We asked Toronto-based artist Bridget Moser to share some of her favourite online destinations for Top Tabs, a series featuring the top Internet finds and fancies from artists, curators, dealers and more.
1. craigslistmirrors
The first time I saw craigslistmirrors sometime in 2013 I started crying a little bit for no reason. Or anyways, I think it made me think about what it means to be a human being. Basically it’s a website that aggregates all of the most compelling photos of mirrors for sale on Craigslist. It was created and continues to be maintained by Brooklyn-based artist Eric Oglander.
2. She’ll Never Know
She’ll Never Know is an animated web series by Toronto performance artist Neil LaPierre. The series chronicles a lovesick garbage can who dreams of making the girl of its dreams happy. It’s actually a deeply personal account of unrequited emotion. Each episode is 30 seconds long so you can watch the whole series in under 10 minutes.
Or, if you’d rather spend over 21 hours watching something worthless, as I am currently doing, you can watch the entire first series of the world’s best reality television show Paradise Hotel with Swedish subtitles (it originally aired on Fox in 2003) (without Swedish subtitles).
3. This Man’s Face
Every night throughout the world hundreds of people dream about this man’s face. Some people fall in love with him in the dream. Sometimes the man murders the dreamer. In every case, it’s always the same man. The website aims “to help those who have seen this man in their dreams and to foster communication among them” and “to understand who this man is and why he appears in an apparently pattern-less array of situations in the dreams of such diverse human subjects.” Have you dreamed this man?
4. List of Dads Who Make Other Dads Eat Bugs
While there are almost five million live articles on the English version of Wikipedia, there are also thousands and thousands of pages that have been deleted but live on as ghost articles in a sort of Wiki purgatory. One of the most mystifying deleted pages (removed in August of 2008) is called “List of Dads Who Make Other Dads Eat Bugs.” Apparently the article itself was completely blank, while the Talk Page read, simply, “my dad.”
5. Shawnee County Treasurer’s Office Hallway Camera
Thousands of live surveillance-style webcams exist around the world. For example, you can spy on old country inn “ghost cams” to try to spot supernatural events (never happens) or you can look at famous tourist sites like the Statue of Liberty in real time. But come on, just look at a picture. It’s pointless to look at live shots of monuments, excluding a period of time during Occupy Wall Street between 2011 and 2012 when you could watch cops guarding the fenced-in Wall Street Bull around the clock on its webcam. I think the Shawnee County Treasurer’s Office Hallway Camera, which promises to always show the “current situation” outside of the County Treasurer’s Office, is way better.
6. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Amazon Wish List
There is some debate online over whether or not this is actually Academy Award–nominated actor Benedict Cumberbatch’s Amazon Wish List. But let’s get real: the complete works of Shakespeare (kindle edition) and Dr. Bronner’s organic lavender soap? I think the answer is obvious.
Imagine if I put one of the first two iterations of Top Tabs as one of my Top Tabs. I’m not going to do that, but just imagine.
Bridget Moser’s “Is this thing on?” was recently on view at the MSVU Art Gallery, and she was awarded a 2015 William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists from the Hnatyshyn Foundation. She will be showing a newly commissioned performance at Artspace in Peterborough on November 6, and will partake in a special edition of Doored at Double Double Land in Toronto, which will be live-streamed to Showroom MAMA in Rotterdam on October 17.
