Two pieces of performance news this week are actually one argument about what structures mean after the people inside them change. The Onion's rebooted InfoWars launches July 2nd, inheriting not just a domain but a distribution network, an audience, and an aesthetic built explicitly for radicalization. And in Manchester, Ai Weiwei will reenact his own 81-day detention in his first durational performance. One artist is being inserted into an inherited structure. Another is reconstructing a structure he was forced into. Neither has full control over what the container means.
The Onion's Faustian Architecture
The Onion's InfoWars project is genuinely risky, and not for the reasons its critics fear. The worry is not that satire will accidentally produce conspiracy content. The worry is that the infrastructure of InfoWars, its algorithmic footprint, its audience's trained pattern-recognition, its monetization rails, does not become neutral just because the content changes. Platforms are not pipes. They are argument structures. InfoWars' audience did not just consume content. They were shaped by a feedback loop that rewarded paranoia. Piping satire through that loop is an experiment in whether the container can be decontaminated by filling it with something different.
Ai Weiwei and the Unrepeatable Original
Ai Weiwei's approach is the inverse. He is not taking over someone else's structure. He is reconstructing one that was imposed on him. 'This approach cannot be replaced by any other,' he said of the durational format. There is something here about embodied authenticity that Tom Marioni's argument that conceptual art is idea art clarifies: the performance matters because the body matters, because 81 days in detention cannot be reduced to a press release. The Onion is betting that content can override infrastructure. Ai Weiwei is insisting that only presence can override absence. Both are correct, probably, and both are also probably wrong in ways we cannot know yet.