We spend hours on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube convinced we are choosing what we watch. The students behind La Fabrique du Regard started from a different premise: that what appears on our screens is largely determined by systems we cannot see, and that those systems have a history longer than the internet. The question they asked was not what we watch, but who built the frame through which we watch it.
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The answer they found ran through three moments. First, the Bauhaus, which in the early twentieth century developed a visual grammar based on geometric forms, primary colours, simplified typography, and a resolutely functional approach to composition. Its ambition was democratic: a universal language accessible to all. Second, wartime American propaganda, which appropriated that same visual language for immersive exhibitions at MoMA in New York, including Road to Victory in 1942 and The Family of Man in 1955. These installations used Bauhaus principles to guide the emotions of visitors and manufacture political consent, deploying Herbert Bayer's techniques of photomontage, panoramic staging, and expanded visual field to create what Fred Turner would later theorise as the Democratic Surround: an environment that produces the illusion of free choice while controlling the visitor's entire perceptual journey. Third, TikTok, where an algorithm now performs the role that curators and states once performed manually, selecting, ordering, and personalising the images that appear in an infinite scroll designed to hold attention indefinitely.
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The object the students built to carry this argument was a large cardboard box, painted in Bauhaus primary colours, with geometric forms on every exterior surface. Two circular holes were cut into it at different depths. Through the first hole, visitors saw wartime propaganda imagery, soldiers, patriotic families, national unity, arranged in the compositional style of the very movement that had originally produced the visual language being weaponised. Through the second, set deeper inside, a smartphone displayed TikTok's For You page. The box made the genealogy physical. The visitor who pressed their eye to each opening was enacting the argument rather than reading about it. They thought they were choosing where to look. The holes had already decided. |
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