More Than Mandela. Imperfect memory isn't the only thing changing the past. (These essay fragments suggest a pattern.)
Haruki Murakami's short story Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova is about a man who turns an album review into a creative writing exercise by inventing an alternate history for Charlie Parker. One where he lives long enough to witness the rise of Bossa Nova and falls in love with the style. This is all creatively explained in detail. In the end Charlie Parker visits the main character in a dream and thanks them for essentially breathing new life into their memory. It's a heartfelt story.
We now live in an age where we could easily have an AI spit out 1000 Bossa Nova songs in Charlie Parker's style. And somehow that idea feels completely at odds with the idea of breathing new life into the dead.
Flipnote Hatena created a lot of fun memories for me. I watched many user created flipnotes before the service went offline. So I felt deeply odd when I watched a video from the YouTube channel _The June Archive_. It was the same short I remember from over a decade ago, but the ending was different. The video author animated a new ending obviously, but that's not what I felt in that moment. I felt something more surreal.
You may or may not be familiar with Siivagunner. It's a collective that modifies videogame soundtracks to surprise unwary listeners. The first time I heard the Mario athletic theme turn into the flinstone melody I was caught off guard but also quite amused. The moment felt wrong in the normal sense. As if I has made some sort of mistake. My sense of reality stayed intact.
Somewhat recently there was a TikTok trend where people took old Vines and did what The June Archive did and changed the endings. Usually, the video abruptly changed in style (noticably AI) and a black figure would menacingly walk into the scene to stop the events. This was all done to the same tense and spooky music each time. They are all uniquely eerie, but it's hard to pinpoint exactly what's going on aesthetically. How much eerieness is due to the spooky music and dark figures vs the reality warping content?