Absurdity Threshold. From Avant-Garde Rupture to AI Slop

We are looking forward to the lunch lecture with Giulia Colletti.
Her lecture traces a line from the avant-garde destruction of meaning (Dada’s refusal of language, Futurism’s acceleration of it) to the semantic opacity of AI-generated content. 

There’s food prepared by the cafeteria team.

Absurdity Threshold.
From Avant-Garde Rupture to AI Slop

This lecture examines semantic opacity in the age of artificial intelligence, adopting the viral phenomenon of brainrot as a vector through which to interrogate contemporary transformations of language.

Taking its cue from Günseli Yalcinkaya’s analysis of this form of digital folklore, it situates the phenomenon within a broader legacy of the European avant-gardes. Its lexically absurd and visually accelerated aesthetic echoes the avant-garde destruction of meaning, from Dada’s refusal of the language of war to Futurism’s acceleration of it. Yet these resonances become unsettling when placed alongside Silicon Valley venture-capital rhetoric, such as the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which invokes Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as a patron saint.

Because AI-generated words and images tend to lose their connection to the contexts of their production, the lecture asks what role museums can still play in reconstructing those links. Is it still possible to restore provenance and conditions of production within an ecosystem governed by the feed? Or is critical practice called to radically rethink its own tools of contextualization?

The talk relates the historicized utopias of Futurism to the current, often controversial, trajectories of AI, asking how artistic and curatorial practices might contribute to developing a lexicon that can question the mutations of technoculture.

About Giulia Colletti

Giulia Colletti is a curator and researcher concerned with technological imaginaries. Her research investigates how energy infrastructures and extractive epistemologies shape uneven conditions of visibility, engaging artists who address mining legacies, fossil-fuel technocracy, and computational logics across Southeastern Europe and East Asia.

She is a Rome Prize Fellow in Curatorial Practice at the American Academy in Rome, where her research examines linguistic disruption and algorithmic aesthetics through the relationship between Italian Futurism and AI-generated visual culture. She co-curated the 5th Industrial Art Biennial, The Vast Automaton (2024–2026), supported by the Italian Council; in preparation for the project she was Researcher in Residence at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and the inaugural Researcher in Residence at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA). From 2019 to 2025 she was Curator of Public Programmes and Digital Sphere at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, developing programmes on digital trauma, energy cultures, and practices of participation.

She lectures in the History of Modern and Contemporary Art at ABADIR – Academy of Design and Visual Communication, where she is also Lead Professor of the international programme Bodies of Water. She is Scientific Coordinator of A Fish Out of Water, a summer school organised by ABADIR for Syracuse Academy and the University of Minnesota. She has held visiting appointments at dieAngewandte (Vienna), Xiamen University, and Syracuse Academy, among others. She has presented her research at Columbia University (CAMS), Kingston University, the University of Cape Town, IUAV University of Venice, and the University of Glasgow, among others.

She holds an MLitt in Curatorial Practice (with Distinction) from The Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow, and a BA in Conservation and Management of Cultural Heritage from Università Ca’ Foscari. Her essays, reviews, and edited volumes appear in museum catalogues and in CURA., Flash Art, Mousse, and OnCurating, among others.

@collettigiulia