“Why move clumsily through a faux 3D environment with cumbersome input devices strapped to your body?” asks Maya Posch in their VRML retrospective. Taking stock of Virtual Reality Modeling Language—the 1990s standard promising 3D web before ‘the metaverse’—they diagnose why VR keeps failing. Despite powering early virtual worlds like CyberTown (1995) and inspiring WebGL, VRML revealed keyboard and mouse remain more efficient than immersive interfaces, Posch observes.

American artist Evan Roth resurfaces his seminal 2005 thesis project Graffiti Analysis on social media, and artist peers rejoice in the comments. Marius Watz, for example, who covered the project on Generator.x at the time, celebrates Roth’s clever recording and algorithmic recreation of graffiti writing (that led to other classics) as a “game changer.” It’s a “critical merging of ideas of interactivity, software and data capture,” applied to low-tech culture.