opening: friday 20 march, 17.00 - 20.00

Upstream Gallery is proud to present the group exhibition CONTENT MACHINES – Jouissance, curated by Constant Dullaart.

CONTENT MACHINES – Jouissance excavates an ongoing confrontation with automated production, tracing a lineage from cybernetic experiments and automatic art through early network provocations, algorithmic feeds, to today's generative AI slop. As McKenzie Wark observes, we now labor within "a mode of production based on information that has itself become a commodity." Featuring works by Sam Lavigne, Tega Brain, Dirk Paesmans, Eva and Franco Mattes, Clusterduck, Jonas Lund and Constant Dullaart, the exhibition reveals how artists have consistently exposed the infrastructure of content machines, from early web absurdism to contemporary algorithmic critique and AI-generated detritus.

What Yanis Varoufakis terms "technofeudalism" finds aesthetic response here: artists as vassals learning to sabotage the lord's machinery. The works scrape the repressed unconscious of prompt culture, feed art history back into generators that cannibalize it into new work, and compose algorithmically optimized affect for platforms that can't tell the difference. Video essays rewrite themselves hourly, AI slop evolves from grotesque to seamless across sculptural iterations, and feeds jolt and flitch through infinite scroll as nervous system. Authorship dissolves into endless unique editions where algorithms dictate the conditions of their own making. Jouissance keeps the feed alive. Compulsive consumption of content you informed and a machine authored. These works don't resist that machinery. They détourne it. We are content machines.

artists

Sam Lavigne, Tega Brain, Dirk Paesmans (JODI), Eva and Franco Mattes, Clusterduck, Jonas Lund and Constant Dullaart

curator

Constant Dullaart

 

Image:

The Mistake Is the Message, 2026