girl reading this, screenshotting this for later because you didn’t know that you weren’t the only one."

A selection of paintings in which discorded dreams of climate doom and political decay spill into the structures and feeds we occupy online

Austin Kim elevates a child's ritual. Ancient and modern religious imagery resound with this youthful, hypnotic fantasy

Three individuals recall their life's journey and how it led them towards a radical form of decentralized self-improvement therapy

An animated space shuttle is filled with 3D scans of cultural objects from three databases. 👽

Pneumatic Materials wants to provide a voice to the felt yearning for God on display so frequently today and in particular online spaces, which, if not provided with an alternative, might tend towards reactionary dogmatism.

Nick Bird makes an address to young people –– and to those involved in researching radical politics. He was previously invited to speak in a panel of politigrammers in "After the End of History" 2019, part of Rhizome’s “Info-Wars” program exploring new forms of political thought emerging online.

Joe Iovino gives us a special tour of his collection of Neoliberal Children's Books.

Analysis on escaping the cringe vortex, and how the patterns that befell Chris Chan are likely to befall another.

I <3 OBJECTS

A series of images of the Silver Valley of Idaho – all of the garments used were fabricated in New York specifically for this project. Rather than attempting to describe or explain the work, Drew choses to share his musings.

Symbology Jacket was inspired by Trevor Paglen’s Symbology project documenting secret black site insignia.

Assuming Control is a photo series that takes up fragments of memes and memetic practice on the internet.

Gadsden flag remix.

Michael Bikeal teaches you how to skitch on a bicycle, and then some.

Endurance performance set to "I'll Be There For You."

A page by page translation of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, consisting of over 100 memes

Parasite mourns lost futures.

Social media collapses the commercial and political, turning identities into personal brands. Activism on platforms like Instagram or Twitter must not only wield a powerful message – most importantly, it must embody a desirable look and aesthetic.

Mirror acts much like Substack or Squarespace, but with a crucial difference: it taps into web3 services to transform your writing from mere textual content to inchoate cryptofinancial instrument.

The Euro members of the DNR community visit the place that started it all ...

Student Travis Hunnie discusses how dark forest spaces have informed his studies and IRL organizing.

After 1 year of CCRuWu, we present to you this Ambient 4K ASMR TV New 1080p MEME Compilation 2022.

Looking back on Finkelstein's Tutorial: Military Memetic, the Gravel 2020 campaign, the Obama coalition, and the meaning of digital detournement.

Community member Ferg takes up the debate of concept versus craft. This is a peek into the skill-sharing workshops within the Do Not Research Discord.

Every day, people log on to the DNR discord just to share images of different Bang flavors in #chat.

Every up-and-coming neighborhood in Manhattan needs its centerpiece, especially when looking to turn the corner from a "young nightlife hotspot" to a "stable investment area". The high-profile condominiums and retail slowly filling in the blocks between Delancey and Canal certainly raise the profile of the neighborhood, but feel disjointed and need acceleration.

S. Posner tours us through texts such as Alexander Galloway's "Protocol" and Shoshana Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" to discuss the status of institutions in the age of the Internet.

Akin to the original Map of Hell and Carly Busta’s Clearnet vs Dark Forest diagram, the internet here is reimagined as a layered and ever-deepening geology, with various levels of access and visibility.

We join Trust in a cross-discord live event. Joanna Pope guides us through a classic text by Vilem Flusser: selections from “Towards a Philosophy of Photography” (1983).

@haywirez tours us through the rare opportunity to see real, hard numbers on how much money ends up in the pockets of those who create content online. The Great Twitch Leak of 2021 provided the perfect missed opportunity.

DNR FALL 2021 is a transcript of a talk given by co-directors Abbey Pusz and Margo Bergamini. It outlines the goals of DNR and introduces the fall update to the blog.

Holly Cow ruminates on the milk wars, casting light on the recent surge in popularity of alternative medicine and diet among the extremely-online

A MANIFESTO FOR HOW DRAIN GANG & GNOSTIC GOSPELS ARE A PERFECT FIT FOR THE FLATTENED UBIQUITY OF INTERNET-AS-EVERYTHING-ALL-AT-ONCE.

DNR co-director Margo recounts her political journey. My Political Journey is a written continuation of Joshua Citarella's podcast series.

Following the September 11th publication of the Memeing of Mark Fisher, Admin F supplies a short essay on the topic.

In the lead-up to graduate school in 2016, /lit/ was a way of eavesdropping on pseudo-academic conversations which didn’t end up helping me much while studying. But, I got to know the board, and ever since I’ve wanted to write something about it—especially if this piece can thread the needle of not condoning bigotry while creating a sympathetic account of why this niche exists.

Sketchbook is a series of eight vertical video art pieces. These works explore the often contradictory spiritual desires of today, while foregrounding the radical political demands for a postcapitalist or post-work future.

This summer Joshua Citarella tried every internet folklore male improvement technique.

Thanks OP, you have been a real life-changing portal of motivation.

In this report, Jak Ritger present three visualizations of how narrative, data and capital flow through digital information systems and offer strategies to subvert, detour or catalyze multi-directional liberation.

A series of paintings that think through devirtualization.

Hudson Yards is the behemoth it is today because it exploited economic fears, Olympics false hope, and money-betting-on-money speculative finance. DLW reflects on how capitalist realism impacts the architecture community.

This project is an attempt to speed run through the front pages of the newspaper while also seeding context, background and counterpoints. More often, however, it is a space to scoff at the parallel universe inhabited by corporate media journalists.

Archive virus, or a phantom speaks. Even ten or fifty years later, culture war ephemera maintains its radioactive cognitohazard feeling.

Community member Ryan Seffinger gives us a peek into San Francisco's DSA scene, complete with its burn out and creative perimeters.

A short poem, published in anticipation of the one year anniversary of RBG's passing.

A deep dive into the niche political community of Taoist Anarchism.

Catboy Deleuze recounts their political journey. My Political Journey is a written continuation of Joshua Citarella's podcast series.

An analysis of the aesthetics of the far-right that emerged after the alt right moment.

Astro Millennial NEET Coloring Book for Adults celebrates the domestic and self-care practices of the terminally-online.

Societyiftextwall supplies us with some greenpilled postpromethean antiantiutopian propaganda.

In Gamer Keyboard Wall Piece #1 the RGB lit keys of four gamer keyboards have become the pixels of a video installation displaying a text addressing loneliness, anxiety and more downsides of NEET life, amongst other topics.

Our narrator is the only faithful viewer of a middle-aged youtuber he finds at once pathetic and enviable.

Episodes 4 & 5 of Carmelo Pampillonio's Excellent Information, covering deep space communication and the meaning of the pyramids

Office Luck and Bounty looks through the eyes of an ordinary worker and lapses into her habit of historicizing splintered moments, treating them as precious gifts, whether they are repulsive or loveable, plain or extraordinary

“People, Grass Clippings, Even Manure” (13:30, 2021) is an illustrated video transcript of a conversation between the artist and an instance of GPT3 primed with ‘Into the Universe of Technical Images,’ an essay by the late media theorist Vilem Flusser.

Mannheim is a monologue.

POV: you're a man and poorspigga's staring out the meme and somewhere past where you're sitting

An anonymous internet user comes to terms with the mundane ubiquity of death and terror online. This is not unique.

Online radicals find themselves so deeply entrenched in new, often self-constructed, sets of esoteric beliefs that it is hard to imagine a way out.

"Say No" is the first single off of Standards volume 2, an EP by the musician, artist, and writer, Ross Simonini.

The state of craft is in crisis...we should adopt an accelerationist attitude about craft's future.

Most corporate mottos land somewhere between laughable and unsettling... An exception. The late media mogul Sumner Redstone coined the phrase “Content is King” to describe his business philosophy. He nailed that shit.

Neoliberalism's Toughest Battles < Strongest Soldier Flip Kostic

Once you’ve been red-pilled, you want other people to take the red-pill, too.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

DNR community researchers Davidy, Holly & Margo join Joshua Citarella to discuss the "Lindy Effect" and why you should eat 36 raw eggs a day.

'La La La La (Inside An Empty Room My Inspiration Flows)' feels a bit like an indoctrination video that could have be used by MKultra or in the Ludovico Treatment, portraying a vision of the world defined by humanity's proximity to conflict, technology and precarity.

Uncertain. Familiar. Eerie. To exist in the immediate American era is to exist in the uncanny valley. But maybe taking a closer look can awaken our weakened political imaginations.

"Leaving Babylon" contextualizes the influx of Rastafarian imagery in leftist politigram memes, and finds the kernel of a politicized spirituality beneath the irony.

In Part 2, Jady finds a name and returns to online discourse, finding it changed as much as she did.

"Compassion compels fierceness. In the face of exploitation, it's not compassionate to say, 'let's understand where the bosses are coming from.'"

Excerpt from Ryan Maleady's Flounder, 2021.

Doomer, a time capsule of the late-2020's memescape.

DNR Contributors Tony and Jak dive into the phenomena of pastel infographics on instagram.

While irony-poisoned reaction has been a cornerstone of internet discourse for decades, this new type of reactionary twitter account eschews irony in favor of a sincere embrace of “tradition.” Nate Sloan explores what this "tradition" means in the context of art and the history of architecture.

Further investigation into what "dark forest" internet spaces and e-deologies offer us.

DNR Contributor C takes us sailing through the shit that is 24/7 free to air news channels, using Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky as his guide.

Understanding No-Knock Raids, 2021, single channel video, runtime: 51 seconds

Contrary to the reductive formulation suggesting that left politics must either be class-first or identity-first, Fisher’s manifesto against the authoritarian moralism of the “Vampire’s Castle” is entirely compatible with a class analysis that recognizes class as being segmented by other interwoven hierarchies. The enemy of mass based leftist movement must be correctly identified as essentialism rather than difference.

Continued exploration into how MLMs are employed, this time with personal anecdotes and a particular focus in on the company Zeekler.

Through lyrical anecdotes that are woven with big-picture news, Erik Simkins seeks to share a vision of leftist principles that avoids its usual pitfalls.

The Macarena [Dance Tutorial], 2020, single channel video, runtime: 5:16 minutes.

For many people, work is their meaning for living, and in some ways that’s admirable. But we should ask, is it literally the relationship of selling one’s labor? Or is it all the other things that come with work: clear tasks, structure, community, and a mission greater than yourself? If it’s the latter, are those things inextricably tied to the profit-driven workplace? Or could they be found or created another way? Audio is available for this blog entry.

Pressures of isolation and unemployment bring new meaning to work, particularly the production of art. Audio is available for this blog entry.

What happens when the posture of the auto-didact reinforces a radical stance — when you read a book to better wage culture war?

Words like "triggered" and "cope" have taken on a life of their own online; but where do these things find their origins? A brief analysis that brings us through cults, trauma, and the movement towards healing.

Since antiquity, the myth of Hyperborea (literally “beyond the northern wind”) has loomed large in the European imagination. The earliest references to the idyllic land appear with the Ancient Greeks, who believed the continent, populated by a race of giants, was the Winter home of sun god Apollo.

During the 2020 Atlanta BLM protest, videos began circulating of protestors and the National Guard dancing together. The Macarena resurfaces as a tactic for de-escalation. This analysis seeks to define how (possible) psy-ops enter our collective imagination.

JUNGLIST MASSIVE
BIG UP GENERAL KOSUL OUCH
STARSEEDS UNITE

An analysis on the Starseed phenomenon, a spiritual community. While Starseeds are not directly related to Qanon, Matt L compares the two as biproducts of social alienation. Audio is available for this blog entry.

What happens when you sell a meme? Dive into an ocean of levitated value and uncover the history of pictures and possible political futures for the new digital mirages we call “non-fungible-tokens.” Artist and Activist, Jak Ritger struggles to detour developments in cryptocurrency towards political agency.

“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombiemaker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”

Beginning an exploration into how MLMs are employed, and broadly, how MLMification impacts other parts of our lives.

MLMs are a crucial area of study because experiences with MLMs make concrete the theoretical critiques of capitalism, specifically the way in which capitalist structures embed regressive and extractive politics into society writ-large.

An attempt to record the categories developed in chat as we navigated Breadtube. Breadtube began after the 2016 election, gaining traction around 2017 and 2018 when Contrapoints received media attention for “deradicalizing” alt-right men when the alt-right was at its peak. The video essay format has persisted as a way to share key political ideas quickly.

VACUUM SEALED TESTOSTERONE ENRICHED ADRENECHROME ORGAN HARVESTING TRANSGENDER CHILDREN MEAT BOP MAGAZINE >Buy It Now