ARTISTIC PROJECT SUPPORTED BY ecomunicare

When Matteo and Vuk first talked to me about the Reverse Contradictionary I didn’t get it at all. Which is pre cisely why I decided to support them. Every day, for professional reasons or out of intellectual curiosity, we deal with communication: content, media, lan guage, design, and data. We don’t always have time to pause and think about what we are doing, and more specifically about where we are headed. In this re spect, artists are at an advantage: they are gifted with sensibility and take the time to look ahead. We might not possess that sensibility, but we can find the time to discover this project.

The entire cultural output of humanity is being fed into AI. Large Language Models are ingesting not only books, articles, and blogs in their entirety, but also the content of our private written and spoken conversations. LLMs are boiling lakes and burning down forests to generate texts based on statistical mediocrity, which we are supposed to worship as the beginning of a great new gilded age.

This is where Reverse Contradictionary comes into play — a collaborative effort by critical media titans Vuk Ćosić, IOCOSE and Vladan Joler. Their new “Dictionary of New Worlds” presents selected confrontational neologisms that, with acute insight and subtle provocation, challenge and overturn the predatory, algorithmic logic embedded in statistical language.

With a preface by Yes Men and a terrifying blurb by real Slavoj Žižek.

REVERSE CONTRAMANIFESTO

We do not mourn the past. We do not feed the future. We create outside of the machine’s reach.

We are giving the world its new words.

Words that are untrained, unindexed, unpredictable. Words that do not yet belong to capital, search, or surveillance. Words with no meaning except the one we give them.

This is not nostalgia. This is not utopia. This is resistance.

Each invented word is a temporary glitch in the system. A blind spot in the map of the machine. A refusal to become predictable.

We know this won’t stop the LLMs. We know our rebellion may be used to improve them. We resist anyway.

Because some of us have already been crushed by the machine. Our voices flattened, our data extracted, our work remixed and resold. We do not owe the Model anything.