Ballerina in the Music Box
Ballerina in the Music Box
Isabella Haid
01. Scripted Content v. Choreographed Self
Shaped by the limitations of the game’s story, characters, & environments versus that of the performer’s image, identity, or subjectivity
02. Capture-based Assembly v. Constructed Ex Nihilo
Depends upon the use of assets found in a game which results in the creation of a new media object and archive of artifacts versus conjuring a game world which exists only for the duration of the meta-machinimatic performance
03. Video game vs Gamified Platform
Performance is guided by a video game’s rules, software, hardware versus the mechanics, logic, and algorithms of a networked media platform which gamifies the production and circulation of media, affects, and idea
04. Post-Cinematic v Post-Internet
Positioned at the boundary of film and video game genres versus the networked platform and video game logic
05. Re-mediation v. Mise en abyme
Breaks down the structure of the game by remediating play & content as a cinematic experience versus creating meta-narrative through recursive structure
06. Gamic action versus radical action
“Conventional gaming poetics versus alternative modes of gameplay.”
References 1) Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Tiqqun
2) A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames, Brendan Keogh
3) Everyone Is a Girl Online, Alex Quicho
4) Critical Play: Radical Game Design, Mary Flanagan
5) From a blog post by Domenico Quaranta mentioned in Larissa Hjorth’s “The Art of Games” in Understanding Machinima. This now inaccessible text is quoted throughout her work. Today, it is absent from the WayBack Machine. Very sad.
6) Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification, Patrick Jagoda
7) Alexander Galloway’s critique of Machinima is that it often privileges the aesthetic layer in absence of gameplay, causing its radical potential as a counter-gaming tactic to fall short.
8) In Defense of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl
9) Image Future in The Machinima Reader, Lev Manovich
10) Cinema, Body and Brain, Thought in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze
11) On the Marionette Theatre, Heinrich von Kleist
12) I use the term “platform collapse” to communicate the idea that a platform’s garden walls cannot contain the multidirectional flow of content or affects between itself and other platforms.
13) “NPC” is a popular insult online. The term “NPC Streaming” was created as both a formal analysis of the genre and a moral judgment of its performers.
14) Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Alexander Galloway
15) Ibid. “Radical action” is what Galloway argues that Counter-gaming has yet to realize as a means of cultural critique. I argue that this quality is integral to any Meta-machinimatic play.
The box opens. The Ballerina draws infinite small circles, resulting in a large cyclical motion. Through each of these subtle movements, she recursively spins around a single axis. She is her own gravitational force and her own heavenly body. The Ballerina is not trapped inside the music box, for within the box is a universe of her own making.
The Ballerina is skilled, her body a site of cohesion between the questions she asks about herself, the answers imposed by others, and the fiction she chooses to write. Designed by the craftsmen of Silicon Valley, the platform is her music box. She rehearses a username and password to enter. To navigate a digital space by means of a digital avatar, the Ballerina must have a body. She must be embodied. She must be a body, too, or that which is limited to the height and width of the smartphone’s camera or subjected to the scrutiny of its image processing algorithm.
I’ve recently become interested in ballet. Or specifically, Ballerinas, and what we can learn about digital embodiment from the Ballerina. I consider the Ballerina a model similar to the Young-Girl; she is the quintessential consumer-subject with the power to orient economies of desire.
To say that “the Young-Girl only recreates herself” (1) is to argue that she is never whole, but always in a process of becoming. Her desires are in excess of what she needs to survive. She has internalized the market, but she is not for sale. The Ballerina is a vessel for desire, but she is also a body at play (2). Within the game world that is the platform, she is the avatar, the player, the user, the used, producer, consumer, artist, and critic.
Her motion within the music box, like anything recursive, begins with a base case: the dancer’s body. The Ballerina’s form—her posture, her technique, her still readiness that enters orbit as soon as the music box opens—is a site of contestation. The Ballerina’s agency is situated within an assemblage of bodies, a distributed agency which is unified by a single image—that of the Ballerina. The avatar realizes the networked subject by offering a mutable configuration of the self, and is enlivened by the Ballerina’s shared agency. The history of the avatar is the history of digitally augmented play and self-experimentation, and the Ballerina thus emerges as a new character in this particular version of political theater.
The networked self, the data body, and the state of girlhood are all intertwined. I imagine the Ballerina as something like Alex Quicho’s vision of the Young-Girl, which is not signified by some biological marker, but by the status of being logged-on. This affectively charged state produces and is productive of desire. Quicho asserts that while performing girlhood, the performance of innocence or fragility is just that: a ruse. She claims that the Young-Girl’s knowledge of the platform is “intuitive”—which is to say that its logic is internalized in some way (3). The Ballerina, as a sister to the Young-Girl, plays with the profit-seeking logic and gamified mechanisms of the platform and takes them to the extreme. As an avatar, the Ballerina transforms the platform into a music box of her own design. The player makes the world. Like all recursive designs, the solution to the problem lies within the problem itself. In the process of iteratively re-creating herself, I argue she actually creates something, too: a new kind of networked performance, Meta-machinima.
Since its inception in the ‘80s demoscene, Machinima has always been an irreverent medium. The leap from tagging cracked proprietary software to in-game anti-war interventions demonstrates the imaginative stretch of meaning and magic which artists have realized by means of Machinima. Commonly understood as animated filmmaking within a virtual environment, the basic throughline over the last few decades is Machinima’s use of the video game engine: its software, stylized forms of interaction, and rules of play. Hacking the game form to create a cinematic experience, Machinima constitutes what Mary Flanagan calls critical play. By un-playing the game and re-skinning its characters, Machinima can be a strategy for artistic expression and a distanced critique. Machinimators experiment with the game’s structural limits to articulate new and unexpected uses or challenge its intended meaning (4). They are not only focused on expanding the game engine as a medium but exploring the embodied experience of digital mediation—one animated by the avatar and its multitude of configurations.
Back in 2009, Domenico Quaranta said of Machinima: “As any other ‘remix’ practice, it has an enormous potential that emerges when the existing material is used to convey a meaning that conflicts with its own source. The video…extends the game’s narrative in an unpredictable direction. And that, sometimes, rejects the body it was designed for.” (5) What does it mean for the Ballerina to choreograph her own dance? As a networked subject, how does the Ballerina protest the music box’s commanding rhythm?
Unlike the puppeteering of Machinima, there is no distance between the performer and the object being manipulated in Meta-machinima. The Meta-machinimator is the Ballerina. She is both subject and object. It is both spectacular human play and a human performance of objecthood.
Meta-machinima is conceived through a different kind of game engine than that of Machinima: the networked platform. Within gamified social spheres like Instagram or TikTok, the basic affordance is a means of self-representation. The basic objective of the game is to perform yourself. To win, you have to be seen; to be seen, you have to win.
Patrick Jagoda observes the gamified platform as evidence of the shift towards a society of the game: “If an earlier stage involved a transformation from being into having…[followed by] a movement from having to appearing, then our moment suggests another notable movement from appearing to acting, in which action, interaction, enactment, expression, participation, and interpellation within an algorithmic environment are paramount operations.” (6) Game logic has taken root at every level: that of cultural production, knowledge circulation, and self-representation. If the platform is a game, its algorithm is its engine.
Notably, Meta-machinimators do not conceal their identities. It is the very identity of the Meta-machinimator that is made an apparatus of play. The Ballerina is a data body and actual body, a networked image and the image of her creator. Writing on Machinima, Quaranta asserts that, “when it comes to games, your appropriation is not only dealing with ‘existing cultural material’…but with your own life, the life you lived inside the game.” For Meta-machinimators, however, the boundary between the real and game worlds is porous. There is no life inside the game or a stable point of agency from which Machinima or Meta-machinima draws its power. During Meta-machinimatic performance, agency spirals inwards and outwards, in excess of the platform’s reward mechanisms, engagement metrics, or limits to self-expression.
Machinima breaks down the structure of a game by remediating gameplay into narrative cinema. Diverging from this trend of “lapsing back to other media,” (7) Meta-machinima materializes as mise en abyme media. Like a movie within a movie, it produces a game within a game. The recursive structure of the Ballerina’s movement is something made, not something given. Each iteration is contingent upon the base case—the avatar, the Ballerina, the Meta-machinimator herself—drawing out the obvious question: who’s being played here? Even under the pressure of the algorithm and its point-casted spells, the Ballerina is not compelled to play. She is free to play. The meta-machinimator understands the digital avatar as a means to experiment with the limits and entanglements of agency, embodiment, and networked girlhood. The overacting, robotic actions, or scripted dialogue all become part of a meta-narrative that makes the platform stutter, resisting the algorithm’s ideology and making a lot of people wonder, wtf did I just watch? As mise en abyme media, Meta-machinima is an optimistic gesture. It believes in play as a form of resistance. The following examples showcase different expressions of this sentiment. Each artist challenges the dominant mode of representation, the platform, by means of Meta-machinimatic performance.
Olia Lialina is the God-mother of Meta-machinima. The web browser is her music box. Through it, she remakes each of its elements into multipliers of her image: the gif, the HTML, the URL, even the browser itself. As a Meta-machinimatic performer, she intuitively understands avatarship as a crossing over between material and emotional circuits, a delicate motion with a critical edge. Lialina’s work is highly contingent upon the physical, infrastructural components which determine connectivity. A twenty-one frame GIF sprawling across twenty-one websites, Summer depicts the Ballerina in a music box made of scripts, network protocols, and undersea cables. With every frame tethered to its own server, speed becomes an aesthetic and practical contingency. Skillfully dis/integrating into the browser’s interface enacts a radical understanding of networked play: how often are we asked to consider the materiality of the Web? Summer’s meta-narrative is tactile, where each jump from frame to frame is a movement through actual space. If I held the browser in my hands, is it more like clay, sand, or brick? This also goes to say that Summer, as a playground, is designed ex-nihilo: the Meta-machinimatic performance materializes the game world together with the platform.
Yet the avatar remains distributed—her image on each server exists independently of a live connection to a distant computer interface. Acting as a model for her own animated gif collection in AGM, Lialina thrusts her image “into digital uncertainty.” (8) Publishing her GIFs to the public domain, she challenges the web browser’s commercial organizing principle: the search engine. AGM can be considered high-performance play in which Lialina’s image competes with all other images—rich, ruined, compressed, censored, converted, screenshotted, forgotten—to live on. Inviting appropriation by inhabiting the public domain, AGM GIFs outplay the file’s archival shortcomings and its obscurification by the search engine. They are designed to escape the music box. Lialina also highlights the impossibility of complete autonomy for the Ballerina by surrendering her image, a gesture which is microcosmic of how we propagate ourselves online today: I post a selfie and I wonder what facial recognition technology will use it for training. And I post again. What if, like the GIF, we just kept dancing? She thus reveals the networked image as a site of collective authorship and ownership, an affective assemblage which acquires new meaning with each page refresh.
Just as the browser platform itself is fragmented by competing ideologies and in/compatibilities, Lialina splits her avatar across three networked platforms in A Self Portrait in Three Browsers. Each data packet is exposed to the network at various opacities given each browser’s unique architecture. Working through the Post-Internet condition, this work considers the platform and avatar as rhizomatic entities inside a world wholly enveloped by the network—the point of tension being that we are constantly undergoing processes of quantification, algorithmic scrutiny, and value speculation. Each third of the portrait is a portrait itself, forming a Meta-machinimatic object and patchwork game environment performed together with the viewer. A Self Portrait in Three Browsers uses the recursive logic of database aesthetics, breaking down the platform and avatar into smaller units to create a portrait of portraits. Altogether, Lialina’s networked portraits are spontaneous and charming Meta-machinimatic performances which unsettle the web browser as a neutral information portal.
Molly Moonn is one of a kind. She is Miss en Abyme. In her videos, she plays let’s plays which feature gameplay of her playing as the main playable character who always gets outplayed by the non-playable character played by herself. A game within a game, Moonn’s work evinces a pivotal change in the superstructure of networked visual culture: it finally caught up. Writing in 2011 about the aesthetic realism of image hybrids, Lev Manovich claims that “our visual culture is characterized by a new computer base and an old photographic superstructure.” He wonders, too, “What kinds of images might we expect to see when the superstructure finally catches up with the infrastructure?” (9) I would argue that the form and metaphor of the game inform the computer superstructure such that we find game logic and design influencing the shape of politics, social life, and personhood. In her cheeky twist on the let’s play genre, Molly Moonn showcases this cosmic shift by using the tactics of minor media.
Minor media is meant to create a new consciousness and, according to Deleuze, “contribute to the invention of a people.” (10) Here, the absence of “a people” can be attributed to the datafication of the individual. They are missing because they’ve all been sent away to server farms and data centers. Playing with and through the avatar represents conditions of struggle unique to the Post-Internet world. In the interstices between the performer and the performed, the missing people must reinvent themselves. Molly Moonn’s video art responds by summoning a sense of futurity peopled by curiosity and wonder.
Constructing fictional game worlds within the major language of the gamified platform, Molly Moonn’s mise en abyme style constitutes a minor practice which opens up new ways of responding to the crisis of gamification. She destabilizes the puppet-puppeteer binary which dominates the discourse on digital embodiment: she is the player and the played. In his essay from 1810 on marionette theater, a conversation with a puppeteer revealed to Heinrich von Kleist the primary advantage a dancing puppet has over a human dancer: “it would never be self-conscious.” (11) This is precisely why Molly Moonn’s disruption of the binary holds so much power, and how Meta-machinimatic performance allows us to imagine a Ballerina that is free to dance. The puppet has achieved self-awareness, yet she still dances.
PinkyDoll has the all-time high score for out-playing the algorithm. Although she did not invent NPC Streaming, she brought the obscure genre into the limelight when recordings of her livestreams began migrating onto Twitter and Instagram. That her fame can be accredited to platform collapse (12) is a testament to the radical potential of Meta-machinimatic performance: it can dissolve social barriers, and in doing so alter the platform’s sacred order. Like an NPC, her words and gestures are contingent upon player interaction. She performs pre-scripted motions in response to “gifts” sent by viewers, which are something like in-game currency with real-life monetary value on TikTok Live. In this way, she is able to boost engagement and maximize her payload. TikTok live is an active game space in which PinkyDoll speedruns the algorithm’s reward mechanisms.
If the algorithm controls the flow of capital in the form of attention, bodies, and products, PinkyDoll’s uncanny ability to outplay the algorithm carries the weight of political gesture. And if the Ballerina forsakes the delicate leap in favor of a mechanical spin, what does the repetitive action actually do? Within the recursive framework of Meta-machinima, her livestream becomes a space for contesting the authorial hierarchy. PinkyDoll plays herself as an NPC getting played by an audience; together, their actions translate the platform’s basic interaction mechanisms into a game where audience members compete for her attention.
The trouble of interpretation that people often have in response to watching PinkyDoll for the first time is somewhat expected for any minor media. Her virality in mid-2023 was undoubtedly colored with a tinge of abjection. The moral panic raised as a result of PinkyDoll’s performance is an expression of how she makes the platform stutter. “Yes yes yes. Gang gang. Ice cream so good.” She herself stutters, and in doing so signals a cultural avant-garde still coming of age.
Like the aforementioned Meta-machinimatic performers, PinkyDoll expresses what Galloway might call a “new grammar of action,” (14) a kind of play whose focal point is not the aesthetic dimension of the game but its mode of embodiment. I adapted Galloway’s grammar of counter-gaming to articulate the medium of Meta-machinima and how it adapts Machinima to its own subversive ends. While the first and last categories presented here are essential, not all of these qualities must be present in a work for it to be considered Meta-Machinima. If it’s a Meta-machinimatic performance that functions as minor media, you will likely be able to identify most, if not all of these qualities in the work.
Today’s ballet scene is dazzling. To think of the influencer, content creator, or camgirl as a Ballerina in a music box stirs up questions of agency, or more specifically what it means to be a free agent in a confined space.
The Ballerina is skilled, her body a site of cohesion between the questions she asks about herself, the answers imposed by others, and the fiction she chooses to write. Designed by the craftsmen of Silicon Valley, the platform is her music box. She rehearses a username and password to enter. To navigate a digital space by means of a digital avatar, the Ballerina must have a body. She must be embodied. She must be a body, too, or that which is limited to the height and width of the smartphone’s camera or subjected to the scrutiny of its image processing algorithm.
I’ve recently become interested in ballet. Or specifically, Ballerinas, and what we can learn about digital embodiment from the Ballerina. I consider the Ballerina a model similar to the Young-Girl; she is the quintessential consumer-subject with the power to orient economies of desire.
To say that “the Young-Girl only recreates herself” (1) is to argue that she is never whole, but always in a process of becoming. Her desires are in excess of what she needs to survive. She has internalized the market, but she is not for sale. The Ballerina is a vessel for desire, but she is also a body at play (2). Within the game world that is the platform, she is the avatar, the player, the user, the used, producer, consumer, artist, and critic.
Her motion within the music box, like anything recursive, begins with a base case: the dancer’s body. The Ballerina’s form—her posture, her technique, her still readiness that enters orbit as soon as the music box opens—is a site of contestation. The Ballerina’s agency is situated within an assemblage of bodies, a distributed agency which is unified by a single image—that of the Ballerina. The avatar realizes the networked subject by offering a mutable configuration of the self, and is enlivened by the Ballerina’s shared agency. The history of the avatar is the history of digitally augmented play and self-experimentation, and the Ballerina thus emerges as a new character in this particular version of political theater.
The networked self, the data body, and the state of girlhood are all intertwined. I imagine the Ballerina as something like Alex Quicho’s vision of the Young-Girl, which is not signified by some biological marker, but by the status of being logged-on. This affectively charged state produces and is productive of desire. Quicho asserts that while performing girlhood, the performance of innocence or fragility is just that: a ruse. She claims that the Young-Girl’s knowledge of the platform is “intuitive”—which is to say that its logic is internalized in some way (3). The Ballerina, as a sister to the Young-Girl, plays with the profit-seeking logic and gamified mechanisms of the platform and takes them to the extreme. As an avatar, the Ballerina transforms the platform into a music box of her own design. The player makes the world. Like all recursive designs, the solution to the problem lies within the problem itself. In the process of iteratively re-creating herself, I argue she actually creates something, too: a new kind of networked performance, Meta-machinima.
Mise en Abyme Media
Since its inception in the ‘80s demoscene, Machinima has always been an irreverent medium. The leap from tagging cracked proprietary software to in-game anti-war interventions demonstrates the imaginative stretch of meaning and magic which artists have realized by means of Machinima. Commonly understood as animated filmmaking within a virtual environment, the basic throughline over the last few decades is Machinima’s use of the video game engine: its software, stylized forms of interaction, and rules of play. Hacking the game form to create a cinematic experience, Machinima constitutes what Mary Flanagan calls critical play. By un-playing the game and re-skinning its characters, Machinima can be a strategy for artistic expression and a distanced critique. Machinimators experiment with the game’s structural limits to articulate new and unexpected uses or challenge its intended meaning (4). They are not only focused on expanding the game engine as a medium but exploring the embodied experience of digital mediation—one animated by the avatar and its multitude of configurations.
Back in 2009, Domenico Quaranta said of Machinima: “As any other ‘remix’ practice, it has an enormous potential that emerges when the existing material is used to convey a meaning that conflicts with its own source. The video…extends the game’s narrative in an unpredictable direction. And that, sometimes, rejects the body it was designed for.” (5) What does it mean for the Ballerina to choreograph her own dance? As a networked subject, how does the Ballerina protest the music box’s commanding rhythm?
Unlike the puppeteering of Machinima, there is no distance between the performer and the object being manipulated in Meta-machinima. The Meta-machinimator is the Ballerina. She is both subject and object. It is both spectacular human play and a human performance of objecthood.
Meta-machinima is conceived through a different kind of game engine than that of Machinima: the networked platform. Within gamified social spheres like Instagram or TikTok, the basic affordance is a means of self-representation. The basic objective of the game is to perform yourself. To win, you have to be seen; to be seen, you have to win.
Patrick Jagoda observes the gamified platform as evidence of the shift towards a society of the game: “If an earlier stage involved a transformation from being into having…[followed by] a movement from having to appearing, then our moment suggests another notable movement from appearing to acting, in which action, interaction, enactment, expression, participation, and interpellation within an algorithmic environment are paramount operations.” (6) Game logic has taken root at every level: that of cultural production, knowledge circulation, and self-representation. If the platform is a game, its algorithm is its engine.
Notably, Meta-machinimators do not conceal their identities. It is the very identity of the Meta-machinimator that is made an apparatus of play. The Ballerina is a data body and actual body, a networked image and the image of her creator. Writing on Machinima, Quaranta asserts that, “when it comes to games, your appropriation is not only dealing with ‘existing cultural material’…but with your own life, the life you lived inside the game.” For Meta-machinimators, however, the boundary between the real and game worlds is porous. There is no life inside the game or a stable point of agency from which Machinima or Meta-machinima draws its power. During Meta-machinimatic performance, agency spirals inwards and outwards, in excess of the platform’s reward mechanisms, engagement metrics, or limits to self-expression.
Machinima breaks down the structure of a game by remediating gameplay into narrative cinema. Diverging from this trend of “lapsing back to other media,” (7) Meta-machinima materializes as mise en abyme media. Like a movie within a movie, it produces a game within a game. The recursive structure of the Ballerina’s movement is something made, not something given. Each iteration is contingent upon the base case—the avatar, the Ballerina, the Meta-machinimator herself—drawing out the obvious question: who’s being played here? Even under the pressure of the algorithm and its point-casted spells, the Ballerina is not compelled to play. She is free to play. The meta-machinimator understands the digital avatar as a means to experiment with the limits and entanglements of agency, embodiment, and networked girlhood. The overacting, robotic actions, or scripted dialogue all become part of a meta-narrative that makes the platform stutter, resisting the algorithm’s ideology and making a lot of people wonder, wtf did I just watch? As mise en abyme media, Meta-machinima is an optimistic gesture. It believes in play as a form of resistance. The following examples showcase different expressions of this sentiment. Each artist challenges the dominant mode of representation, the platform, by means of Meta-machinimatic performance.
01: Into the Wired with Olia Lialina
Olia Lialina is the God-mother of Meta-machinima. The web browser is her music box. Through it, she remakes each of its elements into multipliers of her image: the gif, the HTML, the URL, even the browser itself. As a Meta-machinimatic performer, she intuitively understands avatarship as a crossing over between material and emotional circuits, a delicate motion with a critical edge. Lialina’s work is highly contingent upon the physical, infrastructural components which determine connectivity. A twenty-one frame GIF sprawling across twenty-one websites, Summer depicts the Ballerina in a music box made of scripts, network protocols, and undersea cables. With every frame tethered to its own server, speed becomes an aesthetic and practical contingency. Skillfully dis/integrating into the browser’s interface enacts a radical understanding of networked play: how often are we asked to consider the materiality of the Web? Summer’s meta-narrative is tactile, where each jump from frame to frame is a movement through actual space. If I held the browser in my hands, is it more like clay, sand, or brick? This also goes to say that Summer, as a playground, is designed ex-nihilo: the Meta-machinimatic performance materializes the game world together with the platform.
Yet the avatar remains distributed—her image on each server exists independently of a live connection to a distant computer interface. Acting as a model for her own animated gif collection in AGM, Lialina thrusts her image “into digital uncertainty.” (8) Publishing her GIFs to the public domain, she challenges the web browser’s commercial organizing principle: the search engine. AGM can be considered high-performance play in which Lialina’s image competes with all other images—rich, ruined, compressed, censored, converted, screenshotted, forgotten—to live on. Inviting appropriation by inhabiting the public domain, AGM GIFs outplay the file’s archival shortcomings and its obscurification by the search engine. They are designed to escape the music box. Lialina also highlights the impossibility of complete autonomy for the Ballerina by surrendering her image, a gesture which is microcosmic of how we propagate ourselves online today: I post a selfie and I wonder what facial recognition technology will use it for training. And I post again. What if, like the GIF, we just kept dancing? She thus reveals the networked image as a site of collective authorship and ownership, an affective assemblage which acquires new meaning with each page refresh.
Just as the browser platform itself is fragmented by competing ideologies and in/compatibilities, Lialina splits her avatar across three networked platforms in A Self Portrait in Three Browsers. Each data packet is exposed to the network at various opacities given each browser’s unique architecture. Working through the Post-Internet condition, this work considers the platform and avatar as rhizomatic entities inside a world wholly enveloped by the network—the point of tension being that we are constantly undergoing processes of quantification, algorithmic scrutiny, and value speculation. Each third of the portrait is a portrait itself, forming a Meta-machinimatic object and patchwork game environment performed together with the viewer. A Self Portrait in Three Browsers uses the recursive logic of database aesthetics, breaking down the platform and avatar into smaller units to create a portrait of portraits. Altogether, Lialina’s networked portraits are spontaneous and charming Meta-machinimatic performances which unsettle the web browser as a neutral information portal.
02: The Creation Myth of Molly Moonn
Molly Moonn is one of a kind. She is Miss en Abyme. In her videos, she plays let’s plays which feature gameplay of her playing as the main playable character who always gets outplayed by the non-playable character played by herself. A game within a game, Moonn’s work evinces a pivotal change in the superstructure of networked visual culture: it finally caught up. Writing in 2011 about the aesthetic realism of image hybrids, Lev Manovich claims that “our visual culture is characterized by a new computer base and an old photographic superstructure.” He wonders, too, “What kinds of images might we expect to see when the superstructure finally catches up with the infrastructure?” (9) I would argue that the form and metaphor of the game inform the computer superstructure such that we find game logic and design influencing the shape of politics, social life, and personhood. In her cheeky twist on the let’s play genre, Molly Moonn showcases this cosmic shift by using the tactics of minor media.
Minor media is meant to create a new consciousness and, according to Deleuze, “contribute to the invention of a people.” (10) Here, the absence of “a people” can be attributed to the datafication of the individual. They are missing because they’ve all been sent away to server farms and data centers. Playing with and through the avatar represents conditions of struggle unique to the Post-Internet world. In the interstices between the performer and the performed, the missing people must reinvent themselves. Molly Moonn’s video art responds by summoning a sense of futurity peopled by curiosity and wonder.
Constructing fictional game worlds within the major language of the gamified platform, Molly Moonn’s mise en abyme style constitutes a minor practice which opens up new ways of responding to the crisis of gamification. She destabilizes the puppet-puppeteer binary which dominates the discourse on digital embodiment: she is the player and the played. In his essay from 1810 on marionette theater, a conversation with a puppeteer revealed to Heinrich von Kleist the primary advantage a dancing puppet has over a human dancer: “it would never be self-conscious.” (11) This is precisely why Molly Moonn’s disruption of the binary holds so much power, and how Meta-machinimatic performance allows us to imagine a Ballerina that is free to dance. The puppet has achieved self-awareness, yet she still dances.
03: NPC Streaming as PinkyDoll
PinkyDoll has the all-time high score for out-playing the algorithm. Although she did not invent NPC Streaming, she brought the obscure genre into the limelight when recordings of her livestreams began migrating onto Twitter and Instagram. That her fame can be accredited to platform collapse (12) is a testament to the radical potential of Meta-machinimatic performance: it can dissolve social barriers, and in doing so alter the platform’s sacred order. Like an NPC, her words and gestures are contingent upon player interaction. She performs pre-scripted motions in response to “gifts” sent by viewers, which are something like in-game currency with real-life monetary value on TikTok Live. In this way, she is able to boost engagement and maximize her payload. TikTok live is an active game space in which PinkyDoll speedruns the algorithm’s reward mechanisms.
If the algorithm controls the flow of capital in the form of attention, bodies, and products, PinkyDoll’s uncanny ability to outplay the algorithm carries the weight of political gesture. And if the Ballerina forsakes the delicate leap in favor of a mechanical spin, what does the repetitive action actually do? Within the recursive framework of Meta-machinima, her livestream becomes a space for contesting the authorial hierarchy. PinkyDoll plays herself as an NPC getting played by an audience; together, their actions translate the platform’s basic interaction mechanisms into a game where audience members compete for her attention.
The trouble of interpretation that people often have in response to watching PinkyDoll for the first time is somewhat expected for any minor media. Her virality in mid-2023 was undoubtedly colored with a tinge of abjection. The moral panic raised as a result of PinkyDoll’s performance is an expression of how she makes the platform stutter. “Yes yes yes. Gang gang. Ice cream so good.” She herself stutters, and in doing so signals a cultural avant-garde still coming of age.
Like the aforementioned Meta-machinimatic performers, PinkyDoll expresses what Galloway might call a “new grammar of action,” (14) a kind of play whose focal point is not the aesthetic dimension of the game but its mode of embodiment. I adapted Galloway’s grammar of counter-gaming to articulate the medium of Meta-machinima and how it adapts Machinima to its own subversive ends. While the first and last categories presented here are essential, not all of these qualities must be present in a work for it to be considered Meta-Machinima. If it’s a Meta-machinimatic performance that functions as minor media, you will likely be able to identify most, if not all of these qualities in the work.