Taking its name from artificial grass, “astroturfing” refers to the practice of covertly contracting companies to create fake public demonstrations. Demonstrators at such events are forbidden to disclose their status as paid activists acting as directed by media outlets that produce viral content to serve their clients’ interests.

For Demo, Yoshua Okón and Juan Obando used the services of Crowds On Demand, a key player in these digital media services, to stage a protest. The protesters carried blank signs coloured greenscreen green – the hue commonly used as a back-ground when creating special effects. By exposing the vulnerability of conventional protest tactics, the work frames astroturfing as a mechanism that shapes the perception of civil action and social destabilisation, and confronts the limits of our ability to discern fact from fiction, revealing democracy’s fragile foundations, and the banality of armchair social media politics.