The Art Room #11 by CURA. for Soho House Rome presents Eva and Franco Mattes in conversation with Luca Lo Pinto.

The talk focuses on the life of images after intention: meme economies, anonymous production, and the training logic of AI systems — including a “Cursed Cat” model, a case study in how machine learning feeds on collective desire, low-resolution folklore, and the soft violence of cuteness. From early net interventions to this AI model, their practice insists on letting the image go feral.

BIO
Eva & Franco Mattes (b. 1976) are an Italian-American conceptual artist duo known for their pioneering contributions to Net Art under the moniker 0100101110101101.org. Since the mid-1990s they have created works that blur reality and fiction—appropriating websites, staging media hoaxes, and producing interventions that probe the ethics and politics of digital life, often employing dark humour. Their projects, including the public exposure of the contents of their entire computer in Life Sharing, releasing a computer virus as an art intervention during the Venice Biennale, and working extensively with internet memes as both subject and material, examine issues of authenticity, surveillance, and the impact of online culture. Their installations, online experiments, and LOLcat sculptures have been exhibited internationally at institutions such as SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Venice Biennale.