*UPDATE* I'm going to be hosting this weeks discussion for my Paster Radio Papers group!!! AHHH THIS IS SO EXCITING :D :D Leave me a message in the guestbook if you want more info :D :D
Welcome to my Pasta Radio Paper - I have listening to the radio show pretty casually since it started, but recently a friend introduced me to the secret world of the Pasta Radio Papers, and I've been hooked ever since. For those of you who don't know, a Pasta Radio paper is like a cross between a fan site and a theory page - and there's a huge community of people who make them, and who come together to discuss the episodes, our theories, and other weird, unexplainable things that we've discovered ourselves. It can get pretty hectic at times, like anything on the internet, but I can't imagine my life now without it.
Episode 54: Reports are surfacing from people using a new app that intergrates maps into several brands of augmented reality lenses - the app allows you to set your destination, and then a brightly coloured virtual path lays out before you, guiding you to your destination. However, there are people who have been experiencing this strange phenomena whereby static images keep showing up in the corners of their field of veiw. People are describing instances where they've been walking down the street with the app enabled and all of sudden they'll see the blurry details of a person out of the corner of their eye. However, when they turn to look at it head on, there's nothing there. While a large number of reports have been flooding about the phantom images, there are no accounts of anyone being able to bring the images into focus.
My theory: This reminds me of a thing I saw about an old technology called Street View, where streets were constructed out of a composite of photographs, allowing people in the 2000s to see what streets looked like at a certain moment in time. Most of the photographs were taken by the company running Street View, and if they managed to capture people in the photographs, they would always blur their faces. But people were also able to take their own photos, and upload them to the locations on the map, and sometimes these photos would get mixed in. So you could go "walking" along the "street" and then all of a sudden this random person would just appear. I don't know if this is a theory so much as it is an observation lol but oh well, the episode just made me think of this.
Episode 53: Augie talks about 'The Livingroom', an experimental film project that as of today has been running for 2,340 days. It started out as an art project by video artist Lydia Morgan, who set up an old video camera in the communal living room of their sharehouse, livestreaming the room and its every day happenings to YouTube. The basic gist of the project was to examine how people change their behaviour in front of a camera, how that behaviour changes over time, while creating a window into a space that continues without any people in it. The channel became way more popular than they thought it would - it satisfied countless viewers curiosity and vouyeristic tendencies, but many people also made reports that they found the live stream to be incredibly relaxing, that they would often leave the stream up while they were working or studying, or have it on to help them fall asleep. So, when Lydia and their housemates decided to move out, they also made the decision to keep the project running going. However, rather than taking the camera and restablishing the project in their new house, they left the camera set up - Lydia wrote this long rambling statement on her website before she moved, about the project and house being intrinsicly linked (see link below if you want to read it).
People have moved into and out of the house over the years - some because they specifically wanted to be a part of the project, but others mostly because the rent was so cheap - (I mean, you can see that the back wall of their livingroom is brick, so it's totally in one of those 'used to be a rough but is now a totally trendy area'. I think the house might've even belonged to Lydia's parents or something?).
Obviously this is a little weird, but in like a performance art school kind of way, but not in a Pasta Radio kind of way. The real weird stuff doesn't kick in for a few years, when someone leaves a comment on the livestream video: "hi Cindy! I thought you had moved back to New Zealand." Cindy had in fact moved back to New Zealand, and hadn't visited the house since she'd left almost a year prior. (see footnotes for transcript and screenshots for the full exchange). And that's when people start coming forward, saying that they've seen footage of people who used to live in the house but had since moved away. They had always thought it was just them coming back for a visit, but, when asked, most people of these people confirmed that they had moved out weeks, months, sometimes even years before the sightings were recorded.
My theory: I don't know about this one. I actually think this might all be bullshit? The cynical part of me latches on to the fact that the project's views were steadily dropping around this time, and so maybe someone started a rumour to get people interested again? I mean, I can't talk, I still watch it - at the moment they've got three born people living there, I think two of them are a couple but I'm not a hundred percent sure. They were all very aware of the camera when they first moved in, but they've all smoothed out now, thank goodness. I don't really watch it for the people though. In the later night hours, when they've all gone to bed, I like to put the stream on in the background of whatever else I'm doing, and watch the room breathe without people in it.