A ‘Rhythm 0’ for the TikTok Age

In 1974, Marina Abramovic placed an assortment of objects on her desk. A rose, a gun, a knife, a feather, a jar of honey, a whip, etc. An object that can bring pleasure or pain. Viewers were told the props could be used on Abramović for the next six hours and she would not resist them. It’s a famous show: what starts as a gentle, playful interaction quickly turns violent. When the gallery owner announced the show was over, people who tore her clothes off and taunted her with knives and bullets ran for the exits. For many people, Abramovich Rhythm 0 It has become a myth that humans are prone to violent behavior when the rules of interaction are suspended. The photos of Abramovich afterwards are haunting.

While browsing on Instagram recently, I came across a video. In it, artist Briony Godivala explains that in January 2025, she had a QR code tattooed on her forearm as a piece of performance art. Every day for a year, the public was invited to submit and vote on which link the QR code should redirect to. In the video, she explained that over the past month, someone had hacked into the voting site and played the same episode of the anime over and over again. Godiwala said the hackers’ continued success hurt the project by discouraging participation. Most commenters responded with derision: She shouldn’t expect anything different; In fact, she should have expected worse.

What was expected happened. “I saw a lot of people die,” Godiwala told me by phone recently. There are also links to pornographic and pornographic material, some of which is particularly disturbing, as well as fascist and racist content. Rhythm 0Godiwala ink link Use passives to attract engagement, e.g. Rhythm 0 Passive attraction interactions are often violent.

When Godivara was a student at the Glasgow School of Art, she would perform a piece in which audience members would carry her around the room until they tired, then put her down.

“I loved testing collective responsibility by putting myself in a violent or dangerous situation. But once I graduated, it was difficult to find performance spaces that allowed that,” Godiwala said. By turning to social media, Godiwala found a space in which to continue his experiments with violence, kindness, and publicity.

What’s interesting about Godiwala’s perspective? Rhythm 0 It reveals that the act of giving up control in a physical coexistence space is a different act with different meanings when translated into a virtual space. While Abramović and her gallery, Mora Gallery in Naples, must have done some work to engage the audience, once Abramović begins performing, her passivity is evident in her stillness. This calmness and her commitment to remaining still create a space with a different moral burden. We know what happened next.

In contrast, Godiwala’s passive performance requires a lot of initiative. Godivala continues to promote and document the work on Instagram and TikTok to recruit participants for the project. However, even in this act of promotion, Godiwala tried to maintain a neutral, passive stance so as not to influence the selection of props they brought to the project. To achieve this neutrality, the short-form content she produces has to look like any other content you might scroll through, making aesthetic and narrative choices that social media algorithms reward: videos in natural light, talking to the camera while walking down the street, using a compelling hook in the first few seconds, etc. In effect, to be passive online is to disappear.

Imagine that it is 1974 and Abramović is sitting in her seat, slowly becoming transparent in the process of stillness until there is nothing left of her. Performing passivity online requires something very different from what we think of as passivity. Not stillness, but continuous activity. Imagine that in 1974, Abramovich had to keep shouting: “Do anything to me! Do anything to me!”

But in the end Godiwala was quite successful in achieving the neutrality suggested by passive aesthetics. The website documenting past winners is a long list of links that does seem to capture a random sample of the “Internet.” In addition to the expected outrage baiting and shocking content, people are using ink link Promote their business, podcast, social media accounts and music by linking to their Spotify and Bandcamp profiles. It’s also attracted a host of “old internet” style sites: rotatingsandwiches.com, wplace.live, isitwednesdaymydudes.com and pokemoncries.com, among others. There is also a live broadcast of the gray seal puppies and a fundraising website for Palestine and mental health organizations.

Wikipedia pages include: the British town of Camborne, anti-fascism, Hitler, concept art, the Liberty incident, tattoo history, September 11 conspiracy theories, Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal, the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, the Sami people, the Charlie Kirk shooting, and the meadow. Elon Musk’s Wikifeet page, when I clicked on the link last week, it showed me a lot of photos of Musk’s feet, but for some reason, as of the time of publishing, didn’t show any at all. This differs from a common feature of this list: many, many broken links resulting in 404 messages.

It’s easy to think of this website as a piece of tape, blowing in the wind, capturing bits and pieces of content. But we know it’s not that easy.