• Screenshot 2021-02-24 at 17.18.02

    'Nothing Ever Happens on Social Media' (2020) is an intimation on the constant social media baiting turning users into used, represented here by a Tyler the Creator impromptu gig in London, 2019, that didn't happen. In a state of suspense and potential, the crowd is kept engrossed, not realising that they in themselves are the potential.

    "What remains particularly unexplained is the apparent paradox between the hyper-individualized subject and the herd mentality of the social. What’s wrong with the social? What’s right with it?" (Lovink, 2016)

    "Why is updating such a seductive yet boring habit?" (Ibid.)

    “Social media’s imaginary community that we stumble into (and leave behind the moment we log out) is not fake. The platform is not a simulacrum of the social. Social media do not “mask” the real. Neither the software nor the interface of social media are ironic, multilayered, or complex. In that sense, social media are no longer (or not yet) postmodern. The paradoxes at work here are not playful. The applications do not appear to us as absurd, let alone Dada. They are self-evident, functional, even slightly boring. What attracts us is the social, the never-ending flow, and not the performativity of the interfaces themselves. (Performativity seems to be the main draw of virtual reality, now in its second hype cycle, twenty-five years after its first).” (Ibid.)

    Lovink, G. (2016) On the Social Media Ideology. Journal #75. e-flux. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/671...​ [Accessed 18 March 2020].

    The videos in this film have been taken at the non-happening of Tyler the Creator's free impromptu gig at Copeland Park in Peckham, London, one spring day in 2019.

Nothing Ever Happens on Social Media (2020)

Projects

The video work was shown as part of the group show On Media. Signals and Connections curated by LoosenArt, which took place at Millepiani in Rome between November 18th - December 16th, 2021.