Bathroom Advertisements #3

For the third installment of ‘bathroom advertisements’ we take a look at:

DUMP.FM that was found by Ethan in a bathroom somewhere in the Lower East Side…

To date, this might be the most perplexing website I’ve ever encountered. Based on the URL I was hoping to find a site that was made up of poop humor, but I found something that was far from it (kinda). When you first enter the site you are brought to a chat room that bombards your brain with a series of crazy photos and .gifs using little-to-no actual text. Confounded, it took me about five minutes to pull my eyes away from the screen as I watched image after image, individuals responding with the next crazy thing they found on the internet, pop onto my screen. It’s The Burger King having sex with Katamari King… Oh, now it is a grab from Tekken 4…

Will someone please explain what is going on?

And then I found it – the ‘About’ page located at the bottom of the site. I was brought to a page that included their mission statement, bios and contact info. Their group image looked like a pop-punk band photo with the front man adorned with a kafiya scarf, forearm tattoos and black hair with a bleech streak in the middle. Their mission statement:

DUMP.FM is a new and exciting tool for the internet; allowing pictures to be used for realtime com.munication and collaboration. Users can send image URLs (which display instantly in the chat), upload locally from their hard drive or post pics right from their webcam. Every image gets stored in your DUMP.FM log, similarly, a log is kept of the entire collaboration.

Having read that, I went onto do some further research to see who these crazy dudes of DUMP.FM really are. One has created a site, called Internet Archeology cataloging and archiving art, images and graphics found within earlier internet systems, another helped develop the MIT Exhibit and the rest somehow participate in digital art or development of internet communication and networking – smart dudes nonetheless. While silly as it all may seem, I decided that I had stumbled upon something brilliant.

This is actually a .gif, but I don't know how to upload those into wordpress. It's really funny to see the real thing.

The site also offers the participants a series of tools that allow them to edit and adjust images and create .gif images which helps for quick and hilarious image responses.

The best part of this site, especially for newcomers to this internet magic is the Hall Of Fame page that is made up of the best images, that are ‘liked’ by those in the chat room. A long page of .gifs that ensue nothing but copious amounts of laughter and tears of amusement. A cool concept, funny content and overall bizarre, I think I will occasionally go back to this site to marvel at its weird wonder.

Tags: .gif, Dump.fm, internet archeology, internet communication, MIT exhibit, new york

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 21st, 2010 at 2:41 pm by Austin and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.