Eva & Franco Mattes: The Bots (British Market)

The Bots is a series of video installations based on interviews with internet content moderators. The interviews were conducted in collaboration with journalist Adrian Chen during a year-long investigation. Actors reenacted the interviews from home, filming themselves using their phones.

In the installation version, each video is installed on the back of a customized office desk of the same brand used at Facebook’s Berlin moderation center, where the interviewees worked. To tell their stories the artists have borrowed the aesthetics of “fake makeup tutorials” often used on social media to bypass censorship. Serious discourse – addressing topics such as violence, sexual abuse, hate speech and terrorism – is constantly interrupted by makeup tips. In The Bots (British Market), Jesse Hoffman shares the testimonies of a moderator who talks about the (linguistic) requirements and classifications of hate speech, nudity as a basis for censorship, and the psychological strain of the work. Makeup is a way of concealing imperfections on our faces, in a way not so different from content moderation, which beautifies the surface of the internet by removing unwanted content.

Eva & Franco Mattes are an Italian artist duo living in New York. They were among the first artists to use the internet as a medium to create art. Through videos, installations and websites, their work responds to and dissects our contemporary networked condition, always approaching the ethics and politics of life online with a darkly humorous edge. Their works can be found in the collections of the SFMOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Fotomuseum Winterthur, X Museum and the Walker Art Center. Links to many of Mattes' projects can be found at their website: https://0100101110101101.org

Proposed by Cornelius Ferber