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The 10-minute short Banky – “The Factory” is side-splittingly hilarious, a note-perfect parody of Banksy’s very serious commentary on corporate culture. In the satire, our hero Banky takes on “a pretty negative experience I had at the Old Spaghetti Factory” by dropping off a bowl of pasta mixed with barbed wire to a bewildered customer on the patio. “I think pasta came at least in Italy in the 13th century,” he says, voice altered, face pixelated. “I’m probably the first person or the first artist who brings this type of energy to this dish.
“At least I hope so.”
The channel also includes a series of stock videos including Man Riding Escalator and Man Sitting Down, where its subject is constantly laughing.
As curator, Kushner says the thread running through the films “is definitely something I feel more than I can articulate. Definitely gravitating to slower, meditative, more existential comedy — but not all comedy,” he laughs. “Some of it’s not funny at all.”
While Johnson loves the “elite, super nerd comedy base,” he’s drawn with a certain horror to art made by robots. “Machine Symphony is f—ing insane. Basically this guy is a computer programmer, and all the visuals are computer generated by an AI that he let ran loose.
“It’s almost too scary to watch with the world the way it is right now. It feels like what kind of TV will be on the air once the disease the computers created wipe us all out.”
Says Kushner, “The result is pretty unsettling.”
But see for yourself at eternal.tv — the site launched Monday, and that dusty bass guitar isn’t going anywhere, anyway. Welcome to Eternal Family!