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

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

Workshop
26 February 2025, 2–5 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #16: Are You A Software Update?


Minimum knowledge or experience required: No special technical skills are required, but it may be useful to have some experience in creating and editing images in any way.

Target Group: students and teachers of visual art, media art, digital cultures, design, visual culture, philosophy, history and sociology, artists, researchers, activists, cyber-flaneurs, and investigative journalists.

What to bring: laptop, tablet, smartphone

Maximum number of participants: 25


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.


Takeaways:
– Learning tactics for documenting unstable online aesthetics and their environments of origin.
– Development of methods and tools for critical thinking applied to Internet imagery and new forms of propaganda.

THE AUTHOR

Noura Tafeche is a visual artist, onomaturge and independent researcher working in between installations, videos, neologisms, archiving practices, laboratories, experimental applied methodologies and miniature drawings. Her areas of research expand on the subjects of visual culture and its techno-political implications with a focus on operational images, digital militarism, online aesthetics, internet hyper-niches and meme culture, philosophy of language and visual representation of speculative imaginaries. She has exhibited internationally in various contexts, including at Pirelli Hangar Biccoca, Tainan Art Museum and transmediale.

[+] RELATED ACTIIVITIES

EXHIBITION

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Annihilation Core Inherited Lore ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶
24 February–28 March 2025
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

LECTURE PERFORMANCE

Noura Tafeche, Alex Quicho
She’s Evil, Most Definitively Subliminal
25 February 2025 at 3 PM
Kino Šiška, Trg prekomorskih brigad 3, Ljubljana

PUBLICATION

The Kawayoku Tales: Aestheticisation of Violence in Military, Gaming, Social Media Cultures and Other Stories
PostScriptUM #51

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