Abstract
Since their early adoption of Web 2.0, far-right movements have exploited postdigital platforms as participatory stages, using performance strategies to cultivate virality, engagement, and ideological recruitment (Drayton and Dunne-Howrie 2026). In recent years, these mythologies of nationalist restoration have been intensified by AI-generated media that produce increasingly hyperreal images of reactionary fantasy. This paper argues that, through a performative deployment of false nostalgia, a broader subculture of short-form video creators - many not overtly far-right - construct hybrid realities that dramatise a longing for a lost future (Fisher 2014) or an imagined past. While circulating as seemingly aesthetic or humorous content, such AI-generated nostalgia slop (Gault and Koebler 2025; Nazaryan 2025) aligns affectively with reactionary worldviews and can draw audiences toward radicalising pathways. I term this phenomenon the un/real right: a postdigital mode of performance that occupies a hauntological (Derrida 1994) and metamodern (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010) space between genuine disaffection with neoliberal modernity and the fantasy of a world before digital mediation. Through analysis of TikTok and Instagram reels, the paper explores how AI imagery and platform aesthetics function performatively – creating emotionally charged, algorithmically optimised spectacles of belonging and loss. It contributes to current debates on AI and the arts by framing generative systems as agents of cultural performance that shape political feeling, nostalgia, and belief in the postdigital public sphere.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
New Media, Technology and the Arts
KEYWORDS
AI aesthetics, Far-right radicalisation, Postdigital performance, Nostalgia, Hauntology, TikTok
