#BiennaleArte2026 - Palazzo Franchetti - Eva and Franco Mattes - Rage Bait

 Palazzo Franchetti 

Eva and Franco Mattes - Rage Bait

At Palazzo Franchetti - Autotelic Foundation presents - Rage Bait - Until June 30 - curated - Nadim Samman and Luisa Haustein - an exhibition by the Italian artists Eva and Franco Mattes.  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.

The artists subject a suite of 16th century rooms in the palazzo to architectural banalisation. 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 - Cursed cat (in the Dataset -2025) and Are You Still There? - 2025.

Eva and 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.

Eva and Franco Mattes

Cursed Cat (in the Dataset) - 2025, involves a computer running a Large Language Model train 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', where it poses for a moving camera mounted on a robotic arm, that also captures 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 are absorbed into future AI training datasets. The artist intend "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 user's prompt maybe.

Also exhibited other AI-generated 'cursed cats' are made physical in a series of sculptures: using material such as wood-carved from the Dolomites, glass forged in Murano - above - and plastic food replica from Japan.

Are You Still There? - 2025 - a series of AI-generated videos in which 'Italian Brainrot' characters restage real conversations from a suicide prevention hotline.

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.

Le Cabanon

Rage Bait 

The second venue presenting Rage Bait was in a private swimming pool located next to Palladio's Redentore church on the Giudecca where Eva and Franco Mattes staged a monumental site-specific video installation titled - But I Love Human - 2025 . There the pool water rippled with the reflection of moving images generated by a massive LED screen suspended over the water.  The work staging created a contemporary reflection akin to that of the Greek myth Narcissus, who vainly fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. 

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