Net Evil - Art exhibition on Feral File

In the 1990s, as the internet began entering homes in force via personal computers and early browsers, it was mostly met with wonder and delight—but other emotions lurked, too. For many, this new network inspired skepticism and fear. Headlines warned of the dark side of the internet: pornography, cybercrime, misinformation, and more. But as the benefits of having access to a worldwide network of information became clear, it didn’t take long for these initial hesitations to fade. Propelled by its divine utility, the World Wide Web quickly spread from computers to mobile phones and other devices, leading us to today, when nearly everything is connected.

Now, the internet is everywhere. It runs our transit systems, enables our work, and delivers our entertainment; as such, it affects nearly every person on the planet. But while its benefits have expanded to practically every aspect of modern life, its power to cause harm has continued to grow. Misinformation floods our news feeds, scams prey on the vulnerable, and countless sites facilitate human trafficking, drug trading, and the spread of all manner of illegal and immoral content. It all begs the question, are these ill effects balanced out by the benefits, or is the internet a net evil to society?

At least in part, early fears about the internet’s harmful effects proved correct. However, these vices were not completely new to us; instead, they were part of a larger pattern of human indecency. In the year 590, Pope Gregory I identified seven sins to encompass the negative temptations of humanity. These included lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Though the earliest origins of the behaviors associated with these sins cannot be known, each sin was drawn from earlier texts, and from the ancient wisdom that sometimes, people do bad things. The seven sins reflected the social and political system of the time they were created, specified and spread in part to impose a moral system onto the Pope’s Christian followers and others.

Today, the seven sins provide a convenient framework to examine the effects of a network invented long after their conception, and which has come to consume humanity in its own right. In Net Evil, seven artists explore how evil inhabits the internet, each through the lens of one of the seven sins.

In A(nn)i’s Phantom Obsessions, Ann Hirsch engages with lust through an AI version of her younger self, A(nn)i, to create zine pages and collages of crushes. These crushes are imaginary, but not by choice; instead, their fictional nature is imposed by the content limitations of the LLM which contain A(nn)i. Just as Hirsch is limited by her memory, A(nn)i can only create collages which, while passionate, are limited by the AI’s technical constraints.

Phat Phonk is a 25-minute, 10-track mixtape by the artist duo Dadabots, based on the hip-hop subgenre “phonk.” The mixtape is composed of 50 fragments, formatted as stark terminal graphics with short audio snippets. Much like the audio-generation practices of its creators, the distribution method of Phat Phonk is unapologetically gluttonous, with each snippet linking to a download of a full .mp3 file which takes up anywhere from 89GB to 29TB of hard drive space—making it incredibly resource-intensive to listen to the mixtape in its entirety.

Money Vortex by Steve Pikelny is a generative art series with a single goal: to imbue the spectator with a spirit of abundance and wealth. Drawing from a category of YouTube videos and livestreams promising that viewers “will receive a huge amount of money” and “travel through the Abundance Gate and release abundance,” Pikelny addresses greed through a semi-spiritual tone, running as live code that speaks affirmations into eternity.

Embodying the sin of sloth, Damjanski took 24 10-minute naps over a 24-hour period to create Napster 24. Each nap was recorded on a wearable sleep tracker, so the data could become the basis of the artworks—which collectively catalog a fractured sleep schedule induced by internet use.

With Diatriber, Lorna Mills presents a graphic display of wrath. Assembling a spectacular selection of simulated violence from weapons-demonstration videos, and featuring ballistic dummies complete with fake bones and blood to mimic a human body, collisions result in a flurry of particles expertly set by Mills' hand.

In Hard Copy, Maya Man examines the “Sad Beige Lawsuit,” in which influencer Sydney Nicole Gifford accused Alyssa Sheil of replicating her content—from decor, to clothes, to nearly every aspect of her online persona. Taken directly from the court filing and electronically signed by the artist, the PDF series centers on side-by-side content comparisons, visualizing envy through utilitarian legal diagrams.

The pseudonymous artist SHL0MS represents pride through 𝚅𝙰𝙽𝙸𝚃𝙸𝙴𝚂, a series of video works created from celebrity mirror selfies. With each piece flashing between the original image and the same environment with the celebrity removed, the rate at which the celebrity appears encodes their name, and the length of their artwork and order in the collection is determined by their follower account. As such, popularity becomes a simple metric for their relative value within the work.

As becomes evident, the internet has proven to be neither purely a miracle nor entirely a menace, but rather a mirror reflecting the best and worst of human nature. Just as the seven deadly sins have endured across centuries as a way to understand our moral failings, the web offers a modern stage on which these same impulses play out—amplified, accelerated, and broadcast to billions. Net Evil confronts this uneasy truth, inviting us to see the internet not as a separate world, but as an extension of ourselves, where ancient vices have found new forms.