Watching the internet together at Galerie Linger
On 27 May 2026, we held the first edition of Collective Scroll at Galerie Linger in Berlin: a format developed by Mudmap for watching the internet together.
For this first session, we entered the visual world of Tartaria, a conspiracy theory built around strange historical claims, architectural obsessions and a specific way of reading images. Moving through keywords, accounts, videos and visual patterns, we explored how these materials circulate, repeat and begin to produce meaning.
The session approached Tartaria as an image-system: a way of looking, connecting and interpreting. Its fascination with monumental buildings, erased histories and impossible infrastructures opened a broader conversation about how images can produce alternative worlds through evidence, desire, suspicion and nostalgia.
The conversation after the scroll moved toward questions around utopia, history and the difficulty of imagining the future today. Tartaria emerged as something like an inverted utopia. Many of the buildings that appear in these videos (world fair pavilions, monumental stations, towers, domes, exhibition halls) were once tied to ideas of progress, collective ambition and possible futures. In the Tartarian imagination, those same images are turned backwards. They no longer point to what societies might build, but to something supposedly lost, hidden or stolen. Even more strangely, this fantasy often removes human authorship from the picture: these buildings are treated as too advanced, too beautiful or too impossible to have been made by people. The result is a dark reversal of utopian imagination. Instead of expanding what humanity could become, it shrinks what humanity is believed to have been capable of making together.
An upcoming article will take that conversation as a starting point and explore this idea of inverted utopia further.
Collective Scroll uses a medium against its expected mode of use. The feed is usually built for individual attention, speed and endless continuation. Here, it is displaced into a room, slowed down, projected and shared. Following McLuhan, the question is not only what passes through the medium, but what the medium rearranges: scale, rhythm, attention, space, bodies and speech.
The second session will be announced soon.
Collective Scroll #1 — Tartaria
Galerie Linger, Berlin — 27 May 2026