✺ Part of the panel «AI & Digital Justice Tools»
In conjunction with the screening of The Future Will Be Weird AF, I will explore how artists and content creators, particularly those rooted in web-born subcultures, have driven the "weirdification" of both the social web and generative AI tools. From “Google Deep Dream” to recent experiments with “Runway 2” and “Pika,” the weird has become the norm, with dream-like, psychedelic aesthetics going viral and appearing on screens everywhere. At the same time, brands and corporations are struggling to seriously capitalize on this AI-generated content, as many consumers experience discomfort or even repulsion toward these synthetic visuals.
Considering that much of the data feeding models like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney is sourced from the internet, one must ask: Have internet memers, shitposters, and creators successfully reclaimed content that was once extracted from their own digital communities? Can we say that by leveraging text-to-video and text-to-image technologies, these subcultures have not only generated cursed AI memes but also challenged proprietary Gen AI softwares? Or is this just another form of exploitation, to the detriment of the creatives themselves?
During my presentation, I will showcase viral examples of weird advertising and highlight the work of the artistic collective Clusterduck, which I co-founded, alongside contributions from our extended network.
Chair: Ivana Jović
Biography
Silvia Dal Dosso is a creative and film director and a researcher in digital technologies and web subcultures. In 2016 she co-founded Clusterduck, an art collective working in the fields of research, design and transmedia. She regularly writes about art, technology and how to survive it, on Domus, Not, INC Longform, and others.