Today there is an overwhelming abundance of content generation – and I use those words explicitly – moving at a pace unseen previously in human history. Even within digital and post-internet art, it is astounding to watch the rapidity with which the fine arts have jumped from Refik Anadol’s giant computer-generated animations, to Beeple’s naïve NFT art, to completely democratised, AI-generated imitations of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime. Astounding and terrifying.

 

When the Italian Futurists embraced the concept of speed to make their art, they were driven by an exhilaration for a utopian efficiency and productivity. With the steam engine as his symbol, Umberto Marinetti saw fascism as the philosophical complement to his aesthetic race to utopia. The path of the futurists is possibly being repaved. As influencers and generative AI flood the ahistoricism of the internet with “maxxed” tropes of anti-establishment sentiment, traditional gender structures, and biological and profit augmentation, the worst of the 20th century is being regurgitated as brand new™ all over again. Jean Baudrillard’s predictions of simulacra and simulation are in seemingly perpetual motion now. Internet futurists’ steam engine has been supplanted by algorithms, speedily converting human labour, emotion, and experience into an ordered, paradisal singularity. But it’s not a paradise. It’s a prison; a dehumanising sea of monotonous repetition. 

 

The “Dead Internet” conspiracy theory tells us that everything online is generated by machines, and while that is objectively untrue, the swift rise of generative AI that we ourselves enabled sends a clear, Frankensteinian message about art in our algorithmic age: it does not need us anymore. We have set the machine to repeat; to make copies of the photocopy forever. The internet is “dead” and real life is the internet. The artist is obsolete.

 

Unless…

 

“Slop” is the result of the machine processes we have put into motion, and which we facilitate by our online predisposition. It is the constant production and reproduction of mass-appealing content. If the artist is to survive in this environment, then her role is to hybridise the sensory and creative to best represent our lived experience in a digital age. This is what Alexandra Jonscher is pioneering. 

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Having established a visual language in her practice thus far, Jonscher’s distinctive loops and playfulness now play a more distinctive role in her techno-aesthetic process as a cypher. Through extraction, manipulation, and refinement, Jonscher is like a scientist in a laboratory, testing pop culture inputs and outputs against sensations of colour, light, space, and emotion. Like a pearl diver, that which she brings up from the depths of the “slop” sea is rehumanised by her own hand. With texture, pigment, and contour, Jonscher (re)imbues chaotic beauty into the calculated, machine-generated product.

 

I’ve been studying Jonscher’s work for over five years now. I crave the new. The real new. Something original. Real originality. And that’s what keeps me focused on Jonscher’s work. It’s what keeps me writing about art, whatever that word means from one year to another. 

 

To me, my words and Jonscher’s works are intertwined now. Two people-turned-artists, now turned friends, through the pursuit for reality in an increasingly fake world. Fake news. Fake noise. Fake tits. Fake friends. It is so easy to simulate and broadcast. The new reality is fakeness. At first one might assume that the ‘Apparitions’ of Jonscher’s eponymous exhibition are the diminishing photocopies of the human spirit I so passionately mourn. No. Instead this show is a séance and Jonscher is the digital necromancer, conjuring out of oblivion the shards of human strangeness and imperfection that remind us of our agency in the torrent of content and “slop.” Jonscher’s effigies to fakeness help us find something that feels pretty real.