In the beginning of the internet, there was Spam. Now, with AI, we have Slop

Our screens are overwhelmed by visual saturation of cosmic proportions, featuring increasingly captivating and bizarre content. The exhibition From Spam to Slop examines two overflowing phenomena of contemporary visual culture driven by artificial intelligence: SPAM ART, a subversive artistic practice that saturates social media and digital spaces, and SLOP, an industrial mechanism producing strange and unsettling AI-generated imagery for commercial gain and manipulative purposes.


FROM SPAM ART: The art of controlled flooding

Born in the crypto-art NFT communities of Discord and Twitter, the SPAM ART movement develops a recognizable aesthetic language: humor, garish colors, delirious typography, and aberrant compositions featuring the iconic SPAM can.

What drives SPAM ART members: transforming the internet into a playground by spamming everyone and infiltrating spaces where they’re unwelcome. They take pleasure in invading the Centre Pompidou’s NFT collection by flooding it with hundreds of unsolicited works, overwhelming specific hashtags on X (Twitter) with their compositions, or rendering online exhibition spaces unusable.

Without a manifesto or definition, this visual movement blending Dada and trolling is described as follows by Bittty Gordon, one of the most active members: “The spam art movement has an innocent character. It’s truly candid. People might see something pathetic in it. We simply want to laugh and spam!”.

John Hamon, an occasional member of the movement, is also present in the exhibition with works specially created for the occasion. A street spammer, his work fits into this dynamic through a practice based on the massive and unsolicited deployment of his portrait since 2001, which naturally aligns with the spirit of Spam Art. Having himself proclaimed the end of the contemporary art period, he sees in this type of movement, which is no longer in tune with old institutional and commercial dogmas, the emergence of a new era in art history. This cycle is meant to be decentralized, freed from traditional channels and driven by new aesthetic, economic and visibility strategies.

Following the Trash Art exhibition in 2023, Avant Galerie Vossen continues to showcase and chronicle the evolution of crypto-art and generative art.


SLOP: a flood of cheap, substandard AI content saturating the web.

TO SLOP: The industrialization of the bizarre through AI

Faced with SPAM ART and its proclaimed naivety, SLOP represents the other side of this visual saturation. With its low-quality content mass-generated by AI for purely economic or even political purposes, SLOP proliferates across social media. Trump rebuilding Gaza, Elon Musk on a sand yacht, Jesus as a shrimp, giant babies impossible to satisfy... These decoy videos are everywhere and go viral.

SLOP producers exploit our shared cultural references to create visuals that are repulsive yet hypnotic. This profusion of images plunges us into a state of intoxicating amusement, disgust, sometimes paranoia, where each scroll becomes an unconscious investigation into the depths of the worst.

The SLOP economy is organized around genuine content factories that master and monetize virality. Its workers use generative AI to create real-time content about current events - Los Angeles fires transformed into apocalypse, a giant Trump hurling bombs at Iran. Platforms then favor this type of content in their algorithms and armies of bots amplify their distribution.

SLOP thus extends the extraction of value from our online attention. And this flooding summons new aesthetic practices. Artist featured in the exhibition, Bennett Waisbren is the creator of Instagram’s most-watched AI video. He produces creations that deliberately borrow the aesthetic of industrial Slop. But unlike content farms that generate en masse, Waisbren refines every detail to achieve the right degree of strangeness that will unsettle the viewer.

His process reveals the thin boundary between the economic logic of algorithms and artistic intention: when does SLOP become art? And isn’t it already?

Artists who explore the Slop

In the exhibition, Mementum Labs questions notions of copyright and intellectual property in the age of viral images created by artificial intelligence, with his subject of study being : Tung Tung Sahur, brainrot figure that became a global phenomenon.

Albertine Meunier et Olivain Porry have created specifically for the show The Slop Machine an interactive installation that continuously views and comments on an Instagram feed with two modes: machine or human. Visitors can judge the images and comment on them.

With SpamBots, Neil Mendoza stages digital overproduction both poetically and ironically. In Spambots, tin cans transformed into robotic storytellers collectively generate texts inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

So no, the internet isn’t dead as Dead Internet Theory proponents proclaim—it simply swarms with life that’s no longer purely human. From SPAM to SLOP seeks to expose this teeming ecosystem that enabled Slop’s proliferation: platform algorithms, bots, humans, political contexts, disinformation tactics. Beyond mere attention-grabbing mechanics, SLOP transforms the absurd into profit, the false into strategy, and makes the consequences tangible…

Glossary

Tung Tung Sahur
A brainrot character who became a global phenomenon, an emblematic viral creature of contemporary internet culture. His name, of Indonesian origin, refers to “tung tung” (stick used for hitting) and “sahur” (meal eaten before dawn during Ramadan), evoking a figure that brutally awakens. This character perfectly embodies the slop aesthetic: a hybrid form, repetitive and infinitely varied by AI algorithms, illustrating how an image can create an event through pure visual contamination.

Italian Brainrot
Brainrot refers to both a state of mental saturation and a genre of recurring viral characters that embody this degeneration. Along with other characters like Chimpanzini Bananini and Tralalero Tralala, Tung Tung Sahur is linked to a creative movement called Italian brainrot, which translates to “Italian-style brain rot.” These characters, created within this movement that emerged in March 2025, are the subject of numerous social media posts of very poor quality. For example, attempts are made to pit the characters against each other to determine which one prevails.

Dead Internet Theory
A conspiracy theory claiming that contemporary internet is primarily composed of content generated by bots and artificial intelligences rather than real humans. This theory maintains that from around 2016-2017, platforms gradually filled with fake accounts, automated content, and artificial interactions, creating the illusion of a living internet when it had actually become largely “dead.