OpenLAB 2026 | Lost in Slop – Talk by Franziska Von Guten

Lost in the Slop recounts the journeys of Franziska Von Guten, a professional internet surfer who became a wandering traveler. 

Instead of starting from the tip of the internet's content iceberg and descending to its dark, deep waters, Franziska’s presentation traces the new, meandering geographies of online networks. A world shaped by niche communities and dark forests, but also by lurkers and individual users in comment sections, who might have nothing in common except a suggestion on the “For You” page, a common visual language or a “vibe.” 

To understand this new geography, with its new states, nations and subcultures, Franziska Von Guten relied not on a map but on her knowledge of branding. 

From corporate design to personal branding, from the appropriation of ancient symbolism to ad-busting, what is needed to understand and navigate the horror pleni of our online (and offline) experiences is the ability to recognize visual patterns: patterns can help us identify what is real in the post-truth era, understand the slopeconomy, and grasp why taste is the currency of our times. 

From early net art to post-internet, from memes to slop, from Kekistan to Folkland, we retrace every step of this journey together, like when in the ’90s friends used to invite you over to their place to show you their vacation pictures. Only here the “vacation” consists of hours of compulsive surfing and scrolling, and the “journey” involves months of disciplined dissociation at 3:33 a.m., trying to reach the end of the algorithm's suggestions without losing your sanity. 

Franziska Von Guten sits in the “sweet” spot between advertising, branding and art. Working as an art director in the advertising industry by day and researching online subcultures by night, for more than a decade she has analyzed images, trends, memes and aesthetics from a critical perspective: first with the collective Clockworkberry, then as a curator of Post Vision and as co-founder of the Clusterduck collective, and now traveling solo, alone with her map. 

This activity is part of the OpenLAB The Mechanics of Truth festival. 

Info

Date: Friday, November 27, 8:15pm. 
Place: Nave Una in Matadero Madrid.
Language: English with simultaneous translation in Spanish.
Price: Free, no registration required.

About Franziska Von Guten 

Franziska Von Guten is an art director, artist, and researcher working across design, internet culture, and curatorial practice. Her work investigates how digital subcultures produce meaning, affect, and forms of collectivity within networked environments. 

She began engaging with the internet in the mid-1990s, an encounter that continues to inform her long-term interest in the aesthetics and politics of online content. Since childhood, she has maintained an ongoing archiving practice, organising and cataloguing visual material as both method and compulsion. This sustained engagement with accumulation and classification informs her work, which often explores the tensions between the archive and its breakdown. 

In 2014, she co-founded the collective Clockworkberry and co-produced Fuck Your Selfie, a multimedia project examining social media narcissism and the politics of self-representation.  

In 2016, she co-curated Post Vision, a platform dedicated to post-internet art, and co-founded Clusterduck, an art collective working across research, design, and transmedia practices. 

With Clusterduck, she has co-created exhibitions and installations including The Detective Wall, Deep Fried Feels, and (W)hole, a cooperative world-building installation commissioned by KiöR Zürich (2025). Collective publications include The Detective Wall Guide (Aksioma, 2021) and Deep Fried Feels (Nero, 2024). 

Von Guten lives and works in Berlin. 

franziskavonguten.online  
@franziskavonguten