🟧 Chasing a vibe pic

From Kazakhstan to South Korea on the fractured internet

Today, a Sebaldian essay on moody internet images getting recycled and stripped of context while traveling across nations and networks. Subscribe to Chris’s personal Substack at A Public Service.

Chris Erik Thomas: On the Dirt discord server, a user posted this image of what seems to be a train station exit onto a metropolitan city street. The caption is vague and feels ripped from a Wim Wenders film; it could easily be a deleted scene from Perfect Days. My attempt to learn more about the image takes me straight to Google Lens. The feature has been around in one form or another for years, but it’s only since August 2024 that Google quietly added it to Chrome on desktop. Copying and pasting the Wendersesque mystery image into Lens, the scarcity of results reminds me that not all mysteries can be solved — or, at least, not through AI reverse image-search technology.

According to Lens, the image seems to only exist in five results, each leading to a more confounding dead end. It’s used as the album art (sans caption) for a Soundcloud rapper named eurei’s track, “destination +deadmall (lileffort)” posted in 2023. The beat is fuzzy, and the vocals are autotuned into oblivion, but its lyrics include the genuine banger of a line: “yea im reachin for the stars while you shootin for the sky” (please disregard that these metaphors mean the exact same thing).

Another result brings up a YouTube account that used the image as its profile photo. They haven’t uploaded in seven years, and their final video is from a trip to Family Park, a recreation area in Almaty, Kazakhstan (located by reverse image searching a screenshot of the park’s entrance pulled from their video). It feels voyeuristic to see these home videos, like stumbling through the wrong door onto an intimate moment. Only one result, a Thai Facebook page that translates to “slot games,” has text overlaid on the image. In that iteration, posted on January 15, 2024, and reposted from a page called “Nope,” the Thai text translates to “I’m so tired of growing up.”

Chasing one more wisp of smoke, I find the image posted on a site called “CRUSHBALL,” full of “content [derived] from the mind of a 20-something year old writer based in London.” The image is accompanied by a meandering short story titled “Mutuals” that begins: “Kalkan is a small place. It has a population that London exceeds by 9 million, yet both feel like toy villages. I was there this time last year, and my job was ‘holiday.’” The story — a meditation on repetition — is told over three brief paragraphs and ends as follows:

“It’s a painful discovery, to find no life outside of repetition, of being predictable. But it’s better to accept it, to serve people with your willingness to repeat, to perceive life as a looping of different songs. Zooming out, it is all fascinating to look at.”

A quick search of the image plus “Kalkan” reveals nothing, as expected; Kalkan, Turkey, is a small seaside town (population: 3,926) with no sprawling downtown to be seen. Just as I’m about to give up and accept that this image will haunt me, I adjust Google’s Lens, framing two clues that might lead anywhere: a flag hung on streetlamps and a public transit bus seen stopped at a crosswalk. The clouds break, and god’s light shines on me as Google refines its search results. The flag is Korean, and the bus is used in Seoul. The brief glow dissipates, and like an episode of LOST, the new information only leads to more questions. I give up the hunt.

The story should end here, but then, suddenly, the internet throws a pie in my face. Hours after accepting defeat, I come across the image on @WordsCocoon, a content farming “vibes page” that traffics in sharing random images plastered with vague captions. These pages feel like ethereal diaries from a lonely circuit board, full of hot air. Currently, the image has nearly 10 million views and nearly 200 comments from both bots and seemingly real users (remember those?). “Everyone experienced today differently,” writes a dominatrix named Skylar Dawn. Some recognize the spot as Wangsimni station in Seoul, South Korea. It’s a big win for my Google Lens digging but a big loss for my sanity.

As I sat with my mad hunt for meaning these past few days, a quote stuck in my head. It’s from “More Stillness,” a short dispatch by Thea McLachlan about the artist Celia Paul in the new Apartamento magazine. It reads:

“In being photographed, there's a danger that the functionality of Paul's practice and studio (a simple, bare room, in which she wears her painting overalls) could be transformed into an aesthetic to be fetishised, something curated and removed from the practicality built into Paul's life.”

I’ve been thinking about how social media strips out context for quite a long time. To exist online is to perform, and part of that performance is reducing content (be it images, video, or text) into the most easily digestible form possible. As McLachlan notes, a photo of the studio of a great artist can be sanded down, its aesthetic becoming a fetish object for Pinterest boards and Instagram grids (or a WordsCocoon post).

I don’t have some grand conclusion to wrap up with here. All I can say is that if there’s anything to be gleaned from my journey through fuzzy Soundcloud rap, Kazakhstan amusement parks, and South Korean train stations, it’s this: algorithms may have forced our perspective of the internet into the size of a pinhole, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The internet is a wild, weird, vast world and a testament to the wild, weird, vastness of humanity. Go off the rails.

Chris Erik Thomas is a Berlin-based writer and editor whose work spotlights trends and talent in the realms of fashion, art, and culture. They've previously worked as the digital editor for Art Düsseldorf, and their words have appeared in Highsnobiety, ARTnews, The Face, BBC, Out Magazine, Paper, and more. Their personal Substack is A Public Service.

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