Algorithmic automation opens an interesting discussion of the negotiation of agency and circulation of affect between the user and the network. On audiovisual platforms, the algorithmic procedure is looped into the demands of attention economy, keeping the user watching. Taking TikTok as the main case study due to its compelling assemblage of surveillance tactics tailored to techno-embodied modes of spectatorship, this lecture questions how platforms renegotiate the user-spectators’ agency and produce new modes of watching. I consider algorithmic montage and affective scroll as TikTok’s key attention capture and instrumentalisation devices, built into the lacunae of behavioural opportunity and capitalising on the affective drive of the moving image flow. I argue that users should be seen as user-spectators whose agency undergoes a double negotiation, as users who can interact with the platform and as spectators who are subjected to specific modes of attention capture; their agential dis/empowerment is, therefore, contingent and framed by the specific epistemic and aesthetic affordances of the platform governmentality. Algorithmic surveillance simultaneously participates in the aesthetic and temporal figuration of platform spectatorship and conditions the tactics of resistance to the algorithmic logic. Finally, I consider some of the aesthetic practices of TikTok content producers, such as live streaming of labour practices, within the context of aesthetic reconfiguration of the affective scroll, and interfacing of the user’s body within the rhythm, pacing and instrumentalisation of the ‘flow’ in the affective scroll.

The talk is part of the lecture series typo3/null"Feeds & Flows. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ephemeral Image Cultures"