Eva & Franco Mattes are among today's foremost artists of networked culture. This exhibition continues their recent investigation into the gap between online culture's polished surface and its murky ethical depths.
The exhibition title is derived from the internet slang term ‘rage bait’: content engineered to provoke a visceral emotional response before reason can intervene. Spanning installation, video, and generative AI, the show explores how rage bait is the logical — often inevitable — endpoint of platforms optimised for user engagement.
At Palazzo Franchetti the artists subject a suite of 16th century rooms to architectural banalization. A scenography of prefabricated components including raised flooring, cages, and cable trays (most commonly fitted in datacentres and crypto mining facilities) ‘support’ two new bodies of work. The first of these, Cursed Cat (in the Dataset) (2025), involves a computer running a Large Language Model trained exclusively on images of a single sculpture: a black, earless, stuffed cat, its expression frozen somewhere between triumph and rage—a physical incarnation of the well-known internet meme ‘Cursed Cat.’ Visitors encounter this uncanny figure upon entering the space, where it poses for a moving camera mounted on a robotic arm, that also captures them in the background. The ever-evolving AI model is a generative system that constantly spews out novel iterations of ‘Cursed Cat,’ distributing them on the internet where they can be absorbed into future AI training datasets. The artists intend “to inject a new mythological figure into generative image streams.” In other words, “to corrupt or alter the imagination of AI,” so that the ‘Cursed Cat’ becomes a ghost in the machine—liable to appear periodically no matter what a user’s prompt may be. Nearby, other AI-generated ‘cursed cats’ are made physical in a series of sculptures: using materials such as wood-carved from the Dolomites, glass forged in Murano, and plastic food replica from Japan.
As visitors proceed through Palazzo Franchetti, they next encounter Are You Still There? (2025), a series of AI-generated videos in which ‘Italian Brainrot’ characters restage real conversations from a suicide prevention hotline. The conversations come from a publicly available dataset whose origins remain murky. These verbal exchanges predate AI but have been used to train the very chatbots people now treat as substitutes for a psychoanalyst. The artwork probes the “Eliza effect”—Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 discovery that people readily attribute empathy to digital systems that merely rephrase inputs or questions—to ask what is at stake when this tendency meets genuine vulnerability.
At the second venue presenting RAGE BAIT—a private swimming pool located next to Palladio’s famous Il Redentore church—the pair stage a monumental site-specific video installation titled But I Love Human (2025). Here, the pool water ripples with the reflection of moving images generated by a massive LED screen suspended over the water. The work’s staging creates a contemporary reflection akin to that of the Greek myth of Narcissus, who vainly fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. But I Love Human (2025) comprises a ten-minute supercut featuring performers who mimic videogames ‘non-player characters’ (NPCs) during live streams—repeating mechanical gestures and scripted dialogue for online audiences, often for pay. There is an eerie fascination in watching them enact these repetitive routines, as if trapped in an endless loop. The work frames this as a symptom of a culture increasingly shaped by algorithmic demand. This strange loop was first made explicit by Kraftwerk: humans impersonating machines that impersonate humans, but its cultural lineage runs back to Charlie Chaplin’s factory worker
in Modern Times—whose entire body appears consumed by a turning screw. As But I Love Human makes clear, today’s assembly lines include TikTok and other platforms where the focus of automation is not just labour, but one’s own self.
RAGE BAIT arrives at a moment when provocation is no longer fringe but is instead native to digital infrastructures. Under these conditions, the strange is the new normal — a feedback loop in which platforms, users, and algorithms train one another into ever more reactive configurations.