Social Media Art: From Dada to TikTok - an online course by Filippo Lorenzin, available at 
aos.arebyte.com 
 
Lesson eight transcript 
 
Hello everyone, thanks for joining me today. This is the eighth episode of Social Media Art: 
From Dada to TikTok, a course produced by Arebyte and hosted by me, Filippo Lorenzin.  
 
2.8 Artist’s Brand and Virality 
 
The user registered on social media is implicitly pushed to create and develop his own brand, 
using his experiences as opportunities to increase his "virality": to quote Jean-Louis Comolli, 
"the forces of repression do not prevent people from expressing themselves. On the contrary, 
they force him to express himself ”. The user is asked to evaluate his own importance on the 
basis of the quantifications we have mentioned in the previous lessons: the number of Likes 
received by the video shared on his Facebook page, the amount of retweets with which his 
tweet becomes viral, the amount of people following his Instagram - they are all tricks to build 
a relationship of dependence between him and the online platforms. This happens at any time 
of the day, without real "free time". 
 
Attention is a rare commodity in an era of endless scrolls on blogs and social media: the user 
has learned to reward what interests him at the expense of what bores him. A project focused 
on this phenomenon is need ideasss!?! PLZ !! (2011) by Elisa Giardina Papa, a video montage 
of clips taken from YouTube in which girls ask what they can do to attract attention.  
 
The artists act in an environment designed to generate competition and their responses to this 
situation can be grouped into two main categories. Many of them use their social media 
profiles as if they were showcases of their business, while others exploit their characteristics to 
develop fields of action in which to act with tactics and artistic projects. Virality unites both the 
approaches. The majority of views artists’ works get online are often not through their own 
websites, but through the accumulated network of reblogs, links and digital reproductions". 
First of all, the name, the title of the work and the date of production are lost, or the elements 
indicated by the more traditional captions: at that point the image competes with every other 
online material. In this sense, it is important for the artist/user to create a brand that is 
recognizable both for their business and for their person. Several artists have reflected on this 
state of competition which can be summed up in the words of Jennifer Chan: “this is the 
anxiety of Internet art: if you stop contributing, you will be forgotten”. The artist has gone 
through the production of a series of isolated works “to a constant broadcast of one’s artistic 

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identity as a recognizable, unique brand”, as suggested by the artist Brad Troemel. Guido 
Segni, for example, created Top Expiring Internet Artists, an online ranking of digital artists. 
Those who update their websites more frequently occupy the highest ranks, while the least 
active online will disappear from the list, forgotten.  
 
In a cultural-technological context like ours, therefore, the most important artist best succeeds 
by attempting to reduce the psychic and technical distance between his artistic output and the 
productive means of society.  
 
 
2.9 The Personalised Experience and the Surprise Effect 
 
The public that comes across the works we are considering is as varied as a group of Internet 
users can be, including both experts on the subject and, to a very large extent, people not 
interested in art. On the internet the importance of an element is defined by the needs of the 
user, who becomes the center of the system: an example in this sense is the GPS technology 
that puts him at the center of the map, without providing him with qualitative information on the 
landscape. We have entered the phase of Me-Mapping, or rather the placing of the user at the 
instant center of everything. In 1995 De Kerckhove wrote that the "virtual reality machines 
make literal the fact that for some cultures, walking is not seen as traversing space but as 
pushing space under one's feet": thanks to algorithms that record, analyse and archive the 
movements and the user's online behaviours, he has access to a version of the Net built on the 
digital reconstruction of his person. This process ensures that the user finds himself both at the 
center and outside of everything at the same time: if on the one hand the feeling is that all the 
elements presented to him on the Net are familiar, on the other there is the fact that this 
context keeps a distance from him.  
 
This dynamic therefore leads to the creation of a sort of blinders that exclude what is not 
interesting for the user, directing him, instead, towards what should potentially attract him, 
including the people he should interact with. If we were to trace the history of devices designed 
to be used only by the individual, we would identify in the walkman one of the very first cases, 
dated 1979 : as Eduardo Kac suggests, “in its private sensorial experience it can be seen as 
the epiphenomenon of a society that chooses to remove itself from public space”. The 
individual listens, alone with their own headphones, to the music they prefer, on a patented 
support produced exclusively by a large global multinational such as Sony; the next step would 
have been the iPod. The digital music player produced by Apple since 2001 took the 
peculiarities of the Sony device to the extreme: in addition to closing the user in a bubble 
designed by himself, it forced him to buy songs on his official digital store. The transition from 
these devices to smart-phones was easy: the individual had access to a tool designed to 
accommodate and satisfy his needs - even and above all those he does not yet know.  
 
He is placed in a situation in which the surprise is not contemplated. All these mechanisms are 
manifestations of algorithms written specifically to analyse and store the interests of individual 

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users under labels useful for market research and product sales: Amazon invites us to buy the 
sequel to the book we just bought, Spotify suggests songs, Facebook invites to follow people 
we may want to know. The artistic projects that exploit this state of the user act in a a 
disruptive way: in the flow of normalized materials selected so as not to disturb his navigation, 
unexpected actions generate curiosity, perplexity, horror, creating occasions to take a critical 
position regarding the tools he is using and their influence on his life. If reality is defined only as 
the product of a negotiation, this kind of art aims to destroy any a priori agreement on the 
perceived. 
 
A way to understand the reasons why such works are epiphanic is suggested by the studies on 
the psychology of thought, that branch of science that reflects on the cognitive mechanisms 
that lead a person to reason in a certain way, based on sociological observations. An 
interesting parallel is that between this kind of works and supernatural concepts, as observed 
by Dan Sperber and Pascal Boyer; according to them all religious beliefs are tied to general 
presuppositions which underlie the way in which human beings categorise the world. Violations 
of expectations make supernatural concepts particularly salient and easy to remember, thus 
favouring their social transmission, cultural selection and historical persistence; in other words, 
the individual placed in a given situation is led to observe the patterns, to identify the most 
recurring and therefore most probable events, and to make these the basis of his own 
perception. When he comes across something that violates these expectations, such as a 
statue that tears blood or in our case the photo of the artist Amalia Ulman on Instagram, that 
event will be potentially more memorable for him than those that conventionally constitute his 
reality. 
 
However, these unexpected events must not be too strange, otherwise the observer won’t pay 
attention to them; as well as the supernatural elements, they must represent small slips with 
respect to what is admitted in the respective domains. For example, Petra Cortright’s videos 
“resemble” many other videos published online and the virtual character played by Angela 
Washko in the online video game World of Warcraft looks like the others played by other 
gamers. A work that does not blend into the habits and expectations generally accepted by a 
community of people is not accepted by them. On the contrary it creates reactions of 
embarrassment - that is, it does not generate participation. 
 
The question of expectations and of the context within which the work is presented is 
fundamental especially in the case of what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière defines 
as critical art, the aim of which is to awaken the consciences of the public by highlighting the 
mechanisms of domination of the structures of power; this practice should lead to the 
transformation of the spectator into a critically conscious agent of changes in the world. This 
approach is criticised by the French, who emphasises how, on the one hand, the mere act of 
discovering can be of little use if one wants to directly influence consciences and contexts: 
"the exploited have rarely had the need to have the laws of exploitation explained to them". On 
the other hand, according to him, this kind of work of art completely eliminates the potential for 
the appearance of this resistance in the praxis of life; in other words, if presented to the public 

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as a “work that must make people change their minds” it does not offer itself to the surprise of 
the viewer, who raises a psychological barrier between him and the work.  
 
This didactic approach is often used to present works that deal with particularly complex 
topics that require conscious participation from the public. This is the case of Loophole for All 
(2013) by Paolo Cirio, which focuses on the international economic system: through the official 
website of the project, anyone can buy the real identity of over 200,000 anonymous companies 
registered in the Cayman Islands, a well-known paradise, for a few dollars. tax. The simplicity 
of this operation is suggested to the user starting from the design of the site which 
incorporates that of any other commercial site. The project logo is playful, and the claim itself is 
presented with an informal character; Cirio uses the language and the communication method 
of large companies to disturb their own activities. 
 
Conclusions 
 
If  you  followed  the  whole  course,  you  noticed  how  the  artists  who  deal  with  situations 
contemporary  to  them  have  developed tactics and artistic methods of expression that respond 
more or less directly to the mechanisms and problems underlying these contexts. This dynamic 
and  its  very  theoretical  formulation  stems  from  the  idea  that  we  live  in  a  historical  period 
characterised  by  change,  both  "positive"  and  "negative".  In  the  drafting  of  this  course  I 
observed  that  almost  all  of  the  texts  consulted identify the industrial revolution as the period in 
which  a  decisive  break  with  respect  to  the  customs  of  the  past  is  generated;  modularity, 
mechanical  measurement  and  the  consequential  ability  to  determine  human  activities  in 
numbers  are  just  some  of the most evident manifestations of the logic behind the first factories 
and  automated  machines  for  industrial  production.  These  dynamics  are  easily  identifiable  on 
the  Internet,  precisely  because it represents one of the most shining manifestations of the logic 
of  quantifying  and  controlling  the  daily  life  of  individuals.  It  seems,  in  short,  that  since  the first 
automated  machines  were  introduced,  an  acceleration  of  history  has  been  perceived by virtue 
of  technological  innovations  that  have  made  it  possible  to  speed  up  the  exchange  of 
information  and materials around the world; this dynamic has led to the awareness of living in a 
world that is much faster and more eventful than that of the past. 
 
This  acceleration  has  led  to  a  perennial  state  of  crisis  for  the  individual  who  looks  with 
suspicion  and  cynicism  at  companies  that  provide  and  promote  the  services  he  uses;  this 
disillusionment  was  observed,  with  the  logical  peculiarities  and  differences  of  the  case,  in  the 
totality  of  the  movements  included  in  this  course,  from  the  Dada  to  the  Postinternet,  passing 
through Situationists, Fluxus and net.art. 
 
The  development  of  tactics  and  artistic  activities  aimed  at  disrupting  the  individual's  daily 
practice  as  promoted  by  the  system  is  the  central  point  of  their  research,  each  time  declined 
according  to  different  prerogatives  and  purposes.  These  practices  are  interesting  for  us  for 
many  reasons.  Mail  Art,  for  example,  is  certainly  worthy  of  being  studied  as  an  aesthetic  and 
social  manifestation  of  great  importance,  but  what  fascinates  me  to  observe  is  also  how  it 

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reflects  the  problems  and  arguments  of  the  era  to  which  it  belongs.  Other  works  I  examined 
have  been  observed  paying  particular  attention  to  the  reasons  for which they were developed. 
These  works  will  accumulate  a  patina  of  dust  within  a  few  years, the same that already covers 
the  works  created  in  the  nineties;  technological  research  and  industry  promote  the 
obsolescence  of  products  and  software,  ensuring  that  even  the  works  created  with  them  are 
affected  by  the  same  centrifugal  and  flattening  dynamic  that  leads,  for  example,  the  websites 
created  by  Jodi  in  1995  to  appear  as  manifestations  of  an  aesthetic  taste  as  far  from 
contemporary as that of Allan Kaprow's happenings. 
 
The  postmodern  is  born  and  nourished  at  the  speed  with  which  the  rubble  of  the  past 
accumulates  and  the  differences  between  different  eras  are  reduced  by  the  individual  in order 
to  identify  common  thread  and  causality  that  can  allow  him  to  connect  them  to contemporary 
situations, justifying their existence. 
 
The  research  undertaken  by  these  and  many  other  artists  mentioned  in  these  lessons  is  the 
grey  area  that  divides  the  general  public  from  art  perceived  as  awkward,  distant  from  real  life 
such  as  that  of  galleries,  biennials.  If  this  public  looks  at  official  art  with  suspicion  the  works 
featured  in  the  course  are  presented  by  the  artists  in  a  non-invasive  way,  using  the  same 
tactics  adopted  by  other  online  users.  This  means  that  the  artistic  projects  are  genuinely 
enjoyed  by  the  public,  without  preconceptions;  the  auratic  status  of  art  is  more  radically 
displaced  than  the  operations  implemented  in  the  past  because  the  Internet  was  developed 
from  the  beginning  to  give  equal  opportunities  for  manifestation  to  any  person,  from  the 
computer  engineer  to  the  artist,  from  the  village  shop  to  the  millionaire  multinational.  This  did 
not  happen,  for  example,  in  the  case  of  Happenings  because  the  artists  who  organised  them 
needed  to  cut  out  in  their  daily  practice  a  moment  regulated  by  otherwise  meaningless  laws; 
The  interaction  with  the  public  on  the  Web  is  less  traumatic  for  artists  because  it  is  itself  a 
space  governed  by  flattening  rules  that  push  individuals  to  manifest  themselves  with  an 
uninterrupted flow of actions and reactions.  
 
The  user's  daily  practice  is  marked  by  online  interaction  and  it  is  here  that  the  artist  reaches 
him, surgically inserting himself between the spaces prepared to be filled by the platform. 
 
This  is  all.  I  want  to  thank  all  of you for joining me every week and Arebyte for this opportunity. 
If  you  got  interested  in  art  and  digital  culture,  I  suggest  you  to  follow  the  amazing  exhibitions 
and  other  activities  of  Arebyte.  Feel  always  welcome  to  get  in  contact  with  me  if  you  wish  to 
ask  anything  about  the  subjects  I  covered  in  the  last  eight  weeks,  I  will  be  at  your  disposal. 
Until then, take care, ciao ciao. 
 

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