Ragebait. It was word of the year in 2025, used to describe “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive”. It’s safe to say that we’ve all fallen prey to this kind of content at some point or another, no matter how attuned we are to the vast, expensive, and energy-intensive systems that transform our attention into billion-dollar profits. In fact, ragebait is the “logical, maybe even inevitable, outcome” of these systems, point out the artists Eva & Franco Mattes, designed precisely to bypass any kind of logical response and hit our limbic system “just a millisecond before reason can step in to analyse the content rationally”.

It makes sense that the Italian-American artist duo’s latest exhibition – literally titled RAGE BAIT – is dedicated to this phenomenon. As pioneers of the net art movement in the mid-90s, their previous projects have included a year-long stint running a hoax Vatican website, a series of grisly performances over Chatroulette, and portraits taken in the virtual world of Second Life. “Looking back, our work has always navigated a contradiction,” they tell Dazed. “We critique these systems while being deeply, perhaps irrationally, drawn to inhabit and explore them.”

Presented by Autotelic Foundation and hosted across two locations in Venice – the Palazzo Franchetti, and Le Cabanon, a private pool on Giudecca – the show opens with a “cursed cat” sculpture: black, earless, angry and/or excited, recorded by a camera attached to a robotic arm. Behind the scenes of “Cursed Cat (in the Dataset)” an LLM turns the resulting images, including snapshots of the audience, into different iterations on the freakish feline that are also shared online. As Eva & Franco Mattes describe it, the cat becomes a “ghost in the machine” or a “new mythological figure” as it’s injected into datasets used to train future AI systems.

The cursed cat is far from the only meme to infiltrate Venice via RAGE BAIT though. In “Are You Still There?” (2025) conversations from a suicide prevention hotline are restaged by Italian brainrot characters, while “But I Love Human” (2024) fills a swimming pool with a ten-minute supercut of NPC livestreams. Gang gang. Venetian gelato so good. Yes yes yes.

Below, Eva & Franco Mattes tell us more about RAGE BAIT.

You’ve been exploring digital culture and online life for almost 30 years. Where does this new show fit into the broader arc of your careers?

Eva & Franco Mattes: In the early days, the web felt like a kind of wild frontier, identity was fluid, authorship unstable, and the rules were still being written. We were drawn to myth-making, hoaxes, and the ease with which reality could be bent online. Over time, that environment hardened: platforms became more centralised, optimised, and extractive. Our focus shifted accordingly, from playful subversion to examining how these systems shape behaviour, emotion, and even morality, turning a space of possibility into an infrastructure driven by metrics that reward intensity over nuance.

This exhibition sits within that trajectory. Ragebait isn’t an anomaly; it’s a feature, the outcome of an economy where attention is the primary currency, and outrage travels fastest. We try to make this contradiction visible, tangible. We trace how these online dynamics spill into physical space, bodies, and politics, mirroring our own shift from exploring what the internet could be to confronting what it has become.

Can you give some background on the ‘cursed cat’? Why do you think these kinds of symbols tend to proliferate so widely in our culture today?

Eva & Franco Mattes: Cats have always been more than animals: gods in Egypt, demons in the Middle Ages, memes in our feeds. They were also among the first images fed to AI, shaping how machines learned to see.

Today, the strange is the new normal. These kinds of symbols spread so easily because they’re incredibly efficient. Cute, uncanny, fluffy creatures are immediately legible; they don’t need context, they bypass language, they trigger an emotional response almost instantly. You don’t have to ‘understand’ them, you just ‘feel’ them. That makes them perfect for platforms built on speed and vibes.

“Cute, uncanny, fluffy creatures are immediately legible... they trigger an emotional response almost instantly. That makes them perfect for platforms built on speed and vibes”

In the NPC artwork ‘But I Love Human’, you explore how humans have entered the cybernetic loop, their actions driven by machine logic. Is this a fair analysis? And how does this differ from the digital dynamics you witnessed in your work decades earlier?

Eva & Franco Mattes: There is an eerie fascination in watching [performers] 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. Today’s assembly lines include TikTok and other platforms, where the focus of automation is not just labour, but one’s own self.

Where do you think ragebait ‘comes from’? Who is to ‘blame’ for the inflammatory, polarising content we see in our feeds today?

Eva & Franco Mattes: A key moment in the shift from content to ‘vibe’ might be the Cambridge Analytica involvement with Trump’s campaign in 2016. In that context, political communication moved increasingly toward emotional micro-targeting, based on personal data and designed to trigger affective responses like fear, anger, or enthusiasm. The campaign relied not much on programs and arguments, but rather on messages and images capable of spreading quickly and generating emotional impact. At that point, politics and communication at large began to shift from the transmission of content to the production of shared vibes across digital platforms.

Has the age of infinite images, especially downstream of generative AI, changed how you approach image-making yourselves?

Eva & Franco Mattes: On the 90s internet, the approach was very DIY. Artists didn’t just make content; they often built the means of making and distributing it. You learned how to code your own website, you hacked tools and used software in unintended ways, you controlled distribution… The equivalent today might be ‘going upstream’, meaning developing your own tools, collecting your own data sets, training your own models, or exploring processes over the final product. In a way, it’s a return to that early internet mindset?

What, do you think, is the artist’s role in this endless slopscape?

Eva & Franco Mattes: It's hard to answer. Maybe mythmaking? People have always created myths because myths help make sense of things that would otherwise feel confusing, unpredictable, or overwhelming. Before scientific explanations, myths gave meaning to natural events, turning abstract ideas like good and evil, or chaos and order, into narratives that are easier to understand and remember. Myths also created shared values and identities. Maybe artists can be mythmakers.

Autotelic Foundation presents Eva & Franco Mattes’s RAGE BAIT at Palazzo Franchetti from May 6 to June 30, and at Le Cabanon from May 6 to May 31.