AI-generated Instagram models posting their latest finds, cursed videos generated by text-to-video freeware, Call of Duty-reminiscent run, and gun POV videos of soldiers in war-torn landscapes. Moving from the mundane to the disturbing, content – promotional, feelgood, aspirational, fake news, or war – increasingly occupies the aesthetic, narrative, and representational tropes of entertainment and gaming. Content mimics the logic and infrastructures of these platforms and cultures to gain mass traction, engineer attention, and rewrite narrative and societal norms. Scrolling has become doomscrolling has become never-ending horror.

Operating between the real and the increasingly unreal, information and misinformation, intimidation and gloating, Anna Engelhardt, Silvia Dal Dosso (Clusterduck Collective), Aleena Chia, and Svitlana Matviyenko dissect how such catchy, triggering, adrenaline-inducing content act to distract online users, instrumentalising them as active agents in the dissemination of propaganda and PR campaigns, from the banality of celebrity-feuds to the justification and support for war.

Silvia dal Dosso's presentation was based on the work #MEMEMANIFESTO by clusterduck, which was realised within the framework of a European Media Art Platform residency at IMPAKT, co-funded by the European Union. This presentation was co-funded by Onassis Stegi.