In 1974, Marina Abramovic placed an assortment of items on a table. A rose, a gun, a knife, a feather, a pot of honey, a whip, and so on. Objects that could bring pleasure or pain. The audience was informed that those props could be used on Abramovic over the course of the next six hours, she would not resist them. It was a famous performance: what began with gentle, playful interaction quickly devolved into an act of violence. When the gallerist announced that the performance was over, the people who had torn her clothing from her body, who had taunted her with knives and bullets, ran to the exits. For many, Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 has become a sort of myth of the human tendency to act in violence when the rules ordering interaction are suspended. The photographs of Abramovic in the aftermath are haunting.
While scrolling on Instagram recently I came across a video. In it, the artist Briony Godivala explains that in January 2025, she had a QR code tattooed on her forearm for a piece of performance art. For one year, each day, the public was invited to submit and vote on which link the QR code should redirect to. In the video, she explained that for the past month someone had hacked the voting site to air the same episode of anime over and over again. Godivala said that the hacker’s consistent success discouraged participation and thus was harming the project. Most of the commenters responded with derision: she shouldn’t have expected anything different; in fact, she should have expected much worse.
The expected has also happened. “I’ve seen a lot of people die, Godivala told me over the phone recently. There have also been links to porn and pornographic material, some of it particularly disturbing, as well as fascist and racist content. As with Rhythm 0, Godivala’s The Inked Link uses passivity to draw out participation, and like Rhythm 0 the kind of interaction passivity attracts is often a violent one.
When Godivala was still 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 got tired and dropped her.
“I like testing collective responsibility by putting myself in a kind of violent or dangerous situation. But once I graduated it was really hard to find performance spaces that would allow that,” Godivala said. By turning to social media, Godivala found a space where her experiments in violence, benevolence, and the public could continue.
What is interesting about Godivala’s take on Rhythm 0 is how it exposes how the act of relinquishing control in a physical, co-present space is a different kind of act with a different kind of meaning when translated to a virtual space. While Abramovic and Studio Morra, the gallery in Naples that she exhibited in, must have done some work to draw in an audience, once Abramovic began the performance her passivity was registered in her stillness. That stillness and her promise to remain still created a space with a different moral charge. And we know what happened next.
Conversely, Godivala’s performance of passivity required a lot of activity. Godivala was constantly promoting and documenting the work on Instagram and TikTok in order to recruit participation for the project. Yet, even in this act of promotion Godivala was trying to maintain a neutral, passive position in order to not influence the choices for the props that they brought to her for the project. In order to achieve that neutrality, the short form content that she made had to look like anything else you might scroll upon, thus taking on the aesthetic and narrative choices that are rewarded by social media algorithms: a video in natural light, talking to the camera while walking down the street, using a compelling hook in the first few seconds, and so on. To be actually passive, online, is to disappear.
Imagine it is 1974, Abramovic takes her seat, and in the act of being still she slowly becomes transparent until there is nothing left of her at all. Performing passivity online requires something so unlike what we consider to be passive. Not stillness but constant activity. Imagine it is 1974 and Abramovic must continuously shout, “Do anything to me! Do anything to me!”
But in the end Godivala was quite successful in achieving the kind of neutrality that the aesthetic of passivity suggests. The website where past winners are documented is a long list of links that does seem to capture a kind of random sample of “internet.” Along with the expected rage-bait and shock content, people have used The Inked Link to promote their businesses, podcasts, social media accounts, and music by linking to their Spotify and Bandcamp profiles. It has also attracted a collection of “old-internet’ style websites: rotatingsandwiches.com, wplace.live, isitwednesdaymydudes.com and pokemoncries.com among others. Also: a live cam of gray seal puppies and fundraising sites for Palestine and mental health organizations.
Wikipedia pages for: the British town of Camborne, anti-fascism, Hitler, conceptual art, the USS Liberty Incident, the history of tattooing, September 11th conspiracy theories, the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal, Red Scare, Lavender Scare, the Sami people, the shooting of Charlie Kirk, and grass. The Wikifeet page for Elon Musk, which, when I clicked the link last week showed me plenty of photos of Musk’s feet and which as of publication, for some reason, shows nothing at all. This is different from what is also a common feature of this list: many, many broken links leading to 404 messages.
It’s easy to imagine this website as a piece of glue paper, fluttering in the wind, catching stray bits of content. But we know it’s not that easy.
