“Black Fax off the Hook” is an insurrectionary transmission—a cultural guerrilla operation leveraging the destructive power of spam. In its most basic sense, a black fax can be defined as a malicious transmission, specifically a sheet of black print sent in rapid succession to a fax machine. This simple act overwhelms the machine’s ink and paper supply, a material assault akin to a digital denial-of-service attack, disrupting the machine’s functionality and rendering it impotent. This exhibit configures black faxing as a tool of psychopolitical derision, a constantly clicking fusillade of narrative flooding the space of perception. The exhibit reinterprets this as a critique of media saturation, where information becomes a relentless assault on cognitive bandwidth, paralyzing its audience into a state of psychic immobilization. In doing so, black faxing transforms into a weaponized inversion of Bulgarian mainstream media, and political populist tactics at large, which wage a campaign of total info-saturation on the public consciousness, entrapping the citizenry in a state of an anything-goes regime of public politics.

The installation unfurls through 35 meters of gothic erotic fan fiction, generated by the custom Bulgarian GPT developed by INSAIT (Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology) in collaboration with the Bulgarian government. This AI, “BgGPT,” has been specially engineered to understand the nuances of Bulgarian language and culture, but its informational corpus is potentially polluted with data from Bulgaria’s so-called “yellow media”—a term for scandal-driven, populist outlets that serve as a conduit for sensationalism and political propaganda. Ostensibly promoted as a tool for advancing Bulgarian education, business, healthcare, and public administration, BgGPT becomes, in this context, an agent of spectral subversion, capable of creating grotesquely funny narratives wieving prominent political figures in a noir air of mistique, something lacking in its pure everyday brutness. In this case, the AI reanimates notorious personalities like Boyko Borisov, Ivan Geshev, Konstantin Kostadinov, and Andrey Lukanov, recasting them as the protagonists of a dark, libidinal fiction. This is a story of corruption and carnality, an obscene reimagining of political figures entwined in grotesque scandals that border on the mythological.

To “receive a fax” in Bulgarian idiom is to be struck by an intrusive idea, a sudden pulse from the without. On the other hand the slang term “ченге” (from the Turkish, meaning “hook”) carries connotations of entrapment, referring both to a policeman and, crucially, to an agent of the former State Security Services (Д.С.) during the communist era—figures of enmeshed culpability, guardians of repressive continuity and so called “Quiet Front”. Many protagonists of this installation remain entangled in the remnants of this apparatus to this day. Here the double translated tittle plays on the duplicity of language and slang with „off the hook” mirroring the Bulgaria „от ченге” (literary meaning “from a cop”) suggesting the tendency of such materials to be used as kompromats (blackmail material).

“Black Fax off the Hook” functions as a spam-apparatus in the form of hacked Philips PPF631 Primo fax machine. It transforming populist tactics of hypernormalisation into sublime disorientation. In a similar way to the echo chambers of Bulgarian yellow media—whose protocols incessantly amplify populist sentiment, scandal, and hyperbole—this installation mirrors the propaganda machine at the heart of contemporary populism, challenging the idea of information as enlightenment. Instead, it invites viewers into an info-blitzkrieg, a deliberate dérive within a media system where truth and fiction are continuously rewritten by forces vying for influence. Here, AI serves as a co-conspirator, converting both the algorithmic and libidinal energies of propaganda into a boundless, machinic production of scandal and spectacle.

The exhibit was featured as part of Bulgaria’s first porn festival, SPORNO—organized by Æther Sofia and Michaela Lakova.

Media Coveredge

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