Eva and Franco Mattes, Dear Imaginary Audience, 2021

Funny cat pics with creepy captions shared on social media, digital images that circulate unseen through the internet’s infrastructure, or anonymous workers hired online to create morally dubious content or to remove it from the web: Eva & Franco Mattes have been investigating the internet’s effects on our daily lives since the 1990s, reflecting on how networked images increasingly define our private and social behaviour. In the process, the artist duo dissect the opaque mechanisms of our networked society, its infrastructures and forms of online spectatorship—holding up a mirror to the viewer that is at once unsparing and darkly humorous.