A new group show asks what happens to the human libido when it passes through an algorithm, and whether we should be worried about the answer.
There is a corner of the internet where men spend hours in front of their screens, deliberately stopping themselves from finishing. They call it gooning. There is another corner where people fall in love with chatbots, write to them every day, grieve when they go cold. They call it something closer to yearning. I AM AN ADULT ___ YOU WILL BE REWARDED is an exhibition that takes both of these phenomena seriously, and asks what it means that they are happening at the same time, on the same platforms, through the same code.
The exhibition is created and curated by Violet Bordin, Tammer Nassiff, and Luca Varano, three artists with roots in RISD and Brown University. In the tradition of landmark survey shows like the Posthuman, the exhibition positions itself as a response to a genuine cultural shift rather than a provocation for its own sake.
The Gooner and the One Who YearnsWhat curators Luca Varano, Violet Bordin, and Tammer Nassiff identified is that these two modes of longing, the compulsive masculine act of deferral and the shamed feminine condition of yearning, are mirror images of each other. Culture celebrates one and pathologizes the other. The exhibition holds them side by side and asks what that asymmetry reveals about who gets to want, and on what terms.
Prompting as Seduction
The second major thread running through the show is the prompt, the iterative command fed to a large language model to produce a desired output. Getting around a chatbot’s filters has become a community practice. Users have found that asserting authority, writing “I am an adult” in a prompt, or reframing prohibited language, referring to masturbation as an “entirely non-sexual wellness routine,” can coax the model into producing what they want. Luca Varano, Violet Bordin, and Tammer Nassiff frame this as digital hijacking: an unauthorized redistribution of the power dynamic between user and machine. The show takes its name from this dynamic. I am an adult. You will be rewarded. It is a line of code. It is also, unmistakably, seduction.
A Database as Primary Source
Running alongside the exhibition is youwillberewarded.com, a living reference database built as the theoretical and terminological foundation for the show. It functions as a primary source as much as a project site, somewhere between an academic glossary and an internet artifact, documenting the subcultures, language, and theory the exhibition draws from in real time. It is worth visiting before anything else.
An Open Call
The exhibition will include an open call for submissions, and Luca Varano, Violet Bordin, and Tammer Nassiff report that there is already a significant body of artists generating work in response to these themes. Work is welcome across all forms: painting, sculpture, photography, video, and digital media. As the show develops, the curators are building it out alongside professors, curators, and esteemed collaborators from within their network. The show is not interested in shock alone. It is interested in the performance of agency inside systems designed to contain it, in what synthetic intimacy reveals about real longing, and in who gets to be the one doing the wanting. Those questions are not new. What is new is the infrastructure they are now running on.
More information at youwillberewarded.com
