After a crusade left Venice drowning in debt, the republic created the world's first bond market and, with it, a new way for governments to fund themselves.

Venice’s failed war against Constantinople led to the first bond market

After a crusade left Venice drowning in debt, the republic created the world's first bond market and, with it, a new way for governments to fund themselves.

For two months this spring, an office in Venice's Palazzo Franchetti ran as a small, malicious data centre. On a turntable sat a model of the "cursed cat"—the earless, tailless, ANGRY AS FUK blob in circulation since 2008—while a robotic arm photographed it from every angle, feeding an image model that generated new variants and released them onto the web, the better to contaminate the training sets of whatever comes next. Around the rooms, the machine's mutations were rebuilt by hand in wood, moss, and Murano glass. That was _Rage Bait_ , Eva and Franco Mattes' exhibition with the Autotelic Foundation, which ran alongside the Venice Biennale this summer. The cursed cat, remade in moss. Photo: Melania Dalle Grave for DSL Studio, courtesy Autotelic Foundation The games entry sat across the water, over a private swimming pool on Giudecca: _But I Love Human_ (2024), a ten-minute supercut of NPC livestreamers—performers who mimic videogame background characters, repeating awkward, mechanical gestures and scripted dialogue for an online audience—screened above the pool so visitors watched it in reflection. An excerpt is below, silent; the full video has its audio. 0:00 /0:24 1× Silent excerpt from __But I Love Human__ (2024). The full video, with audio, is at the artists’ site In a conversation with Gary Zhexi Zhang for Ocula—the piece that surfaced this for us—the duo sound less like pranksters than like people whose tools were expropriated. "The strategies that we contributed to or pioneered—you know, faking, pranking, rage bait—now are being used by the most powerful people on the planet," Eva Mattes says. Or, shorter: "Strange is the new normal." We've been following the Mattes' work since Issue o1 and Killscreen was on the humans-as-NPCs beat back when it was heartwarming—in 2014 we covered a Japanese villager repopulating a dying town with life-size NPC stand-ins. What stays with me now is Franco Mattes' stubborn optimism: no company, however big, "was yet able to engineer an honest meme, something that lasts more than a few days. And some kid in a bedroom in Kyiv does it." From net art to NPC streams, Radar reads the internet’s strangest corners through games—free, in your inbox, three times a week. Get Radar free

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