Ghosts in the Machine: Art, Mourning, and Making in the Post-Pandemic Digital Sphere

Five years after COVID-19 fundamentally altered our world, we exist in a strange collective silence. We are actively mourning a lost past while pretending this rupture never occurred. Yet the pandemic’s most enduring legacy may be our transformed relationship with digital space. As our social media usage surged during global lockdowns and continues to reach unprecedented levels, the “terminally online” condition has been adopted as a norm.

This panel interrogates the fraught position of contemporary artists navigating social media and the virtual world as both creative space and contested terrain. With platforms incidentally suppressing political content, algorithmic feeds designed to pacify rather than activate, and rising authoritarianism weaponizing digital networks, how do we create meaningful work in spaces engineered for passive consumption?

As late-stage capitalism accelerates, anti-intellectualism surges, and the internet—once imagined as a liberatory third space—becomes a site of surveillance and control, artists face urgent questions: What does it mean to make politically engaged work when platforms censor it? How do we foster genuine community and dialogue in attention economies designed to fragment and isolate? Can social media be reclaimed as a space for collective action rather than individualized doomscrolling?

Join us as we examine what kinds of artwork emerge from this strange, unacknowledged grief, and how artists might create not just on social media, but against its most extractive logics.

Thursday, February 26, from 6 to 8 p.m.

No reservation required.

The exhibition and its program of activities are part of the 3rd edition of the FAVE 2026 Emerging Visual Arts Forum 🎨. Find all the Forum’s activities here.

→ This event is organized by the Art Matters Festival.