Silvia Dal Dosso The Future Is Now Finally Weird AF

Videostill from Silvia Dal Dosso, The Future is Now Finally Weird AF, 2025, 13:08 Min., video, colour, sound. Courtesy of the artist

- selected by Inke Arns (HMKV)–

We live in a time of great ambiguity and confusion.

Events keep happening that seem unreal and out of control. Dead celebrities are coming back from heaven in every shape and size. Creators are desperately trying to capitalise on pop culture's ancient splendour. Hyper-flexible humanoid robots are getting ready to cook our eggs. LLMs are unleashed on social media to generate synthetic data and consensus. Internet memers are living a new cursed golden era. Tech overlords are going all in on AGI, using war as their open-air R&D studio. Millionaires are hiding at the bottom of the earth. While the rest of humankind is trapped in a mediated reality, where love is constantly intercepted by emotional advertising, robots and ASMR illusions of pleasure. All around them, the world is burning.

The Future Is Now Finally Weird AF (2025) is the third movie of The Future Is Weird AF Trilogy, a time capsule installation telling the story of the three years (2023–2025) in which LLMs, generative artificial intelligence, and other related AI-industry products entered our lives, reaching massive-scale usage. And of how while generated AI imagery, such as the notorious Will Smith's Spaghetti, was getting more and more “fine”, the world we were raised to survive in was becoming weirder, faster and harder.

The video works are inspired by the Internet Corecore movement and by the documentaries of BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis. As with Curtis’s films, this project is built from found footage. The archival material was not courtesy of BBC, but illegally gathered from the endless stream of news, fragments, and oddities that haunt us online.

The synthetic voice of Curtis is recreated by the artist with the ElevenLabs AI text-to-speech software, alongside a rich variety of sound effects. This text-to-voice intervention is the only AI software used in the work. The rest is pure human obsession, as the artist is trying to make sense of the abundant deluge of images, videos and sound through video editing and writing.

The three films have had a huge circulation across film festivals, independent and institutional screenings, unauthorised projections, and viral videos online, sparking debate about the emotional, cultural, and aesthetic implications of the widespread use of generative artificial intelligence and what we should do about it. Today they are finally brought together in a single installation.

Welcome to the post-post-post-truth AI world. You know it’s not real. But you will suffer the bare consequences of it anyway. And there is more out there. Clueless CEOs and their humanoid robots await you at the door. The Future Is Now Finally Weird AF.

(Text: Silvia Dal Dosso)

 

Silvia Dal Dosso is an artist, writer and a researcher in digital technologies and web subcultures. In 2016 she co-founded Clusterduck, an art collective working in the fields of research, design and transmedia. Her practice spans new media, interactive installations, and transmedia storytelling, often translating complex digital phenomena into tangible, participative experiences.Her latest works with Clusterduck include Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project that collectively explores the occult meanings and communicative potential of memetic symbology, and (W)hole, a collaborative world-building project exploring the hidden world of digital infrastructures. Her recent solo work, the trilogy The Future Is Weird AF, examines the emotional, cultural, and aesthetic implications of the widespread use of generative artificial intelligence over the period of three years (2023–2025).
Her works have been exhibited in venues such as KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague; Ars Electronica, Linz; ICA, London; Villa Arson, Nice; Transmediale, Berlin; Gallerie d’Italia, Naples; Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; Aksioma, Ljubljana; The Influencers, Barcelona; Werkleitz Festival, Halle (Saale); Impakt Festival, Utrecht; re:publica, Berlin; AFO Festival, Olomouc; Cineglobe du CERN, Geneva; IFFR, Rotterdam (among others).
And she was featured on news outlets such as Monopol, ArtReview, Artnet, Spike Art Magazine, Foam Magazine, Kunstforum International, Vice US, Motherboard, Archivio Magazine, Domus, Repubblica, Arte Tracks (Arte TV), L'Œil de Links (Canal+) and Rai Play.