matei samihaian (mat3i)
Matei Samihaian is a 25 year old male living in Bucharest, RO. We met online through a natural gravitation of like-minded content. I consider him to be one of the best internet surfers alive.
His web presences include,
http://urlzzz.tumblr.com/
http://delicious.com/rolloverevolver
http://dump.fm/mat3i
http://bodybank.tumblr.com/
http://mat3i.tumblr.com/
4:39:03 PM r@internetarchaeology.org:
how old are you and how old do you feel?
4:39:39 PM matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
25, old & poor
4:40:07 PM r@internetarchaeology.org:
what do you do on the internet?
4:45:08 PM matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
looking at lots of images, connecting with peps like u and dump folks, blogging, reading rss feeds, well basiclly spending a lot of time just stearing at an lcd screen.
4:45:40 PM r@internetarchaeology.org:
how long have u been doing this, what was life like before?
4:56:09 PM matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
i’ve been doing it for like an year, intensive surfing, that is. and before that i used to work in some crappy advertising agency, but i’ve always tried to stay in touch with what was going on, outside the institutions i was involved with. things definitely changed last year when i offcially finished school, and was out of work. after that i finally could spend the time i wanted to pursue my interests: on-line communities, digital technologies, body / tech relation. the downfall of it was that i ran out of money, and i find myself in a quite difficult situation at the moment. but i guess things will turn out ok
4:57:16 PM r@internetarchaeology.org:
when you say “intensive surfing”, what are you surfing for/or towards?
5:05:42 PM matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
well, i’m easily influenced and i think this is a good, positive thing when surfing the internet. so, i don’t really have a plan and all that. i get up at lunch time and see what’s on - tumblr, surfing clubs, delicious etc. i think that although i can’t say i have a style or whatever, i’m towards a kinda pessimistic view of it all, trying to figure out in a lose way when “will it ever end”.
5:10:16 PM r@internetarchaeology.org:
how do you feel emotionally when you are surfing?
5:19:42 PM matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
yeah, good question. most of the stuff on my blog are things i feel emotionally drawn to. there’s a specific feeling for searching, reaching out for familiar things in different contexts, with a different errie kinda thing. i didn’t quite notice this before a friend told my that my posts have this latent violece feel about them. i’m sure about it but they say it’s there - when blogging i kinda try 2 make a decission based on my current state, the actual decission takes like 2 seconds or something, it’s something like an instant shot that couples the image with the frame of mind.
5:29:21 PM r@internetarchaeology.org:
yes, is this process a discovery of both world and self?
5:49:19 PM matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
es it’s defiantly a process of revealing the self, because it all ends up in a sort of visual diary of the self at certain moments in time. one of the good thing about images, i guess, is that they’re not that self-explanatory, they’re more ambiguous with lots of ins and outs. so if i felt bad one time, the image wouldn’t represent only that issue, it would create a context, a story, a whole ambiance for that state. the bad thing is that i will probably be to swift and bored when looking back at them. and, well, sure u discover the world, or how things used to look like at certain moments in time, ending up in some .ir domains mesmerized with the aesthetics of it, trying to understand sup with that culture, how they’r using the internet and the likes, or on some time forgotten personal images folder with people having barbeques, having personal, emotional bonds with the scene but just so far removed that it floats somewhere in the interzone.
6:06:41 PM r@internetarchaeology.org:
has the internet alienated you
6:24:56 PM matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
guess that’s a good question for my girlfriend and my friends. but i’ve felt at times more alien in RL then on the internet. this is definitely freak homeland. but there’s also the other side of the coin, u can only like things and get around ppl u care for in a certain way, there are no accidents, no trouble makers, and if they are, u can just ignore them and they won’t be in ur face..
r@internetarchaeology.org:
what can you do or feel on the internet you couldnt do or feel before?
matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
The best thing for me is that i can finally meet the people whose work I admire, I can stay in touch with them with their work and interests. There are no borders to cross, and traveling on the internet doesn’t require to have money, so besides the people u can surf trough different domains/ cultures.
r@internetarchaeology.org:
do you feel misunderstood IRL (lol)?
matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
Not really, coz I don’t get out too much so I kinda miss this chance.
r@internetarchaeology.org:
do you have any amazing internet experience you would like to share?
matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
Guess, the most amazing internet experience was finding about u guys, internet based artists. It was one of the coolest things that happened, I remember spending entire weeks on delicious, looking at one net art piece after another, after another and so on, totally immersed in that vibe, and thinking, wow now I don’t even have to go out at exhibitions, I have all i want right here, I won’t have to leave this couch anymore.
r@internetarchaeology.org:
whats the coolest thing about the internets past that does exist today?
matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
Well, I think the internet archaeology project has attracted some attention on the tumblr community, people starting their own search for lost graphical artifacts, realizing that the neglected area of the lost homepages contains maybe a more meaningful visual content than the boring web 2.0 aesthetics. So I think that your ia project is a cool thing that reassembles, in the highly networked context of tumblr, the old internet aesthetic from tiny bits on visual information.
r@internetarchaeology.org:
where do you see the internet going?
matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
I don’t like to make predictions and stuff, but I hope it will stay open and pirate coz it’s depressing what is happening in some European countries like France or Germany, where the state can limit and close ur internet access if u download illegally and stuff like that. So hopefully things won’t go in a wrong direction for the rest of us, and maybe they’ll find a way to avoid this stupid policy.
r@internetarchaeology.org:
where do you see your life going?
matei.samihaian@gmail.com:
I see myself working in close relation with the online world.
