Meta’s art-heavy ads are back in the frame — and a Bowery performance series asked why that matters
When tech companies sell AI, VR, or the metaverse, they often reach for the same visual promise: art that seems to move, open, or swallow the viewer whole. Meta’s 2021 rebrand ad used Henri Rousseau’s “Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo” as a portal-like fantasy. Its Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses campaign later paired Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt with Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian,” a banana that Hemsworth ate on camera. The recurring message is clear: new technology is rarely marketed as machinery. It is sold as enchantment.
That logic was the subject of “Exert: The Physics of Metaphysics,” a three-day program at Giorno Poetry Systems in early May, staged in what was once William S. Burroughs’s loft on the Bowery in New York. Artist and curator Mark Leckey framed the event as an effort to “give the internet a body,” a phrase that captures both the seduction and the unease running through the program.
The setting sharpened the point. Visitors moved through the low-ceilinged loft, past patterned carpets, a projector, and an oversized sound system, while a golden shrine had been pushed aside to make room for the performances. The crowd gathered for readings, concerts, and screenings that treated simulation not as a novelty but as a condition of contemporary life.
Among the featured artists was British novelist Hari Kunzru (b. 1969), who read from a novel in progress about a young man trying to make sense of a world where reality seems to fray at the edges. In the excerpt, a tech party, a founder’s pitch, and a friend’s attempt at reassurance all become part of a larger question: if something feels fake, does that feeling matter more than the fact itself?
The program also included Gideon Jacobs’s performance lecture “All Images Are Quite Useless,” which folded together spoken text, image generation, and a website that auto-transcribed his reading and converted the words into prompts. The result was less a lecture than a demonstration of how quickly language, image, and machine logic now collapse into one another.
Other contributors included Jay the Bucket Drummer and Deli Girls, extending the event’s range from literary speculation to live sound. But the through line remained consistent: in an era of AI, augmented reality, and immersive branding, the old question of what is real has become inseparable from the question of what is useful, soothing, or profitable.
If tech companies keep borrowing art’s authority to sell the future, programs like this one suggest that artists are equally intent on exposing the cost of that fantasy.
