The installation invites visitors into a crash course with rogue AI models, blending unsettling content with glimpses of the internet’s quirky, everyday side, all within a participatory, live-performance setup.

Festival director Danielle Harvey notes this year’s event is the largest since it began in 2009.

As part of a 10-day festival lineup, the program features more than 150 participants, including Tim Minchin, Malcolm Turnbull, Bob Carr, Maria Ressa, Cory Doctorow, and Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina, highlighting provocative, boundary-pushing art across cinema, installations, and performances.

Safety and ethics are foregrounded with trigger warnings for potentially offensive material, plus explicit exclusions for child exploitation content and optional side rooms offering lighter contrasts like pandas and mother birds.

The installation scrapes content from platforms such as 4chan, Reddit, and TikTok, alongside international media, with Haslam narrating from inside the box as results are displayed on surrounding walls for about an hour.

Audience feedback dynamically influences the performance, creating a responsive, participatory experience.

Artist Mark Haslam presents FAKE at Carriageworks for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, meshing a scrapping-the-internet setup inside a scrim-mesh box with audience interaction and multi-screen visuals.

An AI-generated voice and a live performer in a yeti costume circulate the space, with the yeti increasingly engaging the audience and eventually revealing a more human persona.

Haslam positions the project as a meditation on humanity’s relationship with the internet, arguing rogue AI models trained on human data can reflect both disturbing and heartfelt facets of civilization, while stressing the importance of human-to-human connection through technology.