Dopamine

Press Text

The "Dopamine" exhibition questions the forms, perceptions, and behaviors shaped by digital platforms, where power is no longer imposed directly but infiltrates through subtle gestures, smooth interfaces, and reward loops. Through techno-critical installations and works exploring the viral aesthetics of these environments—with gestures (swipes, double taps, etc.), postures (duckface, core communities, etc.), and languages ​​(emojis, memes, GIFs, etc.)—it acts as a magnifying mirror. This overabundance of images, incentives, and a somewhat artificial joy, reminiscent of Shutterstock images, reveals the limitations of this algorithmic positivity.

The invited artists, researchers, and hackers also reveal what often remains invisible: the mechanisms of data extraction, user profiling, and the commodification of attention. Considering the internet as a commons, the exhibition will also explore ways in which these platforms can be reclaimed, as well as concrete examples of design conceived to define alternative ways of relating to screens.

As part of Némo – International Digital Arts Biennial of the Île-de-France Region, produced by CENTQUATRE-PARIS, from October 11, 2025 to January 11, 2026.

Affective economy, aestheticization of well-being, and architecture of fluidity

The current aesthetic of digital technology is defined by its lack of roughness: gestures glide smoothly, surfaces shine, colors are soft, synthetic voices are soothing, human relationships are mediated… Design doesn't just aim to serve; it seduces, it attracts; it directs attention into a seemingly resistance-free world. The South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han elevates this "smoothness" to a symbol of our modernity, considering it a form of power through appearances: aesthetics is disciplining. It eliminates negativity, smooths out imperfections, and values ​​fluidity. In fact, it internalizes constraint: nothing forces us to act, everything is merely an incentive. The user experience, designed to be "intuitive," neutralizes tensions—affective, political, or sensory.

This design is of great importance because it shapes gestures (swipes, double taps, scrolling, likes…), languages ​​(emojis, memes, GIFs…), and behaviors. But its influence extends even further. The digital platform economy relies on the manipulation of emotions: feelings are no longer simply experienced, they are staged, measured, guided, and transformed into resources. This logic even extends to our relationship with our bodies. Filters, self-care routines, quantified self via connected bracelets or health apps: the infrastructure contributes to producing a positive, desirable, and high-performing self. Thus, the algorithms of TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Spotify are predictive machines that don't just suggest; they manufacture our preferences, according to opaque and often biased logics, sometimes reinforcing stereotypes and inequalities of visibility.

It is to this very particular aesthetic that the exhibition refers, while simultaneously subverting it. The exhibiting artists do not seek to escape it, but rather to amplify it to the point of distortion. Like a magnifying mirror, they push the codes to the point of tipping them into the strange and excessive. Where everything should be fluid, saturations emerge; where everything should be gentle, a muted violence. By forcing forms to their extreme, these works make visible the sometimes alienating contours of this world of "fluidity," "transparency," and "benevolence."

From Minitel to Liquid Glass: A Brief History of Interface Design
The aesthetics of the internet—its images and sounds, its modes of circulation, the way information becomes visible, interactive, and shareable—are inseparable from the interfaces that shape our digital actions. It is therefore quite specifically a question of design that governs what is and is not possible online, and in doing so, creates, along with the multitude of users, the aesthetics, or rather the aesthetics, of the internet. As early as 2001, Lev Manovich* demonstrated how interface conventions shape our cultural practices by establishing implicit visual and interactional norms. Researchers such as Matthew Fuller** and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun*** have continued this line of thought, showing that code and interface are co-producers of both aesthetics and ideology.

Design, in this sense, is never neutral: it responds to specific functions, to often invisible intentions – whether it be to optimize usability, capture attention, or facilitate monetization. Each interface aesthetic thus reflects a technological “spirit of the times,” at the intersection of the digital industry, visual culture, and social imaginaries.

With the rise of flat design, major platforms (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.) implemented strict guidelines, reducing graphic variability in favor of greater readability for users and improved functional performance. This visual rationalization goes hand in hand with a standardization of behavior, transforming interfaces into increasingly predictable, closed environments governed by proprietary logic. But this homogenization clashes with a more complex reality—as this exhibition demonstrates. From the 1990s onward, artists from the net.art movement highlighted what Olia Lialina calls vernacular web aesthetics: amateur forms of expression, often dissonant or cobbled together, stemming from the spontaneous appropriation of digital tools by users themselves. Produced through subversion, misuse, or transgression of imposed frameworks, these aesthetics reveal that the interface remains a field of negotiation, traversed by a constant tension between algorithmic prescription and popular inventiveness.

There is therefore an inherent friction between, on the one hand, the logics of control and strategic design—aiming to standardize the experience, monitor usage, or maximize attentional engagement—and, on the other hand, the vitality of practices, collective appropriation, and the forms of aesthetic heterogeneity that persist nonetheless. This tension reminds us that, despite increasingly enclosed platforms, the internet remains a commons—a space still inhabited, transformed, and disrupted by those who use it.

Under the watchful eye of the Big Other, the invisible power of the platforms

Do you remember Aladdin? The philosopher Marcello Vitali-Rosati* compares our relationship with online platforms to that of the hero of One Thousand and One Nights with his genie. First, because he knows nothing about how the magic lamp works, except for the gesture that activates it: rubbing it. And when he asks to become a prince, it is indeed the genie who chooses his costume and appearance. Aladdin thus benefits from the genie's services, but without deciding how they are rendered. Similarly, when we delegate our choices to algorithms—search engines, automated suggestions, voice assistants, etc.—we don't really know what is deciding for us, nor according to what logic, nor in whose interest.

This fable highlights an important reality: digital technology is not a neutral tool; it is an infrastructure built with specific intentions. Platforms and applications do more than simply distribute content: they organize our behavior, prioritize our desires, and filter our perceptions of the world. Once conceived as a free and customizable space for emancipation (the era of Geocities and MySpace), the web has become closed off, becoming a system of enclosures. Today, we use this term to describe the privatization of a common good; in this case, the appropriation of data or digital spaces that were previously free. And it is a gigantic system. By 2025, 70% of the world's population, or more than 5.5 billion people, will be connected to the Internet: 3 billion use Facebook, 1.6 billion TikTok, 2.7 billion YouTube, 1.3 billion WeChat… Unsurprisingly, in just a decade, the world's richest people have become their founders: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Larry Page (Google), Zhang Yiming (ByteDance), etc.

Alkan Avcıoğlu, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace , 2021
This model corresponds to what the French economist Cédric Durand** calls "techno-feudalism," a concept adopted by Yanis Varoufakis, economist and former Minister of Finance of Greece. It is an economy that adopts the foundations of feudalism: privatization of common resources and a rent-seeking economy, where platforms do not produce value in the classical sense (labor as a commodity), but extract it through their position as gatekeepers. Every click, scroll , posted photo, or maintained relationship enriches their databases, feeds their predictive models, and optimizes advertising targeting. This dynamic constitutes what is called " digital labor ": it is by using the online spaces they have enclosed that we produce value for these platforms, indirectly working for them. For the American psycho-sociologist Shoshana Zuboff***, this regime falls under what she calls the "Big Other": a non-state, yet all-encompassing entity that observes, anticipates, and shapes behavior on a global scale. Unlike the "Big Brother" of Orwell's 1984, this Big Other does not govern through fear, but through the promise of comfort, personalization, and service. This power is all the more effective because it is invisible, delegated, and perceived as helpful and benign.