VENICE.- Autotelic Foundation presents RAGE BAIT, an exhibition of new works by the Italian artist duo Eva & Franco Mattes. Staged across two venues in Venice, RAGE BAIT will be on view at the Palazzo Franchetti overlooking the Grand Canal, and Le Cabanon—a private swimming pool on Giudecca. Concurrent to the Venice Biennale 2026, RAGE BAIT will be open to the public from May 6.
The exhibition title is derived from the internet slang term ‘rage bait’: content engineered to provoke outrage or extract a visceral emotional response before reason can intervene. Spanning installation, video, and generative AI, the show explores how rage bait is the logical endpoint of platforms optimised for user engagement. Eva & Franco Mattes have spent over twenty years tracking the lacunae of networked life and have been influential on two successive generations of artists exploring the cultural impacts of digital change. This exhibition extends their focus on tensions between the polished surface of online content and its murky ethical depths.
At Palazzo Franchetti the artists subject a suite of 16th century rooms to architectural banalization. A scenography of prefabricated components including raised flooring, cages, and cable trays ‘support’ two new bodies of work. The first of these, Cursed Cat (in the Dataset) (2025), involves a computer running a Large Language Model trained exclusively on images of a single sculpture: a black, earless, stuffed cat, its expression frozen somewhere between triumph and rage. Visitors encounter this figure upon entering the space, where it poses for a moving camera mounted on a robotic arm, that also captures them in the background. The AI model constantly spews out novel iterations of ‘Cursed Cat,’ distributing them on the internet where they can be absorbed into future AI training datasets. The artists intend “to corrupt or alter the imagination of AI,” so that the ‘Cursed Cat’ becomes a ghost in the machine—appearing periodically no matter the prompt. Nearby, other AI-generated ‘cursed cats’ are made physical in a series of sculptures using materials such as wood, glass, and plastic.
As visitors proceed through Palazzo Franchetti, they next encounter Are You Still There? (2025), a series of AI-generated videos in which ‘Italian Brainrot’ characters restage real conversations from a suicide prevention hotline. The conversations come from a publicly available dataset whose origins remain murky. These verbal exchanges have been used to train the chatbots people now treat as substitutes for a psychoanalyst. The artwork probes the “Eliza effect”—that people readily attribute empathy to digital systems—to ask what is at stake when this tendency meets genuine vulnerability.
At the second venue—a private swimming pool located next to Il Redentore—the pair stage a site-specific video installation titled But I Love Human (2025). A contemporary Narcissus, it comprises a ten-minute supercut featuring performers who mimic videogames ‘non-player characters’ (NPCs) during live streams—repeating mechanical gestures and scripted dialogue for online audiences. There is an eerie fascination in watching them enact these repetitive routines, as if trapped in an endless loop. The work holds up a mirror to culture shaped by algorithms, reframing TikTok and other platforms as the new assembly line—wherein the focus of automation is not just labour but one’s own self. 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.
This exhibition is commissioned by Autotelic Foundation. Additional kind support from Palazzo Bentivoglio and Apalazzo gallery.
