Undead, Unmanned: A Screening of Y7’s 'Undead Internet Theory'

If the internet is an AI-generated ghost town, are we banished to being mere spectres, or can we abandon it altogether?

Y7 (Hannah Cobb & Declan Colquitt)’s video-essay (2025) explores the eerie conditions of an internet increasingly shaped by non-human agencies: bots, algorithms, synthetic content, and automated systems. Expanding on the digital-age mythocracy of ‘Dead Internet Theory,' the film navigates the blurred boundaries between conspiracy, infrastructure, and contemporary digital reality—where online spaces feel progressively less human, yet increasingly swarming with activity.

Drawing on conversations with a diverse host of artists, academics, and researchers in digital culture—including Simon DeDeo, Terence Broad, POSTPOSTPOST, Idil Galip, and Anna Rose Kerr—the film explores the implications of an internet re-engineered for AI agents. Undead Internet Theory also asks whether the complexity of large-scale digital systems might generate new cultural artefacts and models of culture not centred on—or limited by—a preoccupation with the human experience. Is the internet dead, dying, or transforming into something even stranger than death?

About Y7

Y7 (Hannah Cobb & Declan Colquitt) is an artist-writer duo based in Manchester, UK, working across emergent technology, cultural criticism, and audiovisual experimentation. They examine how technologies reshape social, philosophical, and aesthetic life: how AI disrupts authorship, how physical and digital spaces optimise away from the human, and how creative practices are reoriented by economic forces.

Alongside their AV works, they maintain a writing practice rooted in cultural criticism, media theory, political theory, and philosophy. Their writing has appeared in publications and platforms such as 032c, Flash Art, and Do Not Research. In 2025, they were invited by commissioner Shumon Basar to co-curate the Global Art Forum programme in Dubai, titled ‘The New New Normal’, where they invited leading practitioners and thinkers to take part in a series of talks, panels, and discussions. They also run Conclave, a cross-disciplinary reading group and network in Manchester connecting artists, theorists, and technologists.

Milia Xin Bi is a curator and writer based in Glossop, UK. Her curatorial practice explores how artistic practices can question the instrumental logic of technology and propose alternative narratives for how technology might be lived with. Her research explores multi-temporalities, manifold materialities, and mediated agency emerging from complex systems.

About Milia Xin Bi

Milia was most recently Curator-in-Residence at FACT Liverpool (2025–2026), where her residency exhibition Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria? was presented. Alongside this role, she has been an integral part of Chronus Art Center (CAC) since 2017, where she has led and contributed to numerous interdisciplinary projects. She is also the recipient of the Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech 2022.

Image credits:

1,2,4,5. 'Undead Internet Theory' (2025), film still. Courtesy of Y7.

3.Portrait of Y7. Courtesy of Y7.

esea contemporary is the UK’s only non-profit art centre specialising in presenting and platforming artists and art practices that identify with and are informed by East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) cultural backgrounds.

esea contemporary is situated in an award-winning building in the heart of Manchester, home to one of the largest East Asian populations in the UK. Since its inauguration as a community-oriented visual arts festival in 1986, esea contemporary has continuously evolved to establish itself as a dynamic and engaging space for cross-cultural exchanges in the British art scene, as well as in a global context.

esea contemporary aims to increase the visibility of contemporary art practices from the East and Southeast Asian communities and their diasporas. It is a site for forward-thinking art programmes that beyond exhibitions also include commissions, research, residencies, publishing, and a wide range of vibrant public events. esea contemporary values creativity, compassion, interconnectedness, and collectivity in implementing its mission.

Learn more at: www.eseacontemporary.org

Photo by Joe Smith.

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