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Slop Mona Lisa, 2026
Oil on canvas
Painted by Art to Your Life
Conceived by artificialworlds
Produced by DemonLovers Inc.
In April 2024, r/midjourney featured a "Grimes-inspired"
Mona Lisa. The AI-generated image garnered 576 upvotes and 41 comments on
Reddit, 1.6 million views on Twitter, and numerous additional views elsewhere.
These numbers are serious; we, too, take Slop Mona Lisa
seriously: as an original fake subordinate to its copy, and as evidence of a
historical event marking the utmost point of exhaustion with infinite
reproducibility. Our decision to return the image to oil on canvas is not an attempt
to restore its dignity or bail it from the digital jail. Mona has reached its
peak.
Few images are better suited for this operation than the
Mona Lisa. Long before AI, the Mona Lisa circulated in various forms—on
postcards, in textbooks, advertisements, memes, posters, ties, wallets, and
even socks. No artwork has been more thoroughly abstracted from its material
origin than Mona.
Walter Benjamin would have described the painting as
possessing an “aura” stemming from age, rarity, and provenance. John Berger
would later argue that the painting’s global prominence wasn’t as inevitable as
we’d like to think. Mona Lisa became truly famous after her theft from the
Louvre in 1911, when the image was mechanically reproduced and spread
worldwide. The loss of the museum collectible resulted in an excess of its
copies, creating a media spectacle.
Our painting sees AI generation as the natural extension of
this process. AI operates as a totalizing remix engine, generating infinite
combinations of poor icon—Grimes Mona Lisa, cat Mona Lisa, e-girl Mona Lisa,
travelling across the web. The act of creation has long been deskilled and, as
Seth Price would probably argue, the “aura” of Slop Mona Lisa has migrated into
distribution and dissolved into discourse.
In this context, the question is no longer whether the Mona
Lisa can be desecrated (it surely has been), but whether her eternal aura has
finally been exhausted through infinite reproduction. Does it circulate
differently now that the audience is aware that this particular version is made
of oil rather than pixels? Our mortician-painters embalmed a moment when the
Mona Lisa briefly became a Grimes-inspired e-girl, circulated millions of
times, and became obsolete.
Unlike our previous work, Slop Mona Lisa isn’t conceived by
us in the slightest. Why contribute to the wasteland of AI-generated content
when we can mine it instead? We did not generate this image, nor did we paint
it. The fetish of authorship, too, has exhausted itself. Our desire to return
the image to oil is absolutely nostalgic, but it is not nostalgia for a
conservative gesture. The infinite has become pathological, so we dream of
closure, recognizing that it will never come.
La Mère et La Fille, diptych, oil on canvas, 2024
Originally, we AI-generated two images of timeless and captive beauty, later translating them into oil. This translation was done by painters in Dafen Village, China, over a month-long correspondence. We instructed them to retain the compression and anatomical slippage, an unlikely stylistic choice in commercial replicas—they bread and butter, their specialty. To us, this process of (mis)translation and labour outsourcing exposed an unexpected continuity between AI image generation and Dafen’s industrial painting practices: both rely on low-wage labor, standardized production, and a structural disregard for authorship.
The left panel reimagines Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, extracting the woman from her mythological horizon and placing her against the muralesque banality of an industrial wall. The sea is swamped for a painted backdrop; the woman, dressed in white Shein lingerie, is held quietly captive, a male figure exercises control. The tableau pokes fun at the original’s rhetoric of divine femininity, revealing the long continuity between classical ideals of female beauty constructed by male authors and the contemporary infrastructures that frame women as objects of surveillance, fantasy, and possession.
The right panel similarly descends from the celestial to the terrestrial register. Drawing on the Madonna and Child, it replaces the pastoral setting with a messy, lived-in apartment occupied by a woman of color. Pets, blankets, and scattered belongings construct a counter-image to the sanitized maternal ideal of Christian iconography. Outside the window, ecological collapse replaces the promise of salvation. Here, the Madonna emerges as a single mother embedded in material precarity rather than divine exception. The work turns the motif from transcendence into survival, from spiritual authority to the realities of care under environmental and social duress.
The Salon Installation, latex, LCD screens, concrete, 2024.
The Salon adopted the historical framework of the French salon but replaced aristocratic excess with the saccharine excess of internet visual culture. The room was built from mass-market objects and fragile, decaying materials, punctuated by Midjourney’s stock surrealism. Waterproof bedsheets from AliExpress’s 18+ section covered the seating; dollar-store toys lay fossilized beneath cracked concrete; decorative pillows printed with seductive, furry avatars. The environment oscillated between domestic (dis)comfort and kitschy online perversity.
Interior design functioned as the installation’s primary interface. Surfaces alternated between inviting and repulsive, directing the viewer’s body before the videos came into focus. Digital art is frequently described as native to the screen, yet its spatial conditions are rarely interrogated beyond the neutrality of the white cube. The Salon introduced an ideological interior—domestic, erotic, improvised, insistently tactile—and asked what occurs when internet-born imagery is embedded in a material setting that shapes the viewer’s sensory and psychological orientation. The result was an environment where online aesthetics had to contend with physical density, proximity, and touch.
Photo Album is What We Screenshot, prints, found object, concrete, 2025.
The ten-second teaser condenses the album’s full contents at extreme speed. Its function was promotional rather than artistic; the acceleration allowed censored material to slip past Instagram’s filters, revealing how velocity can undermine platform moderation.
The album itself comprises 128 cursed images drawn from the deep recesses of the internet and selected for their inadvertent symbolic charge. AI-generated marginal notes simulate linguistic presence while remaining semantically empty. The concrete cover echoes the low-resolution JPEGs inside, whose compression artifacts and degraded surfaces are recalled in the object’s weight and texture. Unlike images consumed online, the album must be held, flipped through, and physically negotiated, introducing tactility into a form usually defined by disembodiment.
The work constructs a narrative without linear storytelling. It situates the viewer in a mode of romantic tourism filtered through a post-human sensibility, imagining an AI attempting to approximate intimacy using only the data it has scraped rather than any lived experience.
My Bed, electric bed, latex, wires, LCD screen, cotton, memory foam, 2025.
The installation frames the bed as a site where intimacy is manufactured. Its lineage runs from the 18th-century boudoir to today’s parasocial production, think ASMR roleplays intended to lull you into sleep. The bed itself is generated from an AI prompt, sterile, glossy, hyperreal, rather than lived-in or bearing traces of use.
The ASMR performers function as a unified system: deliberately non-human but affective in pace and tone. In the boudoir, the subject was arranged for the voyeur; in ASMR, the performer addresses the viewer directly, assuming agency over the lens.
Photography, as described by Sontag and Barthes, is always an act of possession. My Bed accepts this but redirects its force. The camera offers reassurance rather than aggression, though the structure of control remains. The viewer sits on the bed and becomes part of the tableau, exposed in the act of watching. A space associated with privacy is inverted into a stage, where care and surveillance operate in tandem.
LIFE, video, AI, found images, 2025.
LIFE lightly adapts a short excerpt from Reena Spaulings’ novel, delivering it as an ASMR monologue over a stream of found footage. The structure recalls the logic of a car or bank commercial, where image and text never align but create a genre of automated surrealism. Stock-like visuals sourced from all over the internet evoke the emotional flatness of mass media while channeling a low, persistent anxiety. Neither sincere nor ironic, but a secret third thing, LIFE studies the tension between dissociation and hyper-awareness. The voiceover edges toward a prayer or a self-help directive, gentle yet unable to console.
Let's Meet Up and Die, video, AI, found images and videos, 2025.
Let’s Meet Up, and Die adopts a perspective of an AI attempting to reconstruct humanity from a scattered archive of user-generated sentimental schlak. The film’s structure presents a three-act convention absent of meaning. The timeline, a barebone daughter of humanity’s collective psychosis, metabolizing speed, violence, and affect of the 21st century with the same bulimic appetite. Humanity exists only as an image, observed by an AI yearning for something it never had access to—the lived experience. Naked folders, convoluted file names, and corrupted placeholders expose the impossibility of the retrvrn. We call it timeline automatism: fires destroying screens, guns decaying in landfills, and morals eroding directly on the timeline. We lost, AI won. But who cares now?
In the World without Touch, video, 2025.
The World Without Touch, We Still Feel continues the exploration of an AI’s romantic longing for a humanity it can observe but never inhabit, this time through the visual language of video games. Drawing on the notion of “Habsburg AI” and the inbreeding of recursive data, the piece was created by feeding Runway its own outputs. The result is a radiation-scorched aesthetic that feels mutant and over-evolved. AI-generated subtitles function as the voice of a machine storyteller, producing endless fragments of “profound” insight in a world where no one is left to understand them.
Destroyed Room, AI image and set design, 2025
This photograph documents a section of the production design for the short film L’imposteur, directed by Edson Niebla. It extends DemonLovers’ interest in cluttered, psychologically dense interiors, expanding previous research on gamer, hikikomori, and NEET bedrooms into a fully constructed physical set. Jeff Wall’s The Destroyed Room served as a formal anchor: a staged domestic scene whose disarray implies an unshown narrative rupture. Years of collected images of lived-in, chaotic rooms informed the thematic register.
These references were fed into an AI model using “destroyed room” as a prompt, generating hybrid spaces that combined Wall’s narrative clarity with the visceral immediacy of found online bedrooms. The resulting AI images became the blueprint for the set design (on the left), which preserves the logic of the AI with its arbitrary placement of objects, its indifference to hierarchy, and its gnarly sense of visual overload. The textures, props, and spatial inconsistencies reproduce this nonhuman ordering principle.
A small wall print shows a viral photograph of a garbage collector wearing angel wings, whose beautiful pathos aligns with the film’s themes. Although the installation has since been dismantled, this photograph stands as an autonomous work and can be presented as such.
Autopsy of the Black Sun, AI video, Virreina, Bogota, 2025
The Autopsy of the Black Sun orbits a single gravitational figure—the Black Sun, Schwarze Sonne. In the history of ideas, that image is a shorthand for the point where illumination and annihilation collide. Bataille names it the “solar anus,” a sun that burns so hot it becomes pure expenditure; Kristeva uses it to diagnose melancholia, a radiance inverted into total opacity; metal culture adopts it as the badge of a beauty so excessive it blinds you.
The video is native to the genre of Stoner-Baroque Hyper-sublime (we came up with it). To understand it, think of a seventeenth-century catastrophe painting, amplified by the tritone logic of doom metal. Baroque spectacle relied on excess, rupture, and the collapse of stable perspective—qualities metal inherits in sound and iconography. We conceived this piece as a digital descendant of Spanish vanitas, Rubens's massacres, or Pozzo's ceiling frescoes interpreted through the language of metal album covers and designed to overwhelm the sensorium rather than indoctrinate—thanks to the hypertrophic quality of AI generation that turns bodies and landscapes into one single libidinal geology.
Sometimes throughout the piece, we feel desperate and recast the Black Sun as a coroner’s lamp illuminating a corpse that happens to be the universe. Desaturated colors drain romance and invite the spectator to project procedural horror. Some call it “cosmic pessimism”: the recognition that the universe is more corpse than cradle. Every image, grey, veiny, alchemically stained, is a forensic slide; the cosmic is apprehended only through its wounds. We feel as though our digital artefacts are anatomical artefacts, exploring the inverted libido of geology, the pre-parental earth, longing and unsatisfied. Our guitar riff is so repetitive, it starts sounding like a refrigerator hum in a mortuary. Viewers are not asked to follow the melody, only to endure the swell. Academic writing may call this affective monotony as ecstatic time.
Deleuzo-Guattarian schizo-cosmos lends an elastic armature to the piece—the foetal crimson volcano, bruise-violet roots, the insect skull—are a partial object plugged into a cosmic desiring-machine. Libido is not withdrawn; it is everywhere, too present, leaking from geological vents and epidermal pores. Water behaves like amniotic fluid; magma behaves like semen. The earth-machine has no use for language; it only circulates matter and affect.