The artistic relationship with the audience
Starting from the Belgian pop duo Candeur Cyclone on social media, I explore the dialectic of contemporary artistic encounters. Questioning our traditional conceptions of performance and connection with the audience.
The Singularity of Digital Presence
I discovered Candeur Cyclone through their gentle emergence on social media. This Belgian pop duo offered fragments of songs during live streams on TikTok, setting to music texts sent by their connected fans, among other things. I really appreciated their work, this way they had of talking about youth’s malaise while weaving, in the very moment of the live stream, authentic bonds with those watching them. And their artistic universe, meeting with their viewers’ texts, had great depth, in this improvisation and dialogue.
This relationship made me understand that on a social network, doing a live stream without establishing a genuine exchange with connected people leads to immediate failure. Without sincere interaction, viewers disconnect instantly. They have no interest in staying connected to a live broadcast if it doesn’t offer them what television, with its polished production and mastered narration, already does better. This is why we’re often surprised to see, during live streams, people who seem to be doing nothing special, who are simply there. But precisely, the value of the live stream resides in this “being-there,” in this quality of presence that Walter Benjamin already called the “aura” of the work, but which takes on a new dimension here.
Yet, it’s not enough to simply be present in front of a camera to create a live stream that works. One must inhabit their singularity of presence, develop what I would call a “poetics of connection”. Content creators who succeed on social media conduct, consciously or not, deep work: they explore and refine their unique way of being present to their community, creating what Sherry Turkle calls in Reclaiming Conversation a “mediated intimacy” of a new kind.
Interaction as Raw Material of the Work
Each artistic form cultivates its specific quality of presence. A dance performance doesn’t offer the same type of presence as a street performance, a classical music concert differs from a rock concert, which itself has nothing to do with the experience of a nightclub. On social media, this specificity of presence becomes the determining criterion: by connecting to this or that live stream, I know I’m going to encounter a particular human energy, recognizable among all others.
This encounter no longer rests on the usual criteria of artistic production, technical virtuosity, elaborate staging, the fourth wall, but on relational criteria of a different order. As Henry Jenkins observes in Participatory Culture, we are witnessing the emergence of a culture where the distinction between producers and consumers fades in favor of permanent co-creation. It’s a relationship to the collective that establishes itself in the intimate, creating this paradox of a “public intimacy” that artists, even the most renowned, often struggle to master when they venture onto social media.
This shared intimacy via screens differs radically from the intimacy experienced with loved ones in daily life. It is mediated, staged, but after all, as Erving Goffman reminds us in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, our social life is already theater. The difference lies in the specific nature of this digital staging, entirely based on connection and interaction. There is no single right way to interact; each creator must find their own, and this way constantly evolves according to what happens in the community. The interaction device transforms itself, reinvents itself. We are no longer in a simple artistic offering, but in an action that is born from interaction and metamorphoses through it.
The Paradox of Stage Transposition
Candeur Cyclone’s story illustrates well the challenges of this new economy of presence. Their notoriety, built on TikTok and other social media, allowed them to give concerts that I could see captured on video. I wasn’t physically there, but my impression, perhaps mistaken, but nonetheless very clear, was one of a rather striking disconnect: their quality of artistic relationship with the audience in concert seemed surprisingly poor compared to what they deployed on social media.
Troubling paradox: in these venues were probably the same people who followed them online, those who had desired to deepen the artistic encounter. The themes addressed remained identical, loneliness, malaise, drug problems, the financial precarity of artistic creation. Yet, all the authenticity that characterized their digital presence seemed to have evaporated. Watching these recordings of their stage performances, I perceived like an invisible wall between them and their audience. Their way of singing didn’t carry the spectators along, and this could be read in the attitudes, one could feel a distance, palpable.
This observation reveals something fundamental about the nature of performance in the digital age. As Philip Auslander underlines in Liveness, the very notion of live presence has been profoundly reconfigured by digital media. Candeur Cyclone perfectly mastered the art of mediated presence, but found themselves helpless facing traditional physical co-presence. They didn’t have the experience of this particular form of artistic relationship with the audience that the physical stage demands, with its codes, its rituals, its different expectations.
Two Distinct Arts of Presence
This analysis based on Candeur Cyclone is not meant to suggest that it would be easier to establish an authentic artistic relationship on social media than on a physical stage. Both exercises present considerable difficulties, but of fundamentally different natures. These are two distinct arts of presence, each with its own requirements, its techniques, its pitfalls.
Establishing an authentic connection via a screen requires mastering what I would call a “grammar of digital intimacy”: knowing how to modulate one’s voice for the intimate space of headphones, understanding the rhythms of asynchronous interaction, navigating between spontaneity and performance. Conversely, the physical stage demands an entirely different corporeality, a projection of energy into space, a management of the present collective that responds to other laws. As Peggy Phelan notes in Unmarked, live performance implies an “ontology of disappearance,” it exists only in its shared evanescence, while digital performance inscribes itself in a logic of traces, archives, circulation.
One can excel in one of these arts while being clumsy in the other, and this in both directions. I’ve seen seasoned stage artists lose all their force on social media, unable to find the right tone of this public intimacy. Conversely, brilliant digital creators can reveal themselves to be strangely absent on a physical stage, as if their presence couldn’t cross the screen barrier to inhabit real space. This double competence remains rare, and perhaps it isn’t necessary. Each medium calls for its own form of excellence, its own poetics of encounter, and perhaps it isn’t necessary to want to occupy all spaces.
My multidisciplinary practices—spanning creation, cultural action, training, and support in a wide range of cultural, social, and educational contexts across France—provide me with a privileged, subjective, and in-depth observatory of the cultural sector in France.
This sector is weakened by its position, often deemed “non-essential” by many political leaders, by the competition from digital platforms in cultural practices, as well as by challenges and obstacles related to the difficulty of establishing interdisciplinary collaborations and the scarcity of evaluations, which are often poorly conducted and instrumentalized.
My observatory allows me to identify dynamics that work, as well as difficulties I observe. Here, I propose to share my analyses, methods, and suggestions, hoping they may prove useful. My goal is to contribute to a stronger cultural sector in the future, as I believe that defending a cultural sector funded by taxpayers’ money holds the potential for emancipation, the development of freedoms, democracy, and the capacity to act—in a way that is fundamentally different from what private actors produce.
This is possible if there is no hypocrisy, and in my view, it comes at the cost of a commitment to lucidity and self-questioning, a choice to deconstruct representations, and perhaps to challenge certain privileges and systems of domination.
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