In today’s hyper-commercialized online environment, artists Sara Bezovšek, Beti Frim, and Neo Nor hijack digital advertisements to disrupt our scrolling habits. Their work invites us into their own digital worlds, where nostalgia for the early web intertwines with a critical examination of contemporary internet culture. In the group exhibition Chronically Online, their pieces linger between evoking the spirit of the first online communities and imagining what virtual spaces might yet become.
In their own distinct way, each artist of the exhibition explores how users navigate and inhabit online spaces. This includes analyzing meme logic and cultural absorption within the current cluttered digital environment, deliberately revisiting the DIY aesthetics of early web graphics, or creating virtual retreats from the constant demands of online performativity. Neo Nor constructs snippets into a nightmarish world dense with niche gaming references and marginal characters surviving at the edge of systemic collapse. His post-digital dystopia reflects on the internet’s role as both an escape and a site of identity formation, while at the same time alluding to the unpolished, ‘ugly’ aesthetics of the early web. The revival of this visual language, which contrasts sharply with today's minimalist, commercial design, serves as a tool of playful resistance. Sara Bezovšek draws inspiration from the 2010s phenomenon of online personality quizzes, inviting users to “find out what their online personality is.” By answering a series of questions, the participants move through various belief systems, political opinions, and ideological paths. Beneath its engaging surface, which reflects the logic of online consumption, the project critically examines how the algorithmically informed worldview is constructed and commodified within today's saturated media landscape. The overwhelming feelings of the average internet user are also captured in Beti Frim’s whimsical digital sanctuaries, which serve as a response to the relentless commercialization and performance pressure of contemporary online life. Her work offers a utopian retreat, a quiet refuge built within a dreamy, girlish aesthetic full of past online references and memes. Another layer of the project, conceived as a step-by-step online manual for Means of escapism, subverts the productivity-driven logic of the internet and invites exhausted users to slowly disconnect.
Beneath the exhibition’s critical engagement with today’s internet culture runs an undercurrent of nostalgia for a time when the web felt more manageable, slower, less monetised, and more community-oriented. But rather than longing for the simpler times, the Chronically Online exhibition reclaims agency within ad spaces and uses the attention economy's own tools to question whether we could imagine the internet in another way. In an era where meaning dissolves with every scroll, where memory lasts only as long as a story’s fleeting lifespan, and where ads, posts, and notifications wage a relentless battle for our attention, these artists ask: Can we redesign the structures of the internet? Through their work, they not only question the status quo but also imagine alternative ways of existing online.
Curators and authors of the text: Lara Mejač, Ugo Pecoraio, Heiko Schmid
Banner design: Jaka Juhant
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana and KUNSTSURFER Association, 2026
