EMILY THOMAS
MA Music (Audiovisual Cultures Pathway)

The TikTokification of Live Performance: Rosalía’s MOTOMAMI (2022)

This project explores how Rosalía’s album MOTOMAMI (2022) has pioneered a groundbreaking form of mediatized performance by expanding TikTok’s structures of brevity and entrenching the app’s aesthetics, communicative modes and interface into her novel audiovisual world via the convergence of avant-garde and mainstream gestures. Contributing to research on audiovisuality and media studies, it provides fresh insight into how TikTok’s nuanced public space influences music, performance and culture at large. It necessarily critiques several contemporary scholars’ failure to incorporate audiovisual analyses into their studies. Resultantly, this project mirrors Rosalía’s convergent approach to MOTOMAMI by combining and extending theories of mediatization, avant-garde art, TikTok and transmedia to fit within an updated audiovisual framework. After first illustrating how Rosalía expands and entrenches TikTok’s interface into her online performance through mechanisms of convergence, this project proceeds by investigating how MOTOMAMI’s audiovisual universe personifies the nuanced, contradictory means by which culture is subjected to processes of ‘TikTokification’, as the public space of TikTok radically seeps into spaces outside of the app’s vertical boundaries.

You can see the project here: ROSALÍA - MOTOMAMI

Emily Thomas is a writer, musician and DJ based in London. Recent work includes her chapter contributed to YouTube and Music (Bloomsbury Academic), ‘Quare(-in) the Mainstream: YouTube, Social Media and Augmented Realities in Lil Nas X’s MONTERO’ and her video essay for Sonic Scope Journal. She is also a part of the Boudica team, a multidisciplinary platform for female, trans+ and non-binary individuals within electronic music, and she regularly contributes articles and copy to independent book publisher Velocity Press. Alongside this, Emily is a classically trained singer, working alongside musical partners such as Euchre, FLOCO and Stolen Velour to enmesh electronic, popular and experimental sonic palettes. After years of work, her collaborative EP with Euchre will finally debut on 18 November at Niche.

Website - https://linktr.ee/emilythomas____