Our screens are overwhelmed by visual saturation of cosmic proportions, featuring increasingly captivating and bizarre content. The exhibition From Spam to Slop examines two overflowing phenomena of contemporary visual culture driven by artificial intelligence: SPAM ART, a subversive artistic practice that saturates social media and digital spaces, and SLOP, an industrial mechanism producing strange and unsettling AI-generated imagery for commercial gain and manipulative purposes.
Exhibition From Spam to Slop
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FROM SPAM ART: The Art of Controlled Submersion
Born in the NFT crypto-art communities of Discord and Twitter, the SPAM ART movement develops a recognizable aesthetic language: humor, garish colors, delirious typography, aberrant compositions featuring the iconic SPAM can. What interests SPAM ART members: turning the internet into a playground by spamming everyone and infiltrating everywhere they're not invited. Without a manifesto or definition, this visual movement—a blend of Dada and trolling—is described as follows by Bittty Gordon, one of its most active members: "The SPAM ART movement has an innocent quality. It's really candid. People might see something pathetic in it. We just want to laugh and spam!"
TO SLOP: The Industrialization of AI-Generated Weirdness
In contrast to SPAM ART and its claimed naivety, SLOP represents the other side of this visual saturation. With its low-quality content mass-generated by AI for purely economic or even political purposes, SLOP proliferates on social media. Trump rebuilding Gaza, Elon Musk land-sailing, Jesus as a shrimp, giant babies impossible to satisfy... These decoy videos are everywhere and viral. SLOP producers exploit our shared cultural references to produce visuals that are repulsive yet hypnotic. This profusion of images plunges us into a state of intoxicating amusement, disgust, sometimes paranoia, where each scroll becomes an unconscious investigation into the depths of the worst.
In the exhibition, Mementum Labs questions notions of copyright and intellectual property in the age of viral images created by artificial intelligence, with the subject of study being: Tung Tung Sahur.
Albertine Meunier and Olivain Porry created The Slop Machine, an interactive installation that continuously views and comments on an Instagram feed with two modes: machine or human. Visitors can judge and comment on the images. With SpamBots, Neil Mendoza poetically and ironically stages digital overproduction. In Spambots, canned goods transformed into robotic storytellers collectively generate texts inspired by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
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