Sujet Qu'est-ce qui vous fascine automatiquement ?

Narbonne : un violent incendie coupe l'autoroute A9
Une autoroute coupée, ça n'arrive pas tous les jours. A cause, indirectement, d'un feu : la fumée qui se dégage est tellement dense que la circulation en devenait impossible. De quoi donner lieu à de beaux bouchons... Des milliers de véhicules sont actuellement bloqués, sur 15 kilomètres en venant du nord, sur 8 kilomètres en venant du sud.

It’s a standardized room. Like Diet Coke or iPhones, American rooms are a kind of product, built as quickly and cheaply as possible to a standardized specification. Here are Benjamin Moore’s best-selling shades of white. Look familiar?

More than 100 million Americans live in the suburbs. Suburban homes are built many at a time to achieve efficiencies. A set of tract homes is the horizontal equivalent of a skyscraper. The plans themselves are defined along familiar principles, designed to meet market demand. Programs like AutoCAD make it possible to quickly and efficently produce blueprints for homes using a pre-defined, standardized library of components. Viewed very broadly, the construction industry functions like a massive, decentralized, and human-powered 3D printer controlled by AutoCAD.

[...]


The people dancing and talking and singing in beige rooms with 8' ceilings are surrounded by standards, physically and online. Technological standards like HTML5 also allow us to view web pages and look at video over the Internet. All of their frolic is bounded by a set of conventions that are essentially invisible yet define our national physical and technological architecture. Their dancing, talking bodies are the only non-standardized things in the videos.

[...]


On television shows, the characters’ rooms are filled with art, knicknacks, ephemera, and signifiers. Think of the rooms in The Big Bang Theory: Constant visual stimulus, always something for the eye to do. None of the surfaces that define the YouTube room are here. This is an entirely different space.


[...]


You could judge those rooms and say that America has a paucity of visual imagination, that we live in a kind of wasteland. Or you could draw another conclusion, and note that America might be a little more broke than it wants to show. The painfully expensive 2,000-square foot home is furnished with cheap big sofas and junk from Target. Maybe these video stars don’t hang pictures because they are renters. Maybe they know they are going to move soon, to another part of the state or country; suburbs are the temporary worker housing for America. Maybe they moved in and just haven’t unpacked yet, and the big picture of grandma is still in the garage.


[...]


There is a website, brbxoxo.com, that “searches online sexcam sites and only broadcasts feeds when the performers are absent.” The rooms themselves are very interesting and vary widely in their layout, decoration, and overall aesthetics. They are not necessarily American. And they are not always beige. If you watch this website for some time you see all kinds of colors and images. In the bottom left room below you can see religious icons. Sometimes there are sex toys left on the beds. To me, the sex-worker rooms look far more “normal” than the big American rooms of YouTube. They seem lived-in and more permanent. Some care has been taken for lighting. Collectively the decorative sense of women who masturbate for the gratification of their customers is more novel, more humane, than the typical empty rooms where people perform for a (much) broader audience. I have no idea why this is.


Consider a different kind of fantasy: The fantasy home decors on Pinterest, or sites like Houzz. Here the patterns are immediate. The home decorators of Pinterest want whiteness, huge swaths of sunlight. They very badly want old things or old-seeming things. There is a riot of decorative patterns but an overall, unshakeable order—not a perfect grid, which would be oppressive and urban, but a definite structure to the space.


[...]


Finally, consider Pomplamoose, who do sweet, multi-layered covers of various pop songs, most-famously Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” They are sort of a genre bridge; their room is white, not beige, and filled with instruments. The singer stares straight into the camera at times, but she also moves her eyes around and shifts awkwardly; she doesn’t want to be here but she does want to sing. This is a bedroom act, professionally produced (the same instincts as the man doing “Low” by Flo Rida are in play, years earlier) but these are talented, ambitious people. In 2009 they are ready to leave the YouTube room behind, but no one is quite sure how to do it. This posing and mugging drives some people crazy. It does seem out of keeping with the form of online video, which is direct self-expression. People can read awkwardness as self-regard. [...]

But Pomplamoose has nothing on this video, where a skilled musician who works under the name Kawehi produces and mixes a cover of Heart Shaped Box. The signifiers are pure Pinterest, down to a bottle of wine and some pleasingly ratty lamps. It’s a very old house and a very old table. The camera moves and sweeps but the artist barely meets its gaze. She is lost in a rapture of real-time-audio mixing and 1990s grunge passion. We’ve lost the room and we’ve lost eye contact. The camera moves, then moves some more. At the end of a very dramatic performance she looks at the camera and smiles happily, as if to say, oh, you caught me! This is the future.