You’ve lost the plot — and so has everyone else. Slop Plot is a participatory AI artwork by Danish artist Esben Holk, unfolding across Roskilde Festival’s eight days. At its center is a simple invitation: upload a memory and become part of the story.
Using a custom webapp, festivalgoers can contribute images – moments, faces, scenes from the camping area – to a collective AI‑driven collage and an evolving eight‑chapter tale. Each image feeds a shared narrative: a “digital twin” of the festival crowd, moving through the week and playing out in real time on a large screen in Gloria’s foyer. The collage updates continuously as new memories arrive.
Out in the camping areas, a troupe of performers – the scrapers – wander around and playfully encourage festivalgoers to visit the website. Like algorithms made flesh, they serve up gamification and invite the audience to cocreate the artwork.
Inspired by medieval troubadour traditions, internet iconography, and brain rot aesthetics, Slop Plot asks what it means to tell a story together in a time of fragmented realities. In a world of AI‑generated content, main character syndrome, NPCs, and villain eras, who then writes the collective saga?
Esben Holk is an interdisciplinary programmer, visual artist, and game designer exploring identity through artificial intelligence, programming, data visualization, and interaction design. Their work takes shape in 3D landscapes, memes, collages, software, and video games, where algorithms become embodied, play is integrated, and the queered digital human is at the center.