Digital Dada or Futurist slop? An investigation into brainrot as art

Ever since Italian brainrot first went viral, I’ve been haunted by the idea that the trend is derived from Italian Futurism, the 20th century art movement known for its need for speed and technological progress. Seeing the social media feeds of my Italian friends confirmed my suspicion. Featuring memes comparing the absurd-isms of Tralalero Tralala to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1919 sound poem Zang Tumb Tuuum (originally inspired by the Battle of Adrianople), the work features an explosion of text and image to evoke the sounds of gunfire and explosions. Given the Futurist’s glorification of war, which Marinetti himself described as “the only cure for the world”, it all begins to feel a bit sinister, especially when you consider that AI has been dubbed the “new aesthetics of fascism”. I found myself thinking, could this be a message zapped to us from the past? If so, what is it trying to communicate? 

A century on, what do the fascist tendencies of an avant-garde art movement have to do with Bombardino Crocodilo, or Tung Tung Tung Sahur? Can brainrot, a content genre loosely defined by unhinged, often AI-generated social media clips that embody a decline in our collective mental states – ever be considered art in the same way that Zang Tumb Tuuum is? Well, yes. If you imagine the infinitude of readymades, NFTs and memes already classified as art, it’s no stretch of the imagination to place brainrot in a similarly surreal art canon, in which institutions begin capitalising on the medium in the same way as they’ve done with other viral internet trends like NPC dancing and influencer edits. 

But first, let’s cast our minds back to Bombardino Crocodilo, the part-crocodile, part-bomber jet, whose hybrid form recalls the futurist Aeropitturas (aeropaintings) of the 1920s – that combine speed with the mechanics of aerial warfare. The religious fervour through which these paintings were originally depicted were made to resemble the devotional paintings of past eras, depicting machines as cosmic projections akin to the divine. Now, the tech utopian’s desire for acceleration parallels the futurist’s proto-reactionary celebration of violence and aggression branded as ‘drivers of progress’ – think the Silicon Valley motto, “move fast and break things”. This is amplified by the sacred narratives cast onto AI in recent years, in particular the tech bro’s fixation on artificial intelligence’s God-like capabilities – basically a thinly veiled attempt at rebranding neo-feudalism under the guise of the sacred. From the POV of our ‘slopmaxxed’ present, paintings like Alfredo Ambrosi’s aero-portrait of Mussolini (1930) or Gerardo Dottori’s Portrait of il Duce (1933) highlight the uncanny relationship between tech-acceleration and fascism, and have such an uncanny resonance with today’s AI slop politics. 

From here, I could go full-on Dark Mode, and position Bombardino Crocodilo, its close relative, Bombombini Gusini, and their fellow cast of anthropomorphic friends, as a tech-fascist PsyOp backed by the Italian state, designed to brainwash the masses with magical fascist incantations (tralalero tralala la la!) and phonk edits. I won’t, however it is worth noting that some of the videos that feature Bombardino Crocodilo have soundtracks that claim the plane is on its way to bomb the children of Gaza – its racist overtones cast a sinister lens on the biased dataset from which the text-to-speech prompt arises, which is scraped from the internet-at-large. The same AI technology used to generate these clips is also being used to steal our personal information as training data for corporations and to increase surveillance – think the US recently securing a deal with Palantir to build an AI surveillance platform that tracks its population. 

But we all contain multitudes, and brainrot is no exception. As a medium, brainrot is  intentionally absurd, context-less and fast-paced, a total parody of internet culture itself, drawing comparisons to another 20th- century art movement: Dadaism. With no coherent narrative, its bombardment of emotionally saturated content is precision-engineered for digital stimulation, with meme culture as its necessary pre-text. What makes brainrot so funny is the (intentionally) surreal vibe it gives off, which I would argue, sets it apart from what artist Daniel Keller has called ‘sloptimism’ – defined as low-effort, often meaningless content that prioritises the production of attention as its own commodity – from grifters trying to make a quick buck to politicians wanting to overwhelm the system with AI cringe edits of themselves as Star Wars characters. As writer Al Hassan Elwan alludes to in a recent essay for Dazed, AI slop alienates us from each other, whereas brainrot brings us together. In this sense, we can draw a line between the two, to see brainrot as an absurdist provocation, opposed to AI slop’s techno-utopian endgame. Somewhere here, I think, lies its real artistic potential.

For the meme-fluent, the form is not important but rather the aura it carries. This makes brainrot a great carrier medium to engage with life’s contradictions, grotesqueness and inconsistencies – what I described in a 2023 talk at Unsound Festival as a form of  ‘digital dadaism’. Developed partly in response to the horrors of World War One, the OG Dadaists rejected the connection between words and meaning, embracing textual dissonance and absurd-isms to mock the symbols of European liberalism: Dada means nothing. Brainrot is similarly devoid of any coherent message, its incoherent phrases a (il)logical extension of the Dadaists attempts to undermine the fundamental structures of ‘rational’, ordered society, to  cope with our ever-growing cultural alienation. In occultist terms, this might function as a psychic tool to deprogramme the consciousness. The automatism first channelled in the west by occultist Austin Osman Spare, for instance, was later adopted by Dadaists and surrealists – this technique was designed to let loose of the rational mind, and has a similar divinatory resonance to brainrot: the surface is meaningless, yet it’s affect gives it meaning. If the Dada Manifesto tells us to, “Try to be empty and fill your brain cells with a petty happiness,” then today’s brainrot manifesto simply goes, Brr Brr Patapim! 

Every era has its art movement. I’m not suggesting that brainrot is it, but given the alt right’s weaponisation of slop thus far, the banality of the medium might be the perfect disruptive force that sits outside of official language systems, like what shitposting was to IG before the algorithm change. Writing this, I’m very aware that Italian brainrot is already becoming irrelevant, replaced by AI Bible Influencers and these ‘CEO of Azerbaijan Technology’ clips. So, consider this a post-mortem, or a future prediction of some kind. Grifters aside, a medium that has yet to be commodified for its artistic value is rare, and brainrot is still repulsive enough to most artistic elite that it retains some liberatory potential, as long as it’s repulsive in an interesting, generative way.