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The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

blog.archive.org

41–50 of 117 posts

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#41
post #5

I didn't know about the old meme, but the image made me immediately think of The Stanley Parable. Not surprising since TSP is probably a descendant of the meme.

The notion of vast abandoned underground "backrooms", maybe with a couple people in hazmat suits on their way through also perfectly fits into the Westworld TV series. Though of course they didn't go with an 70's office vibe.

But the copy-pasta for the image builds on those influences, not the other way around.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#42
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original URL of the photo was actually found on Twitter, where it had been posted in 2011. Wayback Machine was used only for the final confirmation. It's curious that this is not mentioned in the article, but I suppose it ruins the narrative. I read about the whole thing last week at 404media, via waxy blog, which is a much more comprehensive article: https://archive.is/sj846

That is actually kinda fascinating given that it's directly in opposition to this blog post. I wonder who's telling the truth?

The legend lives on :)

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#43
post #21

How did people hunting for the origin of this image discover the random niche website preserved by the Internet Archive that this image happened to come from?

There’s actually a wonderful little mini-doc on YouTube that just came out the other day, produced by one of the people involved in the sleuthing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1EKIIM3ShI

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#45
post #36

Gotta love the found footage videos' photorealism and camera effects too. One of the reasons why a "retro" motif is commonly seen in these videos is to make it more convincing. What found footage video do you assume to be most convincing? And how do you think photorealistic found footage videos will be made in the future?

Adding those imperfections to the video in post allows your brain to fill in the blanks and make it look more realistic. If it were a 4K video the CGI would be a lot more noticeable.

I think the retro look will probably stay as I feel it's part of the aesthetic. But maybe in the future we'll have backrooms-style videos of the current times, and then I imagine the retro/vintage aesthetic will go away.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#46
post #36

Gotta love the found footage videos' photorealism and camera effects too. One of the reasons why a "retro" motif is commonly seen in these videos is to make it more convincing. What found footage video do you assume to be most convincing? And how do you think photorealistic found footage videos will be made in the future?

Adding those imperfections to the video in post allows your brain to fill in the blanks and make it look more realistic. If it were a 4K video the CGI would be a lot more noticeable. I think the retro look will probably stay as I feel it's part of the aesthetic. But maybe in the future we'll have backrooms-style videos of the current times, and then I imagine the retro/vintage aesthetic will go away.

How do you think CGI for photorealistic found footage would be optimized? What new methods might be used?

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#47
post #7

Now someone should make a game where you design indoor rc car tracks in the backrooms.

Someone should convert an unused warehouse or shopping mall into a real-world backroom maze escape game.

Relevant: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008>

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stanley Parable outdates Backrooms by like 8 years. But they’re all basically about liminal spaces.

Most of my dreams take place in similar places. Often though they are falling apart — like leaking ceilings, etc. Always they are labyrinthian, almost always it is night time (although the frequent windowlessness of the places would not make that obvious). They are often populated though — maybe college-age students, sometimes more like a mall. I've always been fascinated by the place of my dreams. I have asked aroun…

Wonky spaces seem to be a fairly common thing in dreams. One that I used to have every so often was walking around inside what at first seemed like a normal room, then looking up to see that the ceiling was several tens of stories high, as if the building were a skyscraper with only a single tall and narrow room inside. The unexpected height of the ceiling always caused an intense sensation of vertigo, causing me to fall backwards in my dream (and sometimes wake up IRL).

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is because the image didn’t exist in other archives and it’s a very obscure site so why would someone have seen that? More probable they stumbled on something random like this in the wild or on Internet Archive?

Why would someone have been looking at an very obscure site on the Internet Archive? Why is that more likely than looking at it on the web?

They have an index of all images. Maybe someone picked a random image (I don't see a Random button, but one could exist?) or happened to look at this index the day it was added, or just clicked through to 2002 looking for something nostalgic https://archive.org/details/image

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#50

See you all in the backrooms

Anyway, I'm sorry if some people are reading this hastily written blog entry to seem like the archive is taking credit for the process of discovery being done by people. The phrase likely does not mean definitely and perhaps I should have used a different word when I wrote the entry. But the fact remains that the wayback machine is the only place you can see the image in the context of its original website, and that is only happening because the archive is doing such a general crawl. That's all I wanted to get across, all hail the wayback machine, have a great day.
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