Sloppy

“God is a 6 yo covered in syrup and i am the ipad he is holding” - @404src on X, December 30, 2022 Merriam-Webster’s “human editors” – isn’t it fascinating that those clarifications are necessary these days? – declared Slop Word of the Year 2025, defining it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Slop is a formally broad term. It includes both the messy, slurpy, distorted beginnings of AI as well as the perfected, polished trompe-l’œil of the newest generation led by Nano Banana Pro. But slop is much older than AI. It starts as the human desire to express oneself and document one’s existence – the camera roll of one’s first camera, the flood of innocently personal videos on early YouTube, the first saved files on Windows Paint. Slop is expression transformed into excess. It has mutated into a mass-produced filler, tumors in the server tissue. The slop that burned itself into the collective consciousness in 2025 includes videos of cats being cheated on and getting pumped in the gym, Studio Ghibli style deportation propaganda by ICE, Italian sharks wearing sneakers, the Bundespolizei Berlin Brandenburg official Instagram account hallucinating a dystopian police state set in the year 2100. Right now, the most reasonably sounding explanation of how the world works is a conspiracy: The Dead Internet theory claims that since 2016, bots replaced most of human activity online to stir public opinion into propaganda. But looking at who rules the internet and governments… Never did an aluminum hat look so alike with a stable helmet. While slop appears inherently meaningless, its application is highly strategic. It would be a mistake to dismiss slop as nothing but lazy internet hallucinations: It has already turned into flesh: A White House spokeswoman replies to a journalist with “your mom”; a convict-president kidnaps another president; a third guy considers kidnapping a chancellor all while more coke- stuffed people crash out over the audacity to call plant-based patties burgers. What sounds like the beginning of a 6th-grader Wattpad fanfic is the current geopolitical slop landscape. In the era of never-before-seen possibilities of accountability, slop is a weapon, just like “Shock and Awe”, a military strategy developed in 1996 based on overwhelming and paralyzing the enemy through spectacular display of power. Sounds familiar? We are sooo fucking back to the future: Art and life turning sloppy happened already. When reality seemed to generate infinite slop of brutality and chaos, art replied with more slop: Dada occupied the left wing while Futurism accommodated itself in the right. What position does art assume in 2026? The group show Sloppy interrogates the infrastructures and mutations of slop. Iris Helena Hamers collages user- and AI-generated footage into three- dimensional mobiles. Jonas Höschl works with the „Shock and Awe“ of paparazzi journalism. Rosanna Marie Pondorf investigates how conservative aesthetics of power infiltrate digital structures. Through painting, Julius Niemeyer contrasts the smooth screen with the raw materials that enable it. Alexander Scharf brings together monstrous AI mutations and body horror. Simona Andrioletti analyses continuously distorted digital reproductions. Philipp Pess gives digital fever dreams a physical body. Rebekka Benzenberg escapes online fatigue through bed rotting. The exhibition is thus a collection of samples capturing the multiple meanings of slop. And remember: Slop is the street magician’s distraction: Looking for the dollar bill under a hundred cups, you stop focusing on the one truth. You already surrendered to the 99 lies. Jennifer Braun The Gen Z Art Critic