2.1 The setup and the performance space

The first of these elements is the system for acquiring, storing and manipulating the audiovisual stream: an instrument comprising two smartphones, two tablets used as touch control surfaces and a dual-jog-wheel controller (Figure 1). Facing the audience, the performer operates standing behind this instrument. At their back, a vertical split projection displays the two smartphone screens side by side, while the audio – emancipated from the physical constraints of the mobile device – is diffused through a loudspeaker system into the performance space in its full physical extension.

Figure 1.

The acquisition and manipulation system, viewed from the audience’s perspective.

The smartphones are connected via USB to a computer hosting the software environment for signal acquisition and processing. The A/V stream is captured via scrcpy – an open-source utility for real-time mirroring from Android devices – and routed, respectively, to Max/MSP, which handles audio processing and routing, and to TouchDesigner, which manages visual processing. Control over the material is achieved through the jog wheels and the touch screens, which manage processing parameters via the OSC/MIDI control surface TouchOSC (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Detail of the jog wheels and touch surfaces. Reel on screen: @anginedepoitrine.

Both mobile devices operate on Instagram through profiles dedicated exclusively to the performance – the so-called ‘sock puppets’ (Sandvig et al. Reference Sandvig, Hamilton, Karahalios and Langbort2014) – whose function is not merely instrumental. Through a preparatory phase of algorithmic cultivation, analysed in detail in Section 5, these profiles orient the algorithm’s behaviour towards specific thematic territories in advance, shaping the dataset before the performance begins. It is through them that Concrete Reel activates a negotiation with Instagram’s algorithm, the principal non-human agent of the performance. The audio chain transforms this negotiation into perceptible matter.

2.2 The audio chain

The sonic nature of Instagram is the product of a profound historical transformation. Until the early 2020s, content consumption on social media occurred predominantly in the absence of audio: the so-called ‘default mute’, a paradigm at once technical, normative and commercial, had systematically removed the sonic dimension from the platform experience (Bellman et al. Reference Bellman, Arismendez and Varan2021; Beaufort Reference Beaufort2017). The global spread of TikTok – a video-sharing platform launched in China in 2017 – overturned this condition, conferring on sound a determining role in social media communication and introducing a new sound-first paradigm through a short-video format (Bhandari and Bimo Reference Bhandari and Bimo2022). Instagram organises content distribution through distinct sections – Feed, Stories, Reels, and Explore – each governed by its own algorithmic logic. Among these, Reels responds directly to the rise of the TikTok model, inaugurating a paradigm designed for the algorithmic discovery of content beyond the user’s direct connection network (Narayanan Reference Narayanan2023). Since 2020, Instagram has exerted its most aggressive push towards viral content, adopting the short-video format – the individual videos hereafter referred to as ‘reels’.Footnote ¹

The sound entering the Concrete Reel audio chain bears the imprint of this historical shift: it is a compressed material, designed for mobile consumption and optimised for engagement (Cohen Reference Cohen2023), already sonically and ideologically connoted before any manipulation – altered by loudness management algorithms, structured according to sensory marketing logics and calibrated for specific target markets and communities (Mardhatilah et al. Reference Mardhatilah, Omar, Thurasamy and Juniarti2023). Once captured and routed into the performance environment, the signal of each smartphone splits into two parallel chains: the first routes the audio stream directly towards the real-time transformation processes; the second records it within a live-looping system, building an operational memory whose duration the performer can adjust in response to the contingencies of the performance (Figure 3). The jog wheels control the recorded material through gestural interaction – variations in playback speed, sudden arrest, reversal of direction and scratching – determining which portions are subjected to the two main processes of sonic transformation: granulation and convolution distortion.

Figure 3.

Signal flow of the Concrete Reel audio chain.

Figure 3. Long description

A diagram of the signal flow of the Concrete Reel audio chain. The diagram shows Instagram connected to two sock puppets, each linked to a smartphone. The smartphones are connected via scrcpy to Max/MSP, which hosts a looping system, granular synthesis, and a convolution distorter, controlled through jog wheels and touch screens. The output from this system goes to a PA (public address) system. The diagram uses solid lines to indicate direct signal paths and dotted lines to indicate recorded signal paths within the looping system.

Granular synthesis constitutes the first level of intervention. Decomposing the signal into elementary units opens a continuum ranging from enhancing the reel’s spectral qualities to its complete dissolution. A reel with markedly gestural behaviour, processed with 500-millisecond grains and sample-synchronous playback with a jitter of approximately 100 milliseconds, sees the qualities of the original material enhanced: the audience recognises the source and perceives its gestures amplified, more present and physically immediate. Grains of very short duration, asynchronous and inharmonic, progressively withdraw the material from its origin until it becomes unrecognisable, producing frequency bands that belong to the sound but no longer to the reel. This perceptual tension between recognition and dissolution is what granulation activates simultaneously in the audience and in the performer: for the former, an experience of familiarity in tension with abstraction; for the latter, a close ‘perpendicular’ listening to the individual reel, a direct confrontation with its sonic behaviour and spectral morphology (Sound example 1).

Where granulation compels a perpendicular focus on the individual reel, the convolution distorter shifts listening to a ‘transversal’ plane: two streams in relation. Unlike a conventional distorter, which operates via predefined clipping parameters, this device uses the dynamic and spectral behaviour of one stream to shape the distortion of the other: the instantaneous amplitude and spectrum of the first reel determine which frequencies in the second are emphasised, saturated, or destroyed (Montella Reference Montella2025). The two streams cease to be separate materials and become a hybrid sonic field in which the spectral presence of one emerges through the saturation of the other. At minimal degrees of intervention, the contents remain recognisable, and the distorter emphasises their reciprocal behaviour; at the opposite extreme, the source streams are corrupted to the point of rupture – a distortion so dense as to erase every recognisable trait, collapsed into a saturated noise mass (Sound example 2).

This complementarity between the two processes – the ‘perpendicular’ listening of granulation and the ‘transversal’ listening of convolution – defines the perimeter within which the performer constructs their improvisational decisions. The results vary considerably depending on the context of each individual performance.

2.3 Contexts and performances

The first experimentations of Concrete Reel date back to September 2024, during a thirteen-date tour across six countries – from Helsinki to Berlin – conducted within the framework of the Totaleee project (Pisano et al. Reference Pisano, Montella and Laudante2024). At this stage, the system operated in prototype form: only one smartphone was integrated into the chain, the sock puppet profiles were not yet active, and the second stream was fed with pre-recorded concrete material. The objective was not the performance in its completed form, but the empirical verification of the compatibility between social media content and electroacoustic improvisational practice. The venues locate the project firmly within the radical improvisation and noise circuit rather than the seated concert hall: from self-managed centres such as the Rahina Klubi in Helsinki to experimental subculture clubs such as the Ignorantka in Łódź, through to the Neustadt Art Festival in Dresden, in dialogue with key figures of the field such as Cedrik Fermont and Sarmen Almond.

The system, in its definitive audio configuration, debuted in April 2025 on an eight-date tour of the United Kingdom. The setup was adapted for portability, and the computer and smartphones were concealed from the audience to isolate the auditory response to the social media material from visual recognition of the technical apparatus. The sock puppet profiles were active, and the feed content reflected the tour’s itinerary – the product of a localised algorithmic cultivation conducted in the preceding weeks. In Todmorden, the performance was hosted at the Golden Lion, and the feed returned audio from a concert held at the same venue the previous week. A coincidence not programmed, but precisely the kind of short circuit that the logic of the project makes possible: the algorithm, oriented towards a specific topic, returns fragments of local memory that the performer could not have deliberately selected.

The tour opened on 3 April at Pan-Pan in Birmingham, as part of a session hosted by Spectral Karaoke – a free electronic improvisation collective founded by Milad Mardakheh, Jake Williams and Scott Wilson, with a monthly residency in the Digbeth neighbourhood. Three of the seven subsequent concerts document the functioning of Concrete Reel in ensemble, in excerpts where the source material consists entirely of sung and spoken voices. In the trio formation, I share a common improvisational language with Giuseppe Pisano (right, in the video documentation) and Andrea Laudante (left), although each operates with an autonomous system.

At Canvas in Dundee (Video example 1), I record an ASMR voice in a loop and subject it simultaneously to granular synthesis and convolution distortion: a percussive transient by Laudante triggers my gestural response on the jog wheels, which simultaneously activates both processes and freezes the reel’s playback, saturating the spectrum until the whisper is transformed into a dense high-pressure sonic mass. Upon release, the original stream re-emerges in its native quality – an immediate perceptual collision between the intimacy of the feed and the ensemble’s acoustic impact. At Strange Field in Glasgow (Video example 2), I subject a sung vocal fragment to progressive distortion, gradually foregrounding it as a prominent timbral presence within the ensemble texture – its saturated spectral behaviour articulated in counterpoint with the sonic material of the other musicians. At Sketchy Beats in Edinburgh (Video example 3), while manipulating a sung voice, I send a skip signal to the smartphone. The feed moves to the next reel: ‘No puedo, tengo pollos’ emerges – a meme quoting Obsesión by Aventura, a bachata that became an international hit in the summer of 2002. Its abrupt appearance prompts a collective reorientation of the trio’s sonic behaviour, with the meme’s semantic charge becoming a shared reference point for the ensemble’s improvisational response.

Episodes like this are the expected outcome of a system designed to make the Reels stream collide with the improvisational act. Instagram’s capacity to return unforeseen cultural stratifications is the symptom of a deeper logic, one that governs the circulation and selection of content on the platform. Interrogating this logic is the precondition for activating critical interventions upon social media.

3.1 An assemblage of heterogeneous parts

The logic of this ecosystem responds to what DeLanda defines as ‘relations of exteriority’. ‘These relations imply, first of all, that a component part of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different’ (DeLanda Reference DeLanda2019: 11). The components are therefore autonomous and maintain their own capacities even when they become part of new configurations. The smartphone is an emblematic example: it operates as a component of a broader assemblage – that of Instagram – assuming consolidated roles of mediation, content production and geolocation, to which the Concrete Reel ecosystem adds new roles such as sensor, input source, and control interface.

Concrete Reel is thus constituted as an assemblage of heterogeneous and autonomous parts, whose analysis requires mapping the interactions among agents of different kinds. The human components include the performer – whose agency manifests as a force of rupture through an improvisational protocol – and the audience, whose activation can introduce an unpredictable mass of data. These agents interact through the material components: the local physical infrastructure (smartphones, laptops, controllers, cables, diffusion and projection systems) and the performance environment, the software architecture through which the system’s processes are articulated. To these is added the network infrastructure (Wi-Fi, Ethernet and routers), bridging the local plane to the processual components distributed on a remote scale – Instagram and its algorithm as the primary framing force, the Reels feed as raw material. Articulating all these interactions are the discursive components, defined by an antagonistic tension between the normative logic of the platform’s corporate imperatives and the grammar of viral content, on one side, and the performer’s improvisational protocol, conceived to trace alternative paths, on the other.

3.2 Algorithmic territories and epistemic sabotage

The nature of an assemblage is intrinsically dynamic: a field of forces that can be analysed along several dimensions, each defined by a pair of opposing processes. One of these is the axis that runs from ‘territorialisation’ to its counterpart ‘deterritorialisation’ (DeLanda Reference DeLanda2016: 22). The first process is the stabilising force that Manuel DeLanda defines as the degree to which an assemblage homogenises its components and strengthens its boundaries. In Concrete Reel, this force is exerted primarily through the algorithm’s generation of the feed. It acts as a territorial agent, tending to create a homogeneous and predictable space – the filter bubble being one of its manifestations – with the goal of maximising engagement.

The opposite tendency is deterritorialisation: any process that destabilises the boundaries of the assemblage and lowers the degree of homogeneity among its components. Deterritorialisation is enacted through improvisational practice, in which each unexpected manipulation destabilises the fixed identity of the social-media flow and strains its boundaries. It is in the tension between these two parameter settings, territorialising and deterritorialising, that the performance becomes a live negotiation with the black box.

Through this continuous negotiation, the performer-researcher gains the conditions to read the platform’s operational logic – a form of knowledge produced by forcing algorithms beyond their functional ends. This practice finds a direct methodological precedent in Bowers and Green (Reference Bowers and Green2018), who demonstrate that pushing technical systems beyond their operational limits produces – through creative hijacking, or détournement – a form of knowledge that purely instrumental conceptions of interfaces cannot reach. Against the engineering standard of functional transparency – where inputs yield predictable outputs – Bowers and Green advocate for an ‘opaque practice’ that deliberately introduces instrumental resistance and causal mystery as a form of aesthetic subversion.

In Concrete Reel, this choice becomes a methodological imperative. The commercial socio-technical infrastructure constituting the field of inquiry is structurally opaque from the outset. Consequently, creative hijacking ceases to be solely an aesthetic subversion and becomes epistemic sabotage – the structured, necessary provocation of a deliberately closed architecture.

Epistemic sabotage operates through two interconnected modes. First, deterritorialisation serves as the mechanism that enables decoding. The improvisational act of breaking the stable territory of the feed is the concrete mechanism through which the codified function of the Instagram reel is dismantled, exposing its underlying materiality. For example, when a brief viral sound is extracted from its meme function and temporally dilated to ten times its original duration, the performer is forced to confront the intrinsic qualities of the sound itself – compression artefacts, timbral poverty, the artificiality of its construction. While operating on the ontological plane of deterritorialisation, this phenomenon produces a perceptual effect that resonates with the principles of Pierre Schaeffer’s écoute réduite (Reference Schaeffer1966). Second, deterritorialisation renders the platform’s logic legible through its resistance. When the performer forces the feed towards specific content, the algorithm’s counter-push towards viral material is the commercial logic of Instagram manifesting as audiovisual inertia – a homogeneity so total that any anomaly becomes disruptive without further manipulation.

Deterritorialisation, therefore, is not a direct reading process, but the condition of possibility for reading. The performance act does not – and could not – explain the algorithm in a didactic way. It provokes a response, and from the platform’s reaction to this provocation, the nature of social media becomes visible and audible. The legibility of the algorithmic logic is therefore not a simple revelation, but an ‘emergent property’ (DeLanda Reference DeLanda2016) of the Concrete Reel assemblage. It arises from the conflictual interactions between the territorialising force of the algorithm and the deterritorialising practice of the improviser – a binary dynamic that, as will be seen in Section 6, is radically complicated by the intervention of a third fundamental node: the audience.

3.3 Distributed agency within the assemblage: human and non-human

The agency of Concrete Reel does not reside in any single component, but emerges from the relations that bind them. DeLanda characterises each component along two dimensions. Its ‘properties’ – the computational power of a device, the sample rate of a converter, the frequency response of a diffusion system – are always actual and relatively stable, as they emerge from the internal arrangement of its elements. Its ‘capacities’, conversely, are not given in advance: they designate what the component can do when it enters into relations with others, remaining virtual – real but not actual – until a concrete interaction exercises them. Such ‘actualisation’ never occurs as a lasting state, but as an event, and is constitutively double, since every ‘capacity to affect’ presupposes a corresponding ‘capacity to be affected’ (DeLanda Reference DeLanda2016: 56). The algorithm’s ranking logic, for instance, actualises as agency only in relation to a stream of content to be ordered and a user whose behaviour is to be modelled. It is within this transition from the virtual to the actual that the assemblage’s agency is generated, distributed among its elements and irreducible to any single one of them.

Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’ (Reference Barad2007) sharpens this relational priority. The prefix marks the shift: inter-action presumes a ‘between’ that combines pre-existing poles, whereas intra-action designates what occurs ‘within’ a phenomenon, constituting its poles rather than presupposing them. The relata do not pre-exist their relations but emerge through them, their boundaries produced locally by what Barad terms an ‘agential cut’ – a material-discursive operation that provisionally carves out a ‘subject’ and an ‘object’, establishing the condition of possibility for objective knowledge.

The two lexicons divide the descriptive labour. DeLanda’s exteriority accounts for the persistent material substrate: the smartphone, the laptop, the performer’s body as material bodies endowed with actual properties that pre-exist and survive the performance and can therefore be detached from their everyday assemblage and reconnected to the performative one. Barad’s agential cut accounts for how agency is redistributed among these bodies in the live flow, establishing what counts as ‘performer’, ‘algorithm’ or ‘audience’ at any given instant. The bodies DeLanda describes as a substrate are thus legible, in Baradian terms, as the sedimentation of cuts already stabilised upstream, which the performance re-destabilises.

This carries an implication that binds the present analysis. Distinguishing between performer, algorithm and audience is not a neutral gesture but itself an agential cut that participates in the assemblage it claims to observe. To execute it symmetrically, without assuming a priori the primacy of the human component, the term ‘actant’ is adopted (Latour Reference Latour2005), which designates any component – human or non-human – capable of producing an effect. The mapping that follows thus describes the capacities of the principal actants as this specific cut makes them visible.

5.1 The apparatus as a practice of intra-action

Barad’s agential realism has found significant application within music technology. Reed, Benito, Caspe and McPherson (Reference Reed, Benito, Caspe and McPherson2024) have shown that the data-enabled artefacts of digital instrument design do not exist independently of the phenomenon they aim to measure, but co-produce their observations from within a shared state of entanglement. In Baradian terms, such an artefact is not a neutral observing instrument but an ‘apparatus’ – a boundary-drawing practice through which the measured phenomenon is made determinate, the site at which the agential cut is enacted.

Transposed to the present research, the sock puppet profile – enacted by the smartphone – is precisely such an apparatus. It does not record a pre-existing algorithmic behaviour from the outside; it perturbs the system and co-produces its responses from within the intra-action. The map the audit yields is therefore not the representation of an autonomous object, but the trace of a specifically configured apparatus. This perspective resonates with the growing integration of Barad’s concept of intra-action within the NIME research field. In this context, the capacities of human and technological entities to shape music production are posited not as pre-existing attributes but as phenomena that emerge dynamically from their mutually constitutive relations (Tahiroğlu Reference Tahiroğlu2024). The co-production is the very condition that endows the audit with its epistemic value. The findings do not describe an abstract algorithm, but rather the behaviour of a provoked system, which is precisely the type of knowledge that Concrete Reel requires at this stage.

5.2. Audit design

The objective of this audit was to interrogate the materiality of algorithmic resistance by provoking its response through a series of targeted actions. To this end, the investigation involved the manual training of two sock puppet profiles on deliberately polarised thematic territories – one oriented towards mass content and the other towards a cultural niche. After an initial phase aimed at consolidating their respective filter bubbles, a subsequent radical reversal in behavioural patterns enabled a qualitative assessment of the system’s resistance and inertia.

The intra-action with the algorithm revealed an actant with a well-defined character and a consistent drive towards homogeneity. The viral thematic bubble formed with extreme rapidity, while cultivating a counter-tendency proved slower, constantly hindered by the incursion of advertising and trending content. The reversal phase confirmed this asymmetry: the transition towards mainstream content was almost instantaneous, whereas the reverse path required a sustained negotiation against strong algorithmic resistance.

These qualitative insights directly inform the performance protocol. The audit provides the improviser with a strategic map of the territory, in which the manipulation of the material will not be random but inscribed within a field of possibilities that the artist can preconfigure and tactically challenge. However, the very nature of this audit – conducted on profiles lacking a social graph – reveals a crucial tension. The agency mapped through this methodology is not that of a real user, but rather the product of a controlled negotiation between the performer and the algorithm. In accordance with the principle of exteriority, the algorithm is not a tabula rasa. It enters the performance ecosystem carrying capacities derived from its prior interactions with the platform’s entire user base. This transition – from controlled analysis to open interaction – is precisely where the performance generates its most profound knowledge.

6.1 Micro, meso and macro

At the micro scale, the ‘Embodied Archive’ centres on the singular user–algorithm relationship. A participant recruited through an open call is given a dedicated smartphone for several days, operating through one of the sock puppet profiles, which becomes the central node of the live improvisation. The digital traces that emerge are material manifestations of an intra-action in which successive users and the algorithm continuously co-constitute each other. Against the algorithm’s constant territorialisation, the users who succeed one another on the same device and profile produce a collective and stratified deterritorialisation – a heterogeneous accumulation that resists the homogenisation the platform imposes. The resulting profile assumes the status of an emergent property of the assemblage.

At the meso scale, the ‘Performed Persona’ introduces a new layer of authorial agency into the negotiation: a curated collective of artists is invited to create profiles conceived as autonomous artworks destined to constitute the material of the performance. The negotiation is articulated through a network of interactions among the performer, the collective, and potentially an external institution, such as a gallery curating the event. The agency of each artist is expressed in a territorialising sense with respect to their own authorial intentions, but when confronted with the homogenising push of the algorithm, each artist’s agency can either reinforce that push – by complying with the algorithm’s logic – or counteract it by deterritorialising the flow. The performer, in turn, must improvise within a landscape already codified by other authorial wills, which the performance makes visible.

While the first two configurations find precedents in self-archiving and participatory art practices – from Hasan Elahi’s (Reference Elahi2003) Tracking Transience to Amalia Ulman’s (Reference Ulman2014) Excellences & Perfections – the third belongs to a genealogy of radical practices exploring vulnerability and the surrender of control, as in Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974). At the macro scale, the ‘Naked User’ invites the audience to connect their personal smartphones to the ecosystem, bypassing all mediation and transforming each event into a live algorithmic portrait of the collective filter bubble. This configuration pushes ‘digital liveness’ (Auslander Reference Auslander2012) to its breaking point: the device does not merely use the audience’s data, it stages the very problem of their hyper-exposure. Consent and risk become performance material – the object of the gaze is not only the user’s private data, but the visible negotiation between the algorithm and their life.

6.2. Redefining performance success

The three methodologies analysed represent a spectrum of intervention that modulates the impact, temporality and degree of risk of the audience’s participation. This agential cut qualitatively redefines the performance assemblage, transforming the negotiation from a two-way dialogue into a triadic interaction. As the scale expands, a split opens between the show’s outcome – which can be evaluated according to traditional aesthetic criteria – and the ecosystem’s effectiveness in making algorithmic dynamics visible. At this scale, the algorithm becomes legible through its relation with real, socially entangled histories. The audience, as a fundamental actant, radically redefines the ecosystem’s roles. The performer may be overwhelmed by the voracity of the content, the inertia of a filter bubble or the hyper-exposure of the audience itself, without such overload compromising Concrete Reel’s functioning. The performer-researcher is no longer the centre of the assemblage; rather, they become an exposed navigator, subject to the very forces they seek to make perceptible.

7.1 Five phases of paroxysmal rigour

Phase 1: Algorithmic Cultivation. In this stage of deferred interaction, the performer attempts to model the algorithm’s behaviour through the sock puppet audit, guiding it towards specific thematic territories to develop a sensitivity to algorithmic resistance and inertia.

Phase 2: Strategic Cartography. The performer then analyses the insights that emerged during the audit to construct a strategic map of the system’s expected behaviour – a qualitative analysis of the algorithm’s tendencies, inertia and potential ‘openings’ (anomalies).

Phase 3: Listening and Interpretation. This phase inaugurates the real-time cycle. The performer interprets the feed as a series of territorialising actions, classifying each event into one of two categories.

• – ‘Confirmation Event’ occurs when the algorithm acts according to its dominant logic of territorialisation, through a predictable repetition of similar formats, sounds and content.

• – ‘Deviation Event’ is an anomaly – content that, by its aesthetics, theme, or rhythm, breaks the coherence of the bubble, marking a potential point of deterritorialisation.

Phase 4: Tactical Crossroads. Based on this diagnosis, the performer translates the entire binary decision tree – interpretation and tactical choice – into a single, instantaneous, and irrevocable physical gesture. The control interface is deliberately mapped onto a binary matrix, in which activating one of four performance tactics triggers a precise chain of events.

Phase 5: The Performance Intervention. The activated chain operates simultaneously on two fronts: it executes a sequence of automated actions on the smartphones, sending precise feedback to the algorithm, and it reconfigures the signal-manipulation processes available to the performer, constraining them to operate within the logic of the chosen tactic.

The model declines the four tactics as follows, each documented by an audio example.

In response to a Confirmation Event:

• – Saturation. To amplify the algorithm’s logic, the performance environment executes an approval cycle – repeated viewings, liking and saving – to send a maximum-engagement signal. On the sonic level, the distorter operates within margins that preserve the recognisability of the material – emphasising transients, bringing the signal to the foreground without obliterating its source – while the granulator works with macro-grains of duration exceeding one second, sparse and slightly asynchronous, which transform repetition into a compositional principle. The streaming flow always remains perceptible, and the audience never loses contact with the feed (Sound example 3).

• – Fracture. To undermine the coherence of the territory, the performance environment triggers a rejection cycle – rapid skips interspersed with explicit use of Instagram’s ‘Not interested’ function. At the sonic level, the distorter operates at high intensity, decisively forcing the second device’s signal into the convolution process. The granulator works with a large number of grains – up to thirty – short, phase-shifted, and with an inharmonic sample reading, producing fragmentation that severs every link to the source. The streaming flow can be reduced in volume until only the recorded and heavily manipulated material emerges (Sound example 4).

In response to a Deviation Event:

• – Subversion. To promote an anomaly, the performance environment executes an interest cluster – repeated viewing, liking and following – in an attempt to redirect the stream towards the deviant content. On the sonic level, the reel is frozen at a fixed playback position and the recorded material looped over extended durations, recovering traces of material previously processed during the performance. The granulator works with long-duration grains at asynchronous random reading, returning portions of the loop at slightly different moments, volumes and pitches – a counterpoint that privileges the expansion and analysis of the material over its transformation. Signal saturation and playback speed variation operate within parameters of recognisability, emphasising the behaviour of the anomalous material (Sound example 5).

• – Normalisation. To reject an anomaly, the performance environment executes an instantaneous skip. On the sonic level, any action by the performer is bound to high degrees of signal degradation – whether through distortion or convolution – configured on a rapid envelope that rises abruptly towards maximum saturation before extinguishing itself. There is no possibility of gradual intervention: every action produces a peak and an extinction (Sound example 6).

Each intervention alters the state of the ecosystem and compels the performer to return immediately to ‘Listening and Interpretation’ (Phase 3) to decipher the new audiovisual and algorithmic context generated by their own action. The cycle is thus reiterated, always producing a ‘maybe’: an attempt at ‘Fracture’ can be reabsorbed by the algorithm’s inertia; a ‘Subversion’ may prove to be an ephemeral deviation. The paroxysmal rigour of the protocol does not serve to eliminate uncertainty, but to make it maximally visible.

Yet within this controlled, almost laboratory-like protocol, the performer can indeed act as a binary – quasi-algorithmic – controller, managing the anomaly and producing an aesthetically coherent result. But this coherence is a construct. It is the product of a two-way interaction (performer-algorithm), one that remains protected from the world’s noise. What happens, then, when this fragile equilibrium is shattered by the introduction of the most unpredictable actant? What happens when the dialogue is overwhelmed by audience intervention?

7.2 The rubble of the protocol

The passage from the performer-algorithm dyad to a triadic assemblage dispossesses the performer of their privileged position. The preparatory phases of ‘Algorithmic Cultivation’ (Phase 1) and ‘Strategic Cartography’ (Phase 2) are effectively annulled: the performer no longer shapes the system, since the unpredictable noise of the audience’s collective history constitutes the dataset. Deprived of a predictive map, ‘Listening and Interpretation’ (Phase 3) is weakened. There is no longer a guided analysis, but an immediate, subjective judgement formulated within a chaotic and opaque stream. Every action, however, tactically precise, is a fragile hypothesis within an ecosystem that constantly exceeds the improviser’s capacity for comprehension and control.

The audience decentres the performer and exposes the algorithm. Instagram constructs, for each user, the illusion of a personalised stream over which each perceives themselves to be sovereign. The paroxysmal rigour of the protocol is the staging of this idealised condition – the exasperated representation of a user-centric platform as much promised as structurally denied. The content extracted from the stream is degraded, stratified, sedimented and set in relation to one another over the course of the performance. It ceases to be algorithmically delivered at the platform’s ‘right-time’ (Bucher Reference Bucher2020), interrupting the recursive loop in which the user is trapped, shaping their own feed. Withdrawn from the logic of doomscrolling, the social media content becomes the matter upon which, in the ‘shared time’ of the event, relations are constructed: between the performer-researcher and the content, between the contents themselves, between performer and audience and between the material and the cultural histories it carries – a prospect that the platform forecloses and that the performance, for the duration of the event, activates.