Spray and Pray is a speculative animated documentary about “mushroom websites” — automated news networks built to monetize disinformation through advertising and platform circulation. Focusing on identity-based disinformation, the film examines how such narratives are scaled, disseminated, and turned into political and economic value online.

It follows the human–machine arrangements behind these infrastructures: link-spreading micro-labor, domain operators managing large clusters of sites, ad-tech intermediaries, and algorithmic systems that amplify reach. Combining investigative research with speculative cinematic form, Spray and Pray renders an opaque economy of influence perceptible, tracing how agency and responsibility move through automated systems.

The project emerged from a long-term artistic research process combining media monitoring, investigative and academic sources, and machine-learning supported analysis. Its focus was not on isolated cases, but on the structures and circulation logics of disinformation networks, with particular attention to Bulgarian-language content — a field that remains poorly represented in automated detection systems despite being actively targeted by coordinated influence campaigns.

Working with computational linguist Tsvetomila Mihaylova and using Bulgarian-language models provided by the GATE Institute in Sofia, the project analysed collected headlines and articles. These experiments included machine-generated text detection, disinformation likelihood, and sentiment analysis. Rather than treating such outputs as evidence, the film approaches them as unstable readings that reveal the limits, biases, and ambiguities of automated interpretation.

Within the film, documentary material is translated into a speculative cinematic form shaped by collected narratives, mediated traces, and processes of transformation. The resulting tension between documentary trace and mediated reconstruction mirrors the conditions the film examines: an informational environment in which authenticity is constantly produced, circulated, and destabilized.