Dead Internet Museum

What happens when automation rules the internet…and it's impossible to tell the difference between human participation and machines? This fall, during Halloween season, MAD Arts transforms 5 of its downstairs galleries into the Dead Internet Museum. In this beautifully unsettling, speculative world, visitors are invited to explore the edges of humanity, technology, ritual, and digital decay. Blurring the lines between exhibition, game, performance, and collective storytelling, the Dead Internet Museum explores what it means to remain human in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, synthetic media, and collapsing digital realities. Visitors experience the invisible labor, systems, and infrastructure supporting that world while reflecting on where human agency still exists. This fictional museum houses a unique collection of browser-based artifacts, interactive works, and digital remnants that feel playful, uncanny, and eerily familiar. These works are co-created by students, artists, and community participants in workshops through the Art & Tech Studio Program at MAD Arts, then expanded over time through audience interaction and contribution. An audio-led experience guides audiences deeper into the installation, though the experience remains open-ended and self-directed. Headphones enhance the journey, but moments of silence, interruption, and technological failure are intentionally embedded into the work itself. Visitors are encouraged to wander, witness, interact, disconnect, or simply exist within the shifting environment. Each series of interconnected situations reveals different aspects of the world. Some actions unlock new experiences. Others simply encourage observation, reflection, or collaboration. Throughout the exhibition, ritualistic activations and collective moments periodically emerge and dissolve, transforming the space into a living happening that continuously evolves over the course of the month. Dead Internet Museum is a multi-year digital literacy and arts research project and a prototype of the Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab (DSL), developed through collaborative research, experimentation, and public prototyping.