What lies on the thin line between the unheimlich and the homey, the cute and the eerie, something familiar yet unsettling? As digital archives continue to expand, the past has never felt more present, preserved in an ever-growing collection of sounds, images, texts, and cultural artefacts. Endlessly recycled, resurfacing and remixed into new forms, these fragments carry the traces of an earlier online life full of possibility. Reappearing amid an endless stream of slop and brainrot, they leave us with a melancholic longing for the futures we once imagined - nothing really dies while the future seems dead.
ｓｌｏｗｅｄ + 𝓇𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇𝒷 brings together five artist(duo)s who find themselves in a cultural in-between: too young to remember a time fully disconnected from the internet, yet old enough to have experienced the more utopian possibilities of early online life. Drawing on samples, fragments, aesthetics, and memories of earlier eras, they explore our desire to find comfort in what came before, while confronting the unease of a present haunted by what might have been.