February 26, 2026 : Wondercab Mini (107A)

WELCOME

A thread on themes of absorption and immersion, from analog through digital and on to more recent AI instantiations.

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THE MAIN EVENT

A thread on absorption and immersion, from analog through digital

Veterans of this Cabinet will know that the states of absorption or immersion have been ongoing concerns of ours going back to our earliest issues, and even beyond, to “the Pillow of Air” column I used to contribute to The Believer magazine and the aesthetic upon which I originally founded my ill-fated single-issue Omnivore journal—which is to say those moments when our sudden stupefaction facing the world grows so profound that a pillow of air seems to lodge itself in our throats and we suddenly notice we haven’t even taken a breath in tens of seconds.

And some of you may remember two short films in particular which I linked to, I can’t remember the context, which deep-mined that specific territory of regard. The first being “Behold the Face,” the exquisite 1968 short in which the master Russian documentarian Pavel Kogan (1931-1998) trained his concealed camera upon a successions of visitors to The Hermitage Museum as they trained their own hushed gazes upon a magnificent Leonardo Madonna.

Pawel Kogan “Behold the Face” (1968)

To view film, click HERE.

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And then as well, the work of the Latvian-Israeli filmmaker Herz Frank (1926-2013) whose 1978 short (ten years later) deployed its own hidden camera to limn the concentrated experience of a group of young children utterly spellbound before a puppet theater’s fairy tale production, indeed emerging on the far side, as its title suggested, “Ten Minutes Older.”

Herz Frank, “Ten Minutes Older’ (1978)

To view film, click HERE:

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Those two films came back to mind for me recently when I happened upon another short, this one from thirty years after Frank’s and by the English experimental photographer and videographer Robie Cooper (b. 1969), which mined a whole different and distinctly more unsettling seam of absorption—the gaze, that is, of a new generation of youngsters utterly sucked into the relentless gravitational force-field of video games, part of a wider investigation of such mesmeric effects, under the title “Immersion,” which Cooper himself adumbrates here.

Robie Cooper, “Immersion” (2008-9)

Το view film, click HERE.

Not that that gaze is any longer limited to youngsters and teenagers and ex-teenagers. Indeed it has steadily entrammeled all of us, as our old pal the painter Gerri Davis (veteran of our issues 5 and 26) explored, ten years after Cooper, in a series of quick facial oil portraits of friends of hers caught in the glare of their own various screens, which she labelled “The Monitors.”

And just to be clear, I am not casting judgmental aspersions on others from any sort of privileged position here, for yes, indeed, that’s me, bulking strange, third row center.

But I do wonder whether there isn’t indeed a distinct typology—or even hierarchy—among these different sorts of thoroughly absorbed gazes, which is to say that some of them (those afforded, for example, by video games or the infinite Pavlovian regresses of Instagram or TikTok) systematically wear their viewers down across such a supple profusion of offerings (to paraphrase T.S. Eliot in a different context) that the giving comes to famish the craving; while others (perhaps more care-fully hand-curated, if in some cases no less digitally sourced) nourish and even exalt the extended attentions they require (which is to say the sort of free play of associations we try to favor here in the Cabinet, though of course we are by no means entirely successful or in any sense alone in such aspirations). But are those latter of us just fooling ourselves regarding our supposed superiority? I’m never quite sure.

I do know, for example, that I for one can never bring myself to care about video games—or rather, I shrink from them because no matter what, notwithstanding their ever-widening decision trees of possibility, I keep feeling like a rat trapped in someone else’s pre-ordained maze

—which ironically is quite the opposite of the feeling I get, for example, when traversing a fine novel, across which each new paragraph feels to me to be opening out onto a wide-open field of freedom, where paradoxically literally anything could happen next (for as Grace Paley so memorably averred, “Every character, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life”). (Notwithstanding the fact that, in a great novel, by the end whatever has in fact happened will have come to feel inevitable.) (Just like in real life.)

All of which brings me to Gorm the Old, into whose digital rabbit hole I’ve recently been swallowed. Not the olden-day Gorm the Old. The new one.

Which is to say not the dark-brooding founding Viking king of Denmark (circa 895-circa 960) but rather his impish latter-day doppelganger, the mysteriously pseudonymous keeper of the net-fief of that name, endlessly prolific generator (in his own characterization) of “The AI slop you just can’t help but love.” Such ridiculously inspired bêtises as “Every Era as a Video Game,” “The History of Germany as a Doom Game,” “Skateboarding Through History,” “Throwing Cheese at Historical Figures,” and, of course, “Mr. Rogers at the Battle of Agincourt”:

But lately, somehow, Mr. Old has been taking things to a whole new level, with frankly the most striking, disconcerting, and just plain dumbfounding deployment of AI tools that I myself have yet encountered. He has been calling the resultant four-part video series, “Historical Figures as Boring Modern People,”

To view the first part, click Above, and you can access the rest of them HERE, HERE, and HERE.

I’ve been trying to figure out what makes them so affecting, and it’s partly the all-of-a-sudden full maturation of the technology itself, but it’s more than that. It is the haiku-like precision of the vantage (which is to say a distinctly authorial impress on the part of Mr. Old), and the sheer pang of the spirit-sapping anomie it taps into (those aching, draining sighs). These folks aren’t “boring” so much as deeply, existentially bored. It is as if Samuel Beckett had suddenly taken charge of the controls (which in turn reminds me of this. And, for that matter, this.) And as such, they strike me as profound instances of sites that give out onto that second sort of immersive engagement.

Anyway, I ended up writing Mr. Old to ask him if he’d mind my featuring him on the Cabinet and for that matter to ask who the hell he in fact was beyond his Gormliness. And I received this reply:

Hi there! Would be thrilled to be featured in your Substack. I am actually a registered nurse from Minnesota who has always been interested in film and video (my first degree is in film production). You can simply call me “Youtuber Gorm the Old.” I was drawn to Gorm the Old because my Danish heritage has always been a big part of my life, and we discovered my family may actually be related to Gorm the Old and/or Herald Bluetooth, both major figures in the early Danish Kingdom.

So I guess your guess is as good as mine. But Mr. Old has his own Patreon page, and you might well want to give it a whirl, who knows where he will be taking things next.

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Postscript

For some reason that Suburban Stalin was for me the most affecting of all those bored incarnations, and for a while I couldn’t figure out why, but then I realized that its way had been prepared, for me anyway, by a marvelous suite of paintings I covered for the New Yorker over thirty years ago (in the issue of September 13, 1993), to wit, this one

and these (just over forty years after the dreadful old coot’s actual demise by stroke).

Geniuses thinking alike, I guess.

Speaking of which, incidentally, Stalin makes another fetching appearance in Gormlandia in the latest of Mr. Old’s productions. See HERE.

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See you next week!