The word “content” has an interesting etymology that traces back to Latin through Old French. It comes from the Latin contentus, meaning “to contain” or “to hold together.” This Latin word breaks down into con- (meaning “together”) and tenere (meaning “to hold”), and entered English usage, some say, in the late fourteenth century in Old French as “content,” with two uses: as an adjective meaning “satisfied” or “at peace” and as a noun meaning “that which is contained” or “the contents of something.” But language use and words’ significations change and adapt over time, and the meaning expanded even further to include the subject matter or substance within something (like the contents of a book), a state of satisfaction (when used as an adjective), or the material or ideas contained within media (as we commonly use it today in phrases like “content creation”). The modern usage of content to refer specifically to media and information shared online is a relatively recent semantic expansion of the original noun’s meaning, which has become widespread in the digital age and still carries the core concept of “that which is contained.”

The journey of “content” mirrors humanity’s evolving relationship with information itself. In medieval times, when knowledge was physically contained in manuscripts and books, “content” was literally about containment – physical boundaries holding words and ideas. People thought of information as something that needed to be preserved and protected within physical vessels. But something profound happened during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. As literacy spread and printing revolutionised information sharing, the meaning of “content” began to float free from its physical constraints. It began to refer to the ideas themselves rather than their container. This shift paralleled a broader cultural movement toward seeing knowledge as something that could flow between minds rather than being locked away. The Industrial Revolution brought another transformation. “Content” began to describe industrial materials – chemical and mineral content – reflecting how humans were learning to analyse and quantify the world. Information itself was becoming something that could be measured and standardised.

Then came the digital revolution, and it is here that content-as-noun undergoes its most radical transformation yet. In the digital realm, the traditional boundaries between container and contained are almost completely blurred. Digital content can exist simultaneously in multiple places and be infinitely copied, transformed, and shared. It’s everywhere and nowhere.

The original adjectival meaning of satisfaction and sufficiency seems almost ironic in the face of what it might mean to be content now. We live in an age of endless content streams, yet we’re never quite content. The word that once implied boundaries and satisfaction now exists in a realm where boundaries are meaningless, and satisfaction is always postponed to the next click, the next share, the next like. Even the role of the content creator reflects this transformation. Medieval scribes were content-keepers, preserving knowledge within physical volumes, whereas today’s content creators send their ideas out into a boundless digital ocean. And yet, they still struggle with containment in a different sense, as they strive to contain their messages within algorithms, attention spans, and platform constraints.

It’s a beautiful paradox: the word whose root means “to hold together” now describes something that’s fundamentally about being infinitely malleable, able to flow and adapt across any channel or context. Perhaps that’s why the term feels so apt in our digital age – it carries within itself the very tension we navigate between containment and freedom, between satisfaction and endless seeking.

This evolution is not just about a word changing its meaning. It is about how we, as humans, have fundamentally transformed our relationship with information, knowledge, and satisfaction. Each new meaning of “content” added another layer without fully erasing the previous ones, creating a semantic palimpsest that tells the story of human intellectual and technological evolution. In the luminous labyrinth of language, our old friend content shimmers like a chrome relic from a future we’re already living. How fascinating and how frustrating that a single word should map our species’ psychic trajectory so precisely, so inevitably.

II.
A film crew circles a mother as she takes a photograph of her daughter.
Her daughter, holding herself aloft from a floor in the Playboy Mansion, is being photographed by another team of photographers. “You’re doing amazing, sweetie,” the mother coos, encouraging her to maintain her pose for just a little longer.

In the hermetically-sealed environments of contemporary media ecology, certain phrases achieve a kind of technological sublime – crossing the threshold from mere utterance to memeification. “You’re doing amazing, sweetie,” spoken by Kris Jenner in that hyperreal moment of maternal commodification, represents perhaps the most perfect crystallisation of platform capitalism’s libidinal economy: a moment where biological motherhood interfaces directly with the technological stack of attention capture.

The scene itself presents a kind of anthropological diorama of late capitalism’s reproduction protocols: The mother watches her daughter perform sexuality for the apparatus of capture (cameras, lights, the invisible but omnipresent network of distribution channels), all while the meta-apparatus (reality TV entourage) records not just the performance itself but also the performance of supporting the performance. Here we find something that represents what I propose we might call a “maternal stack” – a vertical integration of affect, commerce, and technological mediation that transforms biological relationships into infrastructural components of the attention economy. And it was here that transmediale’s previous artistic director, Nóra Ó Murchú, found the title for 2024’s content-themed festival.

Consider the psychological architecture of the phrase itself: “you’re doing” (the performance of agency), “amazing” (the quantification of that performance against market metrics), “sweetie” (the deployment of intimate affect as a lubricant for market operations). Each component interfaces with distinct layers of validation from the biological substrate of mother-daughter bonds to the technological superstructure of content distribution networks.

When Gutenberg’s machine-dreams spilled words across Europe, “content” began its first metamorphosis. Now we live in the age of infinite content, where Kris Jenner’s “You’re doing amazing, sweetie” echoes through our collective consciousness like a prophecy fulfilled. How perfect that this phrase, originally meant to encourage Kim during her 2007 Playboy photoshoot, has become a mantra for our content-saturated age. Every TikTok, every Instagram story, every tweet is met with this phantom maternal encouragement, this digital benediction.⁠1 We’re all doing amazing, sweetie, as we feed endless content into the void.

The medieval scribe has evolved into the content creator, a hybrid of self-anointed artist and algorithms. The Kris Jenners of the digital age stand behind their ring lights, phones held aloft, whispering encouragement to their disciples. How perfectly contemporary that they still struggle with containment – not of paper and ink, but of attention and engagement metrics, those shimmering currencies of the digital economy. Isn’t it wonderful? The word that meant “to hold together” now describes the very force that is pulling us apart and reassembling us in new configurations. Each post is a new experiment in human consciousness, each like and share a tiny affirmation: you’re doing amazing, sweetie, as you dissolve into the content stream.

The future arrived so suddenly, yet the word was ready for it, waiting all along. From containment to liberation, from satisfaction to eternal hunger – “content” isn’t just evolving; it’s prophesying. Look closely at its shimmer, and you might see your own reflection, multiplied infinitely across tomorrow’s screens, each version of yourself doing amazing, sweetie, in this endless digital performance. How perfect that a mother’s encouraging words during a photoshoot would become the unconscious mantra of our content age. We’re all Kris Jenner now, all Kim Kardashian, all audience and performer, all content and container, dissolving into the beautiful catastrophe of infinite digital reproduction.

III.
The texts assembled in this volume map some of the territories where content has not only colonised consciousness but long since evacuated politics of substance. Jaakko Pallasvuo’s Navel-gazing performs the very emptiness it critiques, inhabiting the role of the artist-as-content-producer to expose its underlying absurdities. Shaka McGlotten’s Vibe is Floating Sideways chronicles a pandemic-era immersion in reality TV and horror podcasts that reveals how content consumption shapes our experience of isolation and dread. Su Yu Hsin’s Water: A Geoarchive reveals how environmental imagery becomes content that obscures rather than illuminates the climate crisis and proposes alternative ways of recording and transmitting ecological knowledge. Some of these works present us with a series of diagnoses on the current state of content: protest movements reduced to hashtags, revolutions packaged as Instagram carousels, and genocide and ecocide transformed into doom-scrolling fodder. Reality TV contestants starve in the wilderness while viewers grow heavy with digital consumption. AI chatbots spin tales of colonial Kenya while corporate accounts perform solidarity. The ghosts in our machines whisper through analogue tape while we endlessly generate content about our own dissolution.

Yet, within these works, we also find strategies for reclaiming meaning from the void. In Studying Listening, dejana and dubravka sekulić examine how Farida Amadou uses her instrument to transform her bass performances into a vehicle for temporal deprogramming, creating sonic spaces that resist algorithmic capture, transforming musical instruments into tools for temporal liberation. In The Ear of the Storm, Nicolás Jaar meditates on listening as a form of resistance, and in Oceanic Refractions, he finds, in an empty morgue in Berlin, new ways to hear beyond content’s endless noise. Artists turn silence into a weapon against extraction, forging communities in the gaps between content streams. And throughout Emele Ugavule’s dialogue with Merewalesi Nailatikau and AM Kanngieser, we discover how the Pacific storytellers of Oceanic Refractions refuse the drowning island narrative through digital refractions that build genuine connection rather than mere engagement, where digital technologies can serve rather than supplant traditional knowledge systems.

What emerges across these diverse interventions is a chronicle of how meaning persists despite its commercial flattening. McGlotten’s musings on reality TV contestants and horror podcast narratives resonate with the sekulić’s on bass performances – both propose how mediated experience might be turned against itself. Su’s analysis of water infrastructure and Jaar’s meditation on listening suggest ways of archiving crisis that resist content’s tendency toward spectacle. Pallasvuo’s performance of artistic alienation finds its counterpoint in Ugavule’s exploration of digital indigeneity, each approaching the problem of authenticity from opposite directions. These texts suggest that recording and broadcasting – whether through social media, streaming platforms, or reality TV (and even if social media is the primary means of transmission) – can be reclaimed as a tool for genuine connection and political action. They show us how traditional knowledge systems are adapting to survive in an attention economy without surrendering their power, how artists are forging new languages of resistance amid endless corporate cringe, and how the very tools that hollow out meaning might be repurposed to fill those spaces with something real.

From Su’s examination of dam infrastructure to McGlotten’s computational hexes, from Jaar’s sonic hauntology to the sekulić’s transinstrumental performances, these works recognise that we have entered an age where political reality has been reduced to malleable content, where trauma is monetised, and where revolution must compete with cat videos. Their works suggest that our survival may depend not just on what we preserve but on how we choose to perform our resistance – in bathrooms-turned-stages, in bedrooms-turned-studios, in morgues-turned-servers housing our digital remains.

These collected works map the psychological territories of our content apocalypse, where genuine political action seems impossible – and yet somehow persists in spite of silencing, deplatforming, and censorship. In the spaces between screens, new forms of solidarity emerge. Communities form in comment sections. Resistance is organised in Signal group chats. The very emptiness of content becomes a space for insurgent meaning.

The texts chronicle both our enchantment with and resistance to computational systems that simultaneously connect and isolate us. They document how social media platforms, interest groups, and governments can convert authentic experience into performative spectacle, but also how users subvert those platforms for genuine connection and support. They reveal how content creation becomes a form of spiritual practice when divorced from metrics and redirected toward community. Perhaps this is why these works return, again and again, to the wisdom of traditional knowledge systems – not as relics to be preserved but as living guides for navigating our current crisis. They suggest that survival may depend on our ability to mobilise older and other ways of knowing via new means of transmission to fill hollow content with contemporary substance.

In the end, these works ask us to consider what it means to archive resistance when the archive itself has become content. By haunting the hybrid spaces that are both analogue and digital, authentic and performance, isolation and connection, we find new forms of communion with our technological ghosts, even as they are compressed, optimised, and served to us as content.

These authors and artists show us how to hollow out the hollow, to create spaces within content streams where genuine meaning flourishes. They teach us to use the master’s tools not to dismantle the master’s house but to build secret rooms within it where revolution can germinate. They remind us that even as content consumes everything, we still have the power to document what is happening. We still have room to consume and create strategically. We still have time to gather evidence.

In these works, we find maps to help us navigate the flood and to build arks of meaning in a sea of empty signifiers. We are all becoming content – but perhaps in these very transformations lie the seeds of our liberations.

Berlin, January 2025.