Spray and Pray is a speculative animated documentary about “mushroom websites” — automated news networks designed to monetize disinformation through advertising and algorithmic circulation. With a focus on identity-based disinformation, the film examines how such narratives are manufactured at scale, disseminated across platforms, and converted into political and economic value.

The film traces the human–machine arrangements sustaining these infrastructures: link-spreading micro-labor, domain operators managing sprawling clusters of sites, ad-tech intermediaries, and the algorithmic systems that amplify their reach. Combining investigative research with speculative cinematic form, Spray and Pray makes a largely opaque economy of influence visible — following how agency and responsibility are distributed, and diffused, across automated systems.

RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY

The project grew out of a long-term artistic research process drawing on media monitoring, investigative and academic sources, and machine-learning-assisted analysis. Rather than cataloguing isolated cases, it focuses on the structural logics and circulation patterns of disinformation networks — with particular attention to Bulgarian-language content, a domain that remains poorly served by automated detection systems despite being a consistent target of coordinated influence campaigns.

In collaboration with computational linguist Tsvetomila Mihaylova, and using Bulgarian-language models developed at the GATE Institute in Sofia, the project analysed a corpus of collected headlines and articles. These experiments spanned machine-generated text detection, disinformation likelihood scoring, and sentiment analysis. The film treats their outputs not as evidence, but as unstable readings — surfaces that expose the limits, biases, and ambiguities of automated interpretation.

Within the film, documentary material is translated into speculative cinematic form through collected narratives, mediated traces, and layered processes of transformation. The tension between raw documentary trace and reconstructed mediation mirrors the very conditions the film investigates: an informational environment in which authenticity is perpetually produced, circulated, and destabilized.