Installation that materializes the toxic flows of contemporary digital discourse. Ephemeral acts of violence leaving permanent stains.

Dripping with hate

The work translates thousands of fragments of online hate into a slow, semi-persistent visual phenomenon: real and digital drips appearing on surfaces of e-paper screens. What is normally invisible-buried in the endless streams of social media-emerges here as a physical, bodily trace.

The installation consists of a series of e-paper displays physically splashed with real paint. Each screen continuously renders dripping marks generated from a database of more than 200,000 real hateful tweets used to train hate-speech detection algorithms.

Mixing physical with digital

The piece operates on the tension between two layers of gesture. The first is the permanent physical act: a violent splash of paint thrown onto fragile electronic displays. This action irreversibly scars the surface, leaving visible residues of aggression. The second layer is ephemeral and algorithmic: a continuous flow of data-driven drips generated from the corpus of hateful speech. While the paint is static and material, the digital stains remain fluid, endlessly forming and dissolving.

By combining these two layers, the installation collapses the distance between symbolic violence in digital space and physical traces in the real world. Online hate often appears immaterial-just words on a screen-but its effects are deeply embodied and persistent. The dripping marks visualize this accumulation: each message becomes another drop contributing to a slow sedimentation of hostility.

Ephemeral acts - permanent stains

The installation ultimately functions as a visual archive of hate. What normally disappears into the speed of social media is forced into duration, turning transient bursts of hostility into something that slowly drips, gathers, and remains. We tend to think about digital media as ephemeral but it might leave permanent marks and scars - similarly to permanently stained surface of the canvas.

Photos by Maciej Jędrzejewski