Editor’s note: This story is an edition of Link Rot, a column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet.
The stage is simply set: a curtain in the background and, to the left, a set of steps, a raised platform, and stacked cardboard packages, like something you might see in an industrial warehouse. A man steps onto the platform carrying a remote control. As thunder claps, a car slips out from under the curtain. Or rather, it is the shape of a car: a frame, a set of wheels, its hood covered in plastic, containing suspended cylinders and seemingly controlled by the man watching from above.
A figure appears clad in a Juicy Couture mint green tracksuit, hood up, two clumps of brown hair peeking through and a mesh mask concealing the dancer’s face. She approaches the car, jumps on it, does a split, slides down its hood. The car stalks her to the edge of the curtain, something on the other side throws her back on to it violently. With a whoosh of compressed air, the car’s frame bucks her, threatening to tip over completely. As soon as she gets the chance, she jumps on it again, amorously. This sadomasochistic dance is interrupted by another dancer, dressed identically and also masked. They begin to fight for a perch on the car, throwing each other off and posing seductively at the slightest respite. But more and more others appear, filling the stage with mint green and rhinestones bedazzled on asses so pert and identical that one begins to wonder if the dancers are wearing padding.
The car—the other dancer—is rendered all-powerful: an alien, masculinized figure in a sea of feminized bodies clawing for the chance to ride it. The fight becomes so cyclical, one body dethroning another in continuous procession, that it tips into slapstick.
This is the first of four acts in The Age of Content, a 2023–24 dance performance by the French companies (LA)HORDE and the Ballet national de Marseille that traveled to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in late February. Like the other acts, this one is not explicitly titled, but the theme is instantly recognizable: the battle for attention on social media, the homogenization of self it implies—a homogenization that is feminized—and a battle staged on a structure whose instability is not incidental but tightly coordinated by someone coolly removed from the stakes of the fight unfolding below.
The car featured in the first act of The Age of Content.
Maria Baranova-Suzuki
It is exactly the unarticulated nature of The Age of Content that makes it so effective. Visual art and literature that address internet culture often attempt to recreate the immersive effect of accumulated references by weaving in specific memes, linguistic quirks, or aesthetic trends, only to feel brutally outdated—or overly mimetic. But The Age of Content sidesteps this trap by translating content into embodied movement, a language not available in digital media.
In another act, a trapdoor in the ceiling creaks open and a body falls to the floor, its impact obscured by stacked boxes in the foreground. The dancer pops up, dazed. Dressed in mint green but unmasked, the figure begins to bob slightly. Pulsing, arms raised, they move in place, performing a kind of standing moonwalk. The gesture is instantly identifiable as the movement of a video game avatar navigating virtual space. Another figure appears: a dancer in a red T-shirt and low-slung jeans. They begin to interact in that strange way video game characters do—approaching one another, throwing up fists, snapping back into neutral stance, “emoting” through preset gestures like laughter, then ignoring each other entirely, moving through space as if the other weren’t there at all. Over the course of this sequence, the tracksuit-clad figure, Pandora-like, unleashes a horde of other dancers who flood the space, bobbing, pulsing, sliding, fighting in movements so stiff and unnatural that I, in my seat, feel every muscle in my body tense.
Throughout The Age of Content, a bodily sympathy catches at audience members. It is not flat but shifts in tone depending on the movement onstage. In the video game portion, the feeling is strain. When watching dance, one doesn’t just see but feels a concept like freedom when the dancer twirls swiftly across a stage, pantomiming lightness with the hard density of her immaculately trained body. It’s obvious but bears noticing because for the first time I’ve realized how differently this bodily sympathy translates to my experience watching bodies online.
In this act of The Age of Content, every slipping, stilted step provokes discomfort. What this translation of computer-animated movement accomplishes is a felt—as opposed to merely thought—realization: that the body contains a mechanism of measurement that, without much conscious engagement, registers proximity, gravity, weight, exhaustion, joy, labor. In short, energy. When we see bodies on screen, that measure is, if not dulled, profoundly uncalibrated. This has consequences.
A scene from The Age of Content.
Maria Baranova-Suzuki
After the battle ends, two bodies remain: the man in the red T-shirt and a woman wearing a sequined top that catches the light. They come together to enact attraction and it feels so natural – isn’t desire the birth of dance? At the very least it’s a relief after the robotic movements that preceded it. But what begins as sensual quickly devolves into caricature. The woman is on the floor, legs spread; the man places his hand on her ass and dribbles it. She is on her hands and knees; he swings his pelvis along the length of her back. Others appear, and the orgy commences. The sex is ceaseless, becoming something other than itself in that abundance. Eventually, it ends, leaving the man in the red T-shirt alone at center stage.
Words like “goonbait” float into the ether to describe not only the shape of content but our relation to it: baited and prodded into simple, low-energy action—to watch a little longer, to move on constantly while never leaving the platform. Theories about how content consumption functions—dopamine addiction which leads to brainrot (here’s a study)—fuel an anxious discourse that, if not wrong, is incomplete.
By reasserting the measure of the body The Age of Content makes it clear that the endless appetite for content is predicated on sensorial alienation. Unable to measure the bodies we consume, we lose our measure of ourselves. What is 75 minutes? On my phone, relaxed into my guilty stupor, it is nothing at all. One body after another passes by and I find myself pleasantly absent. 75 minutes of The Age of Content is to witness the height of athleticism – and this is part of the work’s commentary. The “content” in front of me costs something, and I can feel it.
The final act is the show you thought you wanted. The dancers follow the unfolding curtain in quiet procession until one breaks out and twirls across the stage. Ecstatic gestures from ballet blend with movements from TikTok dances, themselves appropriations from Black dance culture. The TikTok dance, popularized by pandemic-era stars like Addison Rae and Charli D’Amelio, was at once overly sexualized and infantilized, detached yet manic. They—and the social media hopefuls gathered in so-called “hype houses”—displayed a willingness to succeed in the stupidest way. What emerged was a haunting affect that The Age of Content captures: dancers grinning, teeth bared through every second of the fast-paced finale. And in the final moment, through gaping, smiling mouths, they let out a guttural scream.
But the dance offered more than critique of the attention economy and the homogenized culture it produces. In these climactic moments, what the dancers generated was awe—the pure, astonishing joy of witnessing people achieve their art through monumental exertion and cooperation. It is this contagious happiness, and all the life it suggests beyond the performance, that is the prize of craft.
By transforming what is cheap, abundant, and abstracted into something energetic, laborious, and present, a deeply cathartic alchemy took place in every body in the theater. The audience erupted into a ten-minute standing ovation, and I could feel them too, and I knew they were feeling as I did: how good the world can be.
