Eva & Franco Mattes in Venice

A series new works by the duo Eva & Franco Mattes – who, for over twenty-five years, have been exploring the transformations of digital culture with clarity and irony – addresses one of the central themes of our present: the way in which algorithms and digital platforms shape emotions, behaviours and the collective imagination.

From the provocations of early net art in the 1990s to projects that have challenged notions of identity, surveillance, invisible labour and network infrastructure, their practice has consistently anticipated issues that have now become central. With Life Sharing (2001-2003), anticipating Facebook, they made online private life radically transparent; No Fun (2010) questioned the viewer’s responsibility within the platform environment; whilst works such as Dark Content (2015) or BEFNOED (2013-) brought to light the hidden labour of content moderation and the systemic violence underpinning the social media economy.

With RAGE BAIT, this research engages with the new ecology of generative artificial intelligence and the attention economy. The title itself draws on the online term used to describe content deliberately crafted to provoke outrage and impulsive reactions, transforming anger into economic value through the algorithms that govern platform visibility.
At Palazzo Franchetti, the elegant 16th-century rooms are traversed by a landscape of raised access flooring, cable trays and metal structures reminiscent of the architecture of data centres and server farms, making visible the normally hidden infrastructure that underpins our digital lives and which generally conceals the flow of content within them.

At the entrance, visitors encounter Cursed Cat (in the Dataset) (2025), an installation in which a language model has been trained exclusively on images of a single black stuffed cat, destined to become a sort of new myth of artificial intelligence. Continuously filmed by a robotic arm alongside the visitors, the character ceaselessly generates new images which are fed back online with the aim of contaminating future training datasets. It is an ironic yet deeply critical gesture: altering the visual memory of machines from within, insinuating a ‘ghost’ destined to re-emerge in future AI outputs.

The exhibition continues with Are You Still There? (2025), one of the most unsettling works in the exhibition. Here, characters generated by artificial intelligence reinterpret authentic conversations from a suicide prevention helpline, which are subsequently used in the training datasets for conversational chatbots. The work revisits the famous ‘ELIZA effect’ identified by Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s, demonstrating how readily we continue to attribute empathy and intentionality to artificial systems even when they merely process data and language.

RAGE BAIT is a reflection on new forms of relationship between human beings, algorithms and image-production systems. Through irony, unease and a refined ability to stage the contradictions of the present, the artists invite us once again to take a critical look at what lies behind the seemingly innocuous interfaces that punctuate our daily lives.

For anyone in Venice at the moment, this is one of the most interesting opportunities to engage with an artistic practice that, for over two decades, has continued to explore the relationship between humans and technology, anticipating many of the questions that now feature in the debate on artificial intelligence.