“For a new generation of digital native artists, Web 2.0 is filled with innocence and nostalgia in a similar way that Web 1.0 was for post-internet artists. Learning by their practice, emerging artists are sympathizing with the feeling of loss towards their past lives online. Dutch artist Melle Nieling represents this feeling by recreating common tropes in old fashioned spam advertising. His works devirtualizes pop-up banners, emphasizing promises of evading taxes, age-reversal serums or making billions by clicking on a link. In works like Soul (2023) and Funeral (2023), some of these statements take a spiritual turn, presenting clickbait stories of people selling their soul in exchange of points on their credit score, or ancient cults paying for funeral bills. Recalling the terrain of online flash games websites and pirate websites that Gen Z spent its pre-adolescent years, Nieling stages a time when scams online looked like annoying spam banners. When the internet was still naive, digital traps to collect and sell your data had the look of stretched images, funky fonts, hot singles to meet in your surroundings and shiny sports cars to win with a single click.”
– Arianna Caserta, writer
