The Internet is a Horrible Place and I’m Here to Make it Worse


Series of Laboratories
2022 - ongoing


The workshop takes inspiration from The Kawayoku Inception, a project delving into the political-artistic value of cuteness and the permanent status of performativity and hypersexualization on social media, as agents of a growing trend of aestheticization of violence. The project aims to shape under new taxonomies contemporary digital evanescence, visual reformulation of violence, unconventional recruiting strategies and militarized entertainment. Areas of research explore Israeli and US military propaganda and recruiting strategies translated into dance choreographies and challenges, weeb alt-right incel imaginary intertwined with cute manga fan-art and gaming and 2nd Amendment, pro-gun, war enthusiasts or armies employing anime and kawaii aesthetics.

Out of this research, accomplished over three years on popular social media and remote online micro communities, an ongoing archive was built to catalogue nearly 30.000 files (screenshots, memes, posts, videos, etc) with a “geographic map” of digital platforms where the phenomenon proliferates. The workshop aims to provide a strategic toolbox to investigate and analyse fringe internet communities that are involved, in different ways and to different extents, in the production and reproduction of online violence. The workshop exposes participants to a wide array of investigative methods including digital geography and participant observation of such online communities, and qualitative interviews to their members (e.g. channel admins, etc.).


Laboratory’s case studies include the cute imaginary of Israeli Offence Force’s soldiers micro-celebrities and hypersexualized Zionist propaganda’s influencers on major digital platforms, the case of former Military police officer awarded certificate for promoting the reputation of the IDF on TikTok, or the intertwining weapons glorification and anime body pillows, as a hyper-niche fetish that visually and culturally convey suprematist values such as female submission, 2nd amendment magnification and rape culture.

Noura Tafeche will guide the participants through an intricate net of a variety of social media like hyper niche telegram channels, discord servers, popular subreddits, official and bogus accounts and user base. The workshop aims to create collaborative strategies for a net of journalists, artists, researchers to share knowledge and methods of analysis to bring to light issues related to the depths of the Internet and directly interface with its community and its pathway to a radicalized ecosystem, with a subversive/investigative slant.

This workshop aims to include artists, activists, students, teachers, mixed teams of students and teachers, investigative journalists, researchers, emergent artists, art collectives, cyber-flaneurs and groups of people who are joining forces for the occasion.


The Kawayoku educational tool





The laboratory aimed to provide participants with tools to

•  Explore and archive extreme areas of contemporary visual cultures
•  Learn documentation tactics of ephemeral digital materials
•  Develop critical reflection on new forms of propaganda
•  Using found materials for performance or speculative design


The laboratory has been hosted under different names in a span of 4 years around Europe amonsgt which:


Academic teaching amonsgt which :
  • War, Terrorism, Violence in Visual Culture, hosted by prof. Donatella Della Ratta, John Cabot Univeritys, Rome (2024)
  • The (✿◠ω◠) 【╦╤─ side of digital ecosystem, Process Design, HyperWerk, FHNW, Basel (2024)
  • New Media Dept. hosted by prof. Claudia D’Alonzo, Accademia di Brera, Milan (2024)



Photo by Domen Pal | Aksioma




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