BrainRot

Brain Rot, an audiovisual installation by Nicola Carpeggiani and Alessandro Roberti of Studio Cliché, presented at Videocittà 2025 and curated by OhBrain.

Brain Rot is a term used to describe the progressive mental and intellectual decay caused by the excessive consumption of low-quality digital content—a distorted mirror of contemporary society and culture.

In the age of instant communication, we are constantly overwhelmed by an uninterrupted stream of information, to the point that our minds gradually become impermeable to genuine understanding.

This compulsive accumulation of stimuli leads to a chaotic overload that, instead of enriching us, disorients and numbs our capacity for attention and critical thinking.

The project highlights the illusory sense of connection fostered by social media, exposing the viewer to an altered and destabilizing feed that, while mimicking its aesthetic, reveals its effects of alienation, anxiety, and dependency.

At the heart of Brain Rot is a real-time generated audiovisual flow: an organism in constant mutation. There is no final destination—images and videos are distorted and dissolve at the very moment they appear, just like the digital feeds we consume compulsively. It’s as if the self-destruction of this content were no longer an individual act, but a collective ritual.

The choice of playback devices underscores a probable visual continuity between television channel surfing and the passive scrolling of digital content.

Biometric tracking undermines the dominant cult of personality by reducing the branded faces of content creators and influencers to vague, sometimes unsettling shadows—shifting the viewer’s attention to gestures that, once decontextualized, become repetitive and entirely devoid of meaning.

The installation does not aim to demonize the use of social media. That would be a technophobic stance—hypocritical and backward. In a way, Brain Rot unfolds as a recursive performance focused on the collective urgency to perform without pause, thus revealing the inner contradictions of a system that needs to be subverted rather than rejected.