Sublime Slop Landscape

The Broken Promise

The tech industry promised transcendence and a better world, but what we got instead are machines that fail and are programmed to lie, corporate techno-cults with delusions of grandeur, and algorithmic systems designed to soothe, extract, and control. Systems that succeed in fragmenting us while profiting from our complacency. This project interrogates algorithmic control: how systems exploit psychological vulnerabilities, shape taste and political consciousness, and erode critical thinking while presenting themselves as neutral infrastructure.

In a post-truth world where reality dissolves into spectacle and politics into theater, a grand tragic opera of slop feels disturbingly appropriate. In a time of ecological, geopolitical, and algorithmic saturation collapse, the only honest artistic response is something epic, beautiful, stupid, and broken all at once.

Sleeping with the Enemy

I work with AI because it’s better to keep your enemies close. Over the past year, I’ve trained models to exaggerate digital landscapes with glitches and hallucinations, framing error as resistance. Drawing on glitch feminism and decolonial critique, I treat glitches not as aberrations but as ruptures where the violence of the system becomes visible.

The project is aesthetically inspired by European Romanticism (which responded to the Industrial Revolution with melancholy and ego exaltation) and Dadaism (which confronted the World War with absurdity and a rejection of meaning). I train AI to generate dramatic landscapes imbued with Romantic melancholy and what the algorithm understands as “sublime,” embedding text within them, extending my interest in miscommunication through the symbiosis of image and poetry.

The tension between Romantic grandeur, Dadaist chaos, and delirious geometries is central. Could poorly written texts and compositional errors operate as digital sabotage, as a rejection of meaning? My interest is not in representing these artistic movements but in activating their logics: works that exist between emotion and negation, affective excess and the collapse of connection.

The Slop as Infiltration

This is a series of reels designed for Instagram and TikTok, which attempt to “translate” some of my recent readings that interest me for their critical perspective on the technocratic present: the proliferation of automated images, the aestheticization of error, the attention economy, the global crisis of loneliness, and the concrete implications these tools have on the political and emotional state of the world.

Instead of illustrating the theory, I used AI’s tendency toward melodrama as a weapon, inducing it to generate pseudo-profound discourses and construct deliberately ridiculous poetry from fragments of critical discourse.

I pass the texts to ChatGPT or Claude to process and turn them into short (and cheesy) poems. Then, VozartAI “invents” songs full of melodrama and emotion from these poems. Next, I generate the landscapes with my models trained in Stable Diffusion, and from these static images, KlingAI creates the animations. My role, then, is something like that of an editor, executive producer, and director all at once.

The goal isn’t to illustrate ideas, but to force them through the funnel of the short format—that mandatory standard that platforms impose as the dominant grammar and that has us literally trapped.

These short videos are more like rehearsals or tests for a much larger and more ambitious project that I’m developing behind the scenes.