The Internet Is a Horrible Place and I’m Here to Make It Worse: a Kawayoku Journey

The workshop is inspired by The Kawayoku Inception, the research project by Noura Tafeche that delves into the political-artistic value of cuteness and the permanent status of performativity and hypersexualisation on social media as agents of a growing trend towards the aestheticisation of violence.

The project investigates contemporary digital evanescence, the visual reformulation of violence, unconventional recruitment strategies and militarised entertainment under new taxonomies in research areas ranging from ‘Israeli’ and US military propaganda and recruitment strategies translated into choreographies and dance challenges, to the weeb alt-right imagery intertwined with the fan-art of cute manga, passing through video games and the Second Amendment, gun advocates, war enthusiasts or armies employing anime and kawaii aesthetics and rape culture.

From this research, conducted over four years on popular social media and remote online micro-communities, an archive has been built that catalogues almost 30,000 files (screenshots, memes, posts, videos, etc.) with a ‘geographical map’ of the digital platforms where the phenomenon proliferates.

During the workshop, the artist guides participants through an intricate network of niche telegram channels, discord servers, popular subreddits, official and fake user accounts and bases, providing them with a strategic toolbox for investigating and analysing fringe Internet communities that are involved, in different ways and degrees, in the production and reproduction of online violence.