RAGE BAIT is a two-venue exhibition by Eva & Franco Mattes in Venice, exploring how AI, memes, and platform logics turn provocation and vulnerability into content. Curated by Nadim Samman & Luisa Haustein and presented by Autotelic Foundation.
RAGE BAIT presents new installations, videos, and generative AI works by Italian artist duo Eva & Franco Mattes, staged in a 16th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal and a private swimming pool on Giudecca, concurrent with La Biennale Arte 2026.
At Palazzo Franchetti, a data-centre-like scenography hosts Cursed Cat (in the Dataset), a large language model trained only on images of a single “cursed cat” sculpture, continuously generating and releasing new variations online to “corrupt or alter the imagination of AI,” alongside physical AI-born cat sculptures in wood, Murano glass, and Japanese food replica plastic.
Nearby, Are You Still There? reanimates murky, publicly available suicide hotline transcripts through AI-generated “Italian Brainrot” characters, probing the Eliza effect and what happens when synthetic empathy meets real vulnerability.
At Le Cabanon, the site-specific video work But I Love Human suspends a giant LED screen above the pool, casting a Narcissus-like reflection of TikTok-style NPC performers trapped in repetitive, gamified gestures—framing them as symptoms of a culture where platforms, users, and algorithms mutually train each other into ever more reactive, automated selves.
Venues:
Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKeXUaQHZ8E&feature=youtu.be
