Earlier this year, as the market was crashing and our small scene was cannibalizing itself, I was accused by @cf_MIF_GOD of creating Slop NFTs. At the time I took this as a compliment — I thought Canadiana Brainrot had a nice ring to it, and I never intended for my work to be called “Gay NFT” anyway. Slop felt somewhat distant from the truth though; the work was raw, but never unskilled, and despite its glorification of degen Solana behaviour and its insistence on celebrating Neo-Rugcore, it was never intended to be a rugpull. After all, Retardio launched the same week as Self Driving Megaworms, and look where we are now.

https://twitter.com/cf_MIF_GOD/status/1889484612801368274

The more I thought about it (notwithstanding @dnlklr’s incessant neologizing of sloprivatives), the more the idea of Slop began to absorb me. I set out to explore Slop as an aesthetic and conceptual category — a system of meaning, or a chaotic anti-language of absurdity. What is this cheap or unwanted content made of? What would the formalization of Slop look like? Does it resist form altogether? Can one even attempt to build out a visual system from its chaotic taxonomies? Or do these unwanted linguistic excesses speak on their own cynical, financialized terms?

https://x.com/dnlklr/status/1860893428906893729

Smiley.bmp.exe diverges from my recent explorations of Neo-Rugcore and PFPNFT formalism (see my Trilogy), and instead attempts to deploy Slop as a sort of contemporary, ultra-dadaist anti-art, spurred by the increasing financialization of algorithmic incentives and attention-economy gamification. We live in what @MMifella has called “Scam World,” and the spam that proliferates the imagescape is getting sophisticated. The resulting effect is brainrot. A sardonic terrorism which evokes the darkest of humours, targeting the most vulnerable affects: fear, laughter, dread, desire. Hypnotically enraptured by this content-cum-advert flooding our timelines, we have become unable to wipe the grins from our faces.

On a formal level, Smiley.bmp.exe is a generative NFT deploying a type of hyper-derivative painting-cum-collage, using various automated processes and analog-digital hybridities. Using web 2.0 memetic detritus, archival found imagery, LLM vibe-scripting, deep-fried distressing, automatic drawings as control-nets, poems as prompts, and scanned-in unfinished ideas and essays as metadata, the NFT becomes a thesis. Characters which fluctuate between anatomically incorrect Pixar knockoffs and impossible meat-geometries are animated via Stable Diffusion, populating the digital frame. Smiley.bmp.exe is formulated as a Frutiger Medico non-space — a friendly virus (or one posing as friendly) jamming the image plane with a barrage of content without message. Here, the medium is the content, and the content becomes the form — trapped in the vertical plane of the screen, aching to emerge, to leak out into the horizontal plane of the real.

The collection is the second release of TRENDERGARTEN HD, a newly formulated label/collective-cum-bifurcated-zine formed by @id_xanthrax and @adult_trafficker (who contributed hand-drawn traits to this collection). Each iteration of Smiley.bmp.exe undulates with digital detritus, spores of vectorized pseudo-iconography, imagining (imaging) what an iPad child’s mind might conceivably perceive in 2025 AD, eyes glued to the LEDs, over-inundated with cheaply made advert-content designed to capture the attention of the credulous. Something demented emerges; not Elsagate, not Tung Tung Tung Sahur… but something much more sinister: the outsourcing of the imagination.

The effect of forfeiting the faculties of our visual imaginary to LLMs has yet to be seen (we may only understand this better as the AI-native Gen Alpha begins to emerge into the arena of cultural production). Image generation begins with noise and carves form from a plethora of platonic sources, which the model is trained on. This dynamic gets somewhat reversed, as the noisy imagescape imposes strange desiring forms onto our collective imaginary. We are captives in a realm of contextlessness, abundant with referents without source, leaving us to play in a sandbox of formless memetics and empty signifiers. This only worsens generationally. Each new iteration on the derivative, each misquotation, moves further from origin — not toward new meaning, but away from meaning altogether. As McLuhan notes, the cost of every extension of our body into a new medium is the price of amputation. We are experiencing iconoclasm via iterative oversupply. When all can access art (or at least the tools of image production), where does the artist take asylum? Alt becomes normie. Bizarre becomes banal. Imagery is increasingly vested with less and less metaphorical or symbolic value because the stakes are so low. It becomes an empty shell, a mere carrier of ad-tech surveillance metadata sculpted by financial incentives. In a move of self-preservation, the already-rigged, legacy fin-tech of trad art recedes into its own objecthood and speculative scarcity, while the imagescape proliferates pathogenically and unmoored.

Smiley.bmp.exe harnesses these thanatropic flows as a methodology of violent automatism and image anarchy in order to weaponize the hyper-baroque character of contemporary cultural production against itself. There is an undeadness to contemporary images. They are zombies of what was once a meaning-producing vehicle. Yet the undead image takes on extremely psychedelic qualities. It is like a rainbow of fungal spores devoured by friendly(?) computer worms; it manifests as a desire to overdrive itself into oblivion. It becomes the force of the Puer Aeternus, an Id which never becomes Ego.

Smiley.bmp.exe is about reviving the radical imaginative nature of childhood in this uninhibited state. The way we speak to children in euphemistic language feels similar to the physics of a scam. One must be convinced that something is friendlier than it seems, that it is not an extractive ploy. One must be lulled into ontological submission, drugged into acquiescence. The 2021 rugcore NFT is a perfect example of this very Trojan horse methodology: with the alliterative anthropomorphisms abundant — Pudgy Penguins, Lazy Lions, Cool Cats — the extraction event takes on a friendly allure, not unlike McDonald’s mascots or 90s cartoons as vehicles for predatory children’s advertising.

Smiley.bmp.exe is about toxic positivity — not merely of affect, nor strictly pejoratively speaking, but as a need to fill negative space, when the stuff of the content (information, metadata, dummy data) populates the mind and lives there rent-free. It is the incessant urge to placate boredom with doom-scrolling, and the interdependent exploitation of the creative will to maintain a steady flow of production in order to remain visible. Visibility is survival within the economics of attention, and inside the subcultures of cryptocurrency this dynamic is on overdrive. Smiley.bmp.exe is all of these things: a toxically positive Neo-Rugcore Slop NFT, wielding new languages of guerrilla ad-tech commerce against themselves.

As I alluded to earlier, one of the distinctive qualities of these contemporary images is the density of ad-tech, fin-tech, and surveillance metadata baked into them. With AI Slop and Neo-Rugcore NFTs specifically, movement or transmission is built into their very creative process — their very composition is meant to manufacture virality, deploying the contractual mechanics of industrial image-generation tools to do so. Every transaction and transmission can be traced: the information is all there and it is abundant, autistically archived even. When we create, mint, share, or deploy these images we are doing a sort of micro-historiography. The obsession with provenance, microtransactional financial data, behavioural mapping, surveillance, pyramid schematic volunteerism of the swarm, a disregard for authorship, and the appraisal of an individuated yet collective cryptographic financial ownership defines these contemporary images and determines their lifespans. Implicit within this information-reliant approach, of course, is the fact that informatics can easily be tampered with — information is leaky — thus history is destabilized. This vulnerability is both a feature and a bug.

Leaks are inherent in these ultra-dadaist image-generation techniques of hyper-derivative collage. Leaks, here, can be understood both materially and metaphorically — the informatics spill out from the digital into the physically productive universe, in a blurring of states. We carry advert devices in our pockets, algorithmically tailored and personalized to our intricately mapped desires. These platforms we inhabit become surreal cartographies of our dreams. Images and ads become one and the same, irrupting into all facets of life. These images desire too — they want to anticipate your consumption habits. They desire desire, or they desire to capture desire itself.

Slop ad-tech pervades both the analog and digital public sphere but it is also privatized. It has infiltrated the domestic, in the form of merchandise. Merchandizing runs rampant in an attention economy built on channelling the consumer’s energies into material profits. Temu print-on-demand rugs, Labubus, Italian brainrot children pajamas, AI furniture, home decor — a pastiche baroque interior design project of the serpent’s long tail.

However, the impression is that all that is solid melts into air, or whatever. Living in a world dominated by images can make reality feel deprioritized. When we broke from the gold standard in 1971 under Nixon, we untethered value creation from reality. Value untethered from material backing becomes pure representation, pure sign. In this world dominated by faith in representation, things become extremely symbolic, image-rich and reality-poor, and as outlined above, even those signs are no longer tethered to any production of meaningful metaphor. Crypto emerges as a response to this death of metaphor — this hyperinflation of fiat, literally money as faith in the Federal Reserve’s authority. This ties directly into the anarchy of the image, the deterritorialization of how we represent value through hierarchical meaning creation. Slop can be viewed as the pollutive leakage of an internet and a digital banking system which has lied about its immaterial state. The internet is not a cloud — it is profoundly material. Crypto mines burn through energy resources, AI models train on vast computational infrastructure. Stable Diffusion itself requires GPU farms to function. Thus these machinic images do impact our reality in a rather direct sense.

Here it is interesting to look at desire through the speculative objectivity of micro-merchandizing. Temu or Alibaba products can be seen through this very dialectical lens. Our attention needs to be monetized, merchandized, and channelled into material profits. In this sense, all that is air must coagulate into matter. Here emerges my notion of The Poor Object.

Hito Steyerl is extremely hot, I’d fuck Hito Steyerl. Her Poor Image is an internet ripoff of Arte Povera sculpture, or McCarthyist trash art — my turn to rip her off. The Poor Object is the unactualized photoshopped form of the speculative product, liquid yet meaty; an ad selling you something you don’t even know you want, or never could’ve imagined you needed. Your desires have been imagined for you! The Poor Object is pure excess, surplus desire in its most dreamlike and psychedelic form — formless, malleable, customizable to the whim of each scrolling subjectivity which clicks buy — a soup of all the human subject’s historical consciousness. It is the ultimate golem-fetish of globalism, coming to life in Asian polymathematical production facilities. The Poor Object is a mass-manufactured assemblage of interests and tastes, a third-wave industrial revolution readymade made collaboratively by the entire global prosumer hivemind buzzing in a torrent of networked undulations. The Poor Object is Non-Fungible: it may be mass-produced, but it coagulates iteratively into infinitely different life forms. It is pure excess — imagined and materializing algorithmic energetics.

Yet so many say the internet is dead! Overrun with swarms of bots creating demand for product-objects of total superfluity; the AI paperclip apocalypse is here, except what is overproduced is far less useful. Pure excess, surplus desire, desire for desire’s sake. Increasingly specific fetishes in a Saturnalia of neo-pagan idol worship. And still somehow impoverishment and precarity reign as the norm. We live in the horizontal plane, the Z-axis, and it is increasingly evident we are living in a giant ontological scam. The Poor Object is cheap; it’s a Trojan horse. It’s not what you thought it was — never fulfilling, always empty and producing more desire, more precarity, more waste, less value. It is the trickster’s speculative ontological musing, a useless invention, a proximation of utility. This is why the Poor Object resembles the artwork of the 20th century. It is a knockoff which does not have a real counterpart, a derivative with no source, a secondhand item with no original owner. We are living in an impoverished scam world filled with fake things, and daunted by the physical laws of entropy. The Poor Object is the physical manifestation of Slop (Slobject). It is hollowed out, dysfunctional, broken, trashed, useless, yet more resistant to entropics than “naturally” occurring matter. The Poor Object is here for millennia, and like with the historically neurotic, archive-obsessed internet, our ancestors will be forced to reckon with so many landfills of cultural artifacts with so little meaning.

There is wasteful entropy-proofing happening in the digital space as well, and the vertical plane cannot contain its waste forever. Smiley.bmp.exe refuses the vertical plane’s containment. A dozen Smiley.bmp.exe NFTs will be paired with redeemable bedazzled textile print-on-demand Poor Image-Objects — a deliberate collapse of Slop into the Slobject. The choice of fabric as medium is no accident. If the contemporary Slop image is defined by its leaky, emergent quality, then fabric literalizes this leak. It is the material that receives, absorbs, soaks up what spills over.

The choice of fabrics — Polar Fleece, Microfibre towel, Plush, Minky, Squishy, Bathtowel — speaks to an objecthood (or the Hood Object) of domesticity and childhood. These are materials for rugs, blankets, towels, pajamas, cloths, sheets, curtains, and comfortable clothing — textiles which cover, protect, clean, dry, wash, and instill comfort and privacy: vulnerable human needs. The textile receives liquidity in a literal sense; it soaks, it has sponge-like qualities, it absorbs. The liquidity of sign, symbol, image, and value creation gets absorbed into The Poor Object. It takes so much in — spills, stains, the detritus of living — yet offers only the simulacrum of comfort, an aesthetics of care without function. The fabric exists between solid and liquid states (just as Smiley is suspended between digital and analog): it takes the shape of the object beneath but as drapery. This drapery calls into question: what is the identity of the thing beneath? Who is behind the pfp? What meaning lies beneath the image? Is it simply imbued with informatics? The density of technical information is jammed into it, but its meaning is occluded by the drapery of its own abundant data. The meaning drowns in a flood of content and imagery, saturated and soaking in its own leak.

The logic of the financially vivisected image (which I have spoken about elsewhere) is notable here as well. The HashLips art-engine generation system splits the image into technical parts, categorical traits which are fractionalized — all financial and transactional data becomes contractually (historically) available on the blockchain as a JSON file. AI images also produce metadata which can be traced to a seed that helps us understand the source of the linguistic prompts which produced it. Smiley.bmp.exe transduces the Slop NFT into a Real World Asset — into the Poor Object. When it is printed as fabric, it becomes literally mess and absorbent material of this mess. Many issues arise. Is the fabric also spliced up into traits? Does it too carry its own traceable metadata, tradeable on secondary markets? Is one forced to destroy the Poor Object — to use a Burroughsian cut-up — to discover its meaning? RWAs and The Internet of Things have been major narratives this cycle, but it seems the problem of ontological fractionalization has not yet been solved. Companies like Masterworks have monetized fractional ownership of Warhols; other financial products routinely attempt to do this now. When people can set up a payment plan over 12 months to purchase a single $100 Labubu, debt enslavement to this scam world is ever more pervasive.

https://x.com/id_xanthrax/status/1798750152699830756

Yet when the image is increasingly financialized it is laden with its own metadata and internet folkloric histories. Avant Gay NFT (the reclaimed pejorative has stuck) developed as a sort of l’art pour l’art reaction to grailtard red-chip collectorship on Ethereum, taking place on Solana because of its sub-cent transaction costs and near-instant speed — pushing a poorer, faster, more feral version of the NFT than the ETH counterparts of 2021. These images become clad indicators of crypto Twitter: a sort of Hood Rich art. An Arte Povera in reaction to the baroque Arte Ricca of the new-money early blockchain adopters. Many NFT artists are deeply inspired by SoundCloud rap: the same DIY ethos, the same embrace of lo-fi aesthetic as cultural position, the same understanding that scarcity of resources breeds a particular inventiveness and an inverted proliferation of the imaginary.

Neo-Rugcore NFTs and Slop at once contribute to the viral proliferation of images, in a refusal to fraudulently manufacture scarcity. They are terroristic devices — radical and disruptive of all discrete objecthood and imagehood (THE NFT IS THE HOOD IMAGE!) — staging an ontological scam on reality itself. Avant Gay NFT has embodied this idea in some form of digital Arte Povera or another! The original Arte Povera micro-movement of Italian post-modern artists created works which famously leveraged entropics and time itself as media; the works were allowed to decay or rot, defying preservation in a radical gesture using history and amnesia as mediatic tools against the art markets of the moment. While in a sort of inverse move, NFTs concern themselves with temporality on the plane of ensuring a quasi-permanence via blockchain structuralism and market naturalism. Smiley.bmp.exe rug-fabric redeemables embody both states collapsing into each other — the blockchain’s permanence and the fabric’s inevitable decay, the digital’s infinite reproducibility and the textile’s fragility, the infinite absorption of content and the impossibility of meaning.

Smiley.bmp.exe is an NFT about the impoverishment of objecthood in favour of the sweet allure of the imagescape. No other cohort understands this better than the small scene of NFT artists I have engaged with for the past 3 years. The Avant Gay NFT artists are the poor of the internet, harnessing what Dean Kissick recently called the vulgar image. They have democratized the weapons of ad-tech image gen tools in order to leverage their own productive spirits and buy themselves free time. Neo Rugcore NFTs may not end up nearly as valuable as their historical precedants, but at the end of the day the admission fee was only $5. Avant Gay NFTs have spiralled into their own long tail of the desiring image—memetic yet non-fungible, viral yet scarce. Their artist hosts are the graffitos of crypto Twitter, shitposting their work to the crime chain, addicted, not to gambling, but to the memetic retelling of folkloric timeline beef producing a sort of digital cave painting on the walls of the news feed, and encoding their strange histories into metadata. They've collapsed the vertical plane into the horizontal, screen into textile, image into gallery. Digital Arte Ricca into internet Arte Povera. The image-space has been deterritorialized, re-domesticated, then dragged into physical form as fabric soaking up our excess—cum, blood, sweat, tears. The Poor Object materialized at last as the Poor Image-Object. A dialectical process of becoming ever reinventing itself by these ultra-dadaist anti-art luminaries, weaponizing the mass manufacture of the imaginary, Slop as a slang of excess, lore as art history, building a sophisticated unmeaning machine which has runaway, producing its own perverse cosmology.

Bibliography

Vierkant, Artie. "The Image Object Post-Internet." JstChillin.org, 2010. https://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf

Steyerl, Hito. "In Defense of the Poor Image." e-flux Journal, no. 10, November 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image

Kissick, Dean. "Vulgarity and the Vulgar Image." Spike Art Magazine, Issue 73, Autumn 2022. https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/vulgarity-the-vulgar-image

Troemel, Brad. "The ZirpSlop Report." Patreon, 2025. https://www.patreon.com/posts/zirpslop-report-131069177

McLuhan, Marshall. "The Medium Is the Message." In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. Reproduced via MIT. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf

Fang, Charlotte. "On the Ontology of the Leak." Mirror.xyz, 2024. https://goldenlight.mirror.xyz/z6ZQoRMiL07IQrOoxgyZC_IMwMWw4sWmigcnI4raLMg