Why do I keep crying?

This article explores how my performance videos Googling Things in Hell 1 (Tammy) & 2 (Daniel) (2021) capture the contradictory nature of emotional performances in surveillance capitalism and convey them to the viewer. When we perform emotions online through social media posts and comments, or as in these videos, searching for content on Google, personalized content isolates us by using our emotions as data to provide or sell us what the algorithm thinks we want. But the generic nature of our search results shows that our feelings are never truly our own and are always structurally determined by capitalism.

Following Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank's reading of the mid-century psychologist Silvan Tomkins, the article presents a ‘weak theory' of the emotions under investigation by staying close to the surface of the emotional performances captured in the videos. But, by thinking through the aesthetic and form of the screen image, and the textured feel of the activity taking place on screen, the article reveals the ‘strong' theory of emotions deployed by Google Search, which aims at profiting from those emotional performances by interpreting them as potential requests for information about products or services provided by Google’s advertising clients.

This reductive way of interpreting emotions is contrasted by the videos' interest in the specificity of the online performances of emotion captured on-screen. The article concludes by suggesting that these performances of emotion are necessarily interested in the conditions of their own possibility. Using ideas by the artist Andrea Buttner and the affect theorist Lauren Berlant, the article claims that my videos' maintenance of interest in their on-screen performances of emotion might help a viewer acknowledge, understand and reflect on the political conditions in which they take place.

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
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