An ultra-high-resolution image depicting a nighttime scene on a deserted urban street leading to a railway crossing. The street is wet, with light reflections and white road markings. A building on the left side has a light gray facade with bright red graffiti, a red-lit window, and is lined with pipes and wires. A brown metal fence with barbed wire and a leaning pole with a yellow stripe is on the right, separating the sidewalk from the railway tracks. The background showcases illuminated street lamps, greenery, and building silhouettes, evoking a quiet, mysterious urban atmosphere.

Sometimes, I come across a post which comes from leftfield and is almost impossible to quote in a meaningful way. This one revolves around three things I’ve never even heard of, let alone experienced. The author puts them under the heading ‘consciousness porn’, with the three examples being quite diverse.

What I find so fascinating is that there are layers upon layers to this. For example, one of the commenters points out that the guy shooting the long videos of walks around Tokyo posted to his YouTube channel that he was depressed, wasn’t going to do any more after uploading the ones he’d already recorded, and didn’t know why anyone watched them in the first place.

It took me a while to comprehend why my son would watch other people play videogames. After a while I began to understand that there was an element of learning how to improve his own gameplay, but there was also an aesthetic to it. This consciousness porn seems to be almost pure aesthetic. I guess the next stage is endless versions of this created using AI.

Rambalac does everything he can to avoid intruding on the world he is observing, to be, like the character in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin, “a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” But occasionally we catch a glimpse of his reflection in a store window or elevator mirror – oh, he’s not Japanese! And in every frame we feel his presence – quiet, sweet, and a little sad, stopping to watch a black cat thread its way across a cluttered stoop, showing us the label of the green tea he’s bought from a vending machine, looking away politely from a fellow pedestrian, or standing still, on a rainy night, before the red gate that marks the entrance to a Shinto shrine, entranced.

[…]

I often listen to dub techno while watching Rambalac videos, which amplifies their chill, phenomenological trippiness, and makes me feel like I’m experiencing a mutant artform invented by William Gibson. An artform I call consciousness porn.

Source: Donkeyspace

Image: DALL-E 3