The Warholian Re-Emergence and Inversion in Live Streaming

    Decades ago Andy Warhol ventured into film, creating bland, long, dreadfully drawn out films that exposed the intention behind attention. He sought the radical act of subduing and quieting attention through art, rather than optimizing a film as a spectacle. He wanted audiences to give meaning to what they watched, not the other way around. Empire ran for eight hours, nothing but the Empire State Building. Sleep ran for six, six stills spread out, all shots of simply a man breathing in bed. Chelsea Girls nearly 7, split between two screens for a run time of just over 3 and a half hours. All three asked the audience to step away from film as entertainment, and introspect on themselves as the source of meaning. The art was no longer the subject, the spectator was. Live streaming has inherited these formal strategies, but with different intentions. Where Warhol used duration as provocation, asking his audience to step away, streaming uses duration as a form of retention, keeping the audience present. Where Warhol made mundanity uncomfortable and strange, streaming makes it tolerable and sanitized. And, while Warhol used his “superstars” as vessels to create personas that were known for their performances rather than their humanity, streaming packages such personas as false intimacy, personality, and reality to sell back to its audiences. Warhol turned people into spectacle deliberately as a critical act, whereas streaming turns people into spectacle structurally, as a condition of business. This paper argues that the modern live streaming era is an ironic inversion of the Warholian project. While on the surface its most popular forms share much the same aesthetics as Warhol’s films, in reality its intellectual purpose has been quietly stripped by platform incentives and a monetized architecture.

    For Andy Warhol, the relationship between artist and audience was one-sided, permitting at worst parasocial fandom without the means to receive an artist’s reply. Warhol was the first of his kind to be a young artist that was known like a rockstar. The earliest evidence of this was at his first solo museum exhibition at the ICA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. There, upon the anticipation of thousands of fans who might show up, paintings had to be taken off the walls ahead of the opening with fears of potential damage. Sam Green, the exhibition’s curator, said of the event, "Andy was mobbed… and they were all out for blood. Somehow, once inside we managed to get to an old iron staircase that led up to the ceiling... [a] student [broke] through the fake ceiling above us so we could get out through the library private stacks, over the roof, and down the fire escape and out where the police could protect us... That's how we escaped" (qtd. in Stein 254). The opportunity for super fans to realize interactions with their idols was rare, and thus fans were eager to take advantage of the event as a way to bring to life their imaginations. Warhol said after the incident, “It was incredible to think of it happening at an art opening… we weren’t just at the art exhibit—we were the art exhibit, we were the art incarnate” (qtd. in “That’s How We Escaped”). For him, the mob was not a disruption of the artwork but rather the final piece itself. As the exhibit was stripped of its paintings, the frenzied mob unknowingly became the medium for Warhol’s art. However, such art is only achievable because of the singularity of the incident. Warhol’s films called for the audience to realize themselves as subjects, as they do here, yet, this can only be maintained if the relationship between Warhol and his public remains at an unreachable distance. When Warhol becomes part of their intimate, physical lives, the parasocial devotion devolves into something much more dangerous, defined by strict constant feeds of knowledge rather than imaginative freedom.

    In the modern medium of live streaming, the idol-to-fan relationship has been restructured. Distant parasocial relationships have evolved into “one-and-a-half” sided relationships, structured by a new dynamic where the viewer can interact and receive response from their idol in real time (Kowert and Daniel). The “chat,” an automatically-scrolling live message feed built into the broadcast, is the predominant form of communication between streamer and viewer, and is what gives live streaming its true distinction from other forms of media. It transforms passive viewership into active, where the streamer (in reality a distant figure) becomes a friend. The scale of such forms of interaction is far from trivial. For example, Kai Cenat, a popular streamer, set initial records in February 2023 for a month-long “Twitch subathon” where he broadcast himself 24 hours a day for an entire month. During this month, the chat engagement rate was 11.7%, totaling over 19,000,000 messages (Iyer). Here, the audience is far from ghostlike, they inhabit the life of the stream and shape it as a virtual mob.

    It is this real-time aspect, along with the one-and-a-half sided relationship, that gives way to “stream sniping,” the phenomenon where virtual participants track streamers to interact with them in the physical world. While Warhol worshippers had no method of tracking him, aside from perhaps singular events like the ICA premiere, “IRL (In Real Life) streamers” (a subset of live streamers who stream their everyday lives outside) are exposed to obsessed viewers crossing the threshold between virtual and physical reality. For example, popular streamer iShowSpeed (often referred to as Speed), within minutes of starting an IRL stream in Oslo, found himself trapped by fans in a souvenir shop. While IRL streamers do not give away their location explicitly, local fans often read street signs in the background, recognize storefronts, identify neighborhoods, etc., to track down their idols. In this interaction, Speed injured his ankle in the store and was unable to walk out on his own. As his bodyguards attempted to carry him out, the crowd bombarded them, pulling on his hair, jumping on top of his car, denting it, and even managing to maneuver themselves into the moving getaway vehicle (Glaze). In the stream, he can be heard screaming, “Oh oh stop stop, my head, my hair,” in agony (iShowSpeed). After calling the Norwegian police for help, he was told they would only aid if he stopped the stream, which he refused to. While ending the stream would have brought additional aid to break up the crisis occurring outside, it also would mean severing the connection between streamer and viewer for the day, halting momentum, losing revenue, and ultimately losing good content. The mob that had gathered there, as well as Speed’s refusal to end the stream, equally reveal that they had both been doing exactly what the medium had trained them to.

    The 1965 ICA incident and the 2024 Oslo incident each are structurally defined by crazed mobs driven by parasocial and fan behavior; however, while Warhol’s crowd came for the artist, finding themselves accidentally the art, Speed’s crowd came with the intention to inject their presence into his content, to insert their physicality into something they only usually consume virtually. The ICA mob was an oblivious substitute to replace the paintings in the gallery, while serving Warhol’s intellectual cause all the same. The Oslo mob was a conscious reaction of fans who understood a medium so well that they could weaponize it. To be part of the stream was to be one with the “art” that is present constantly in their lives. The violent nature of the Oslo incident suggests something that isn’t as apparent with the ICA incident: that Speed’s presence as an internet personality has converted him into an entity that patrons confuse between brand and identity. Warhol was a household name, but Speed has become a household name, face, image, and presence with constant online content being streamed to his fans. The confusion between brand and person that Warhol cultivated as a critique is for Speed simply a condition of his existence.

    With this pseudo-physical presence in the household, streaming stars become indistinguishable from performer and person, in many ways emulating Warhol’s goals with The Factory. Warhol organized The Factory with old Hollywood in mind, mass producing “superstars” whose personas were under his control and whose lives were essentially his canvas. His in-house Factory nickname was “Drella” (a combination between Cinderella and Dracula), because it “expresses the vampirism attached to his activity as image producer and stargazer, the notion that his touch had the effect of draining away the life of his ‘found personalities’” (Suárez, qtd. in Hawkins 186). Warhol turned people into objects for art, he extracted humanity for commodities as a critical act. A similar extraction occurs in live streaming, but without such critical acknowledgement. The platform’s incentive architecture is constructed such that the more a streamer uploads their life to the internet, the more fame and income they generate. And, because of such a structure, person and brand become mutually dependent. Streamers need to continue streaming in order to not only preserve their online brand, but also to generate income to preserve their livelihoods. Person and brand feed into one another until they are indistinguishable. Where Drella named what he was doing, streaming obscures the extraction and reframes it as authenticity, community, and freedom.

    The most apparent evidence of such extraction of life to become endlessly working digital personas is with the phenomenon that is NPC streaming. Popularized in 2023 on TikTok, NPC streaming involves a performer acting out certain pre-scripted phrases and/or movements depending on the level of donation they receive. The TikTok live streaming interface is set up such that users can send donations of varying amounts using virtual gifts. Each gift, of which there is a set amount, triggers a reaction. There is no communication with the chat, no improvisation, only pre-determined lines. In fact, the origin of the name for this structure is derived from a popular video game term, “Non-Player Character,” defining built-in characters with a set few pre-loaded lines. In this setup, performers are reduced to deterministic figures that feel more robotic than human. While both the NPC streaming structure and Warhol’s superstar apparatus extract personality and humanity from their subjects to convert them into public objects for consumption, the superstars at least had some form of self. Here the NPC streamer is not self, but a script. Viewers interact with them like an action figure with audio effects, where each button pressed (donation sent) triggers a different noise. Viewers do not buy closeness to streamers, as they might in other structures, they buy control over one. NPC streaming makes Drella’s vampirism literal and extreme, reducing streamers to voluntary hollow public objects for financial gain, without any critique of the consumerism to which they expose themselves.

    With brand and persona collapsed into a single indiscernible entity, viewers also become increasingly unable to separate their attachment to streamers from the actual person behind the stream. The one-and-a-half sided relationship that feeds off repeated small financial transactions and acknowledgements (viewer donates/subscribes to streamer, streamer thanks viewer using their username) cultivates an intimacy without actually disclosing a self. Here, the persona becomes the self, and intimacy is accrued through such digital interactions. As parasocial activity continues repeatedly over lengthened amounts of time, feelings that are virtual and fake feel physical and real. An incident of such arises in a stream snipe on March 2, 2025 where three popular women streamers were approached by a fan asking for one of their phone numbers, which she denied. He then followed them before lunging at them and yelling, “I’ll kill you right now.” The women were ultimately able to flee and get help, ending the stream (Mercante). The hyperrealized streaming fantasy is ruptured through stream sniping, breaking boundaries that media like film or television never could before. The IRL stream gives viewers the opportunity to at any time locate a streamer and demand reciprocity for feelings that are one-sided. In this distorted mix of digital and physical world, fans become convinced that the persona they see online, and their feelings toward it, exist in the same capacity in real life. Streaming provides the illusion that the screen isn’t a barrier but rather an open door, one that creates false proximity between viewers and streamers. It is this invisible illusion that Warhol’s cinema sought to destroy.

    Warhol’s Sleep (1963) refused its audience the right to watch it in any conventional sense; it popularized the “fixed-frame film,” consisting of only half a dozen shots displayed over six hours. Each shot captures John Giorno’s body from varied angles, using extreme close-ups often to create a filmic intimacy where the audience sees every part of his body, from his torso to nipple to lips to crotch. It refuses the conventions of cinematic movement, the camera doesn’t pan, it is purely driven by cuts unmotivated by any narrative logic. Even with still frames, the film creates the illusion that Giorno is breathing, creating a rhythmic parallel between the audience’s breathing and his (Gopnik). It is a film where audiences can hardly pay attention, often drifting in and out of focus. Warhol built this reaction into the experience, he expects audiences to zone out, to leave, to return, to experience the film not by the content it provides but by the hours one lives while interacting with it. Joan Hawkins describes, “... only a few diehards actually planned to sit through the whole thing. Most of us (my friends and I) … picked a time that was convenient, dropped in for a while, and then, when we got bored, went out and did something else, came back to the movie for a while, and so on. From what I could tell, most … [got] their hands stamped so that they could drift in and out in this way” (Hawkins 178). Sleep defies cinematic expectations by encouraging viewers to not sit-and-watch (as is typical for a film), but to roam, converse, speak back to the film, and even leave the film, to come back an hour later to see a new frame. Its own pretension is so obvious that it forces viewers to pay attention less to the screen and more to the space that exists between the viewer, those around them in the present, and their past self from the start of the screening.

    Across his filmic oeuvre, Warhol’s relationship to his audience is defined by inverting the conventional format of spectatorship, asking the audience to create an experience for the film, rather than the film creating one for them. Warhol says, “When people go to a show today, they’re never involved any more. A movie like Sleep gets them involved again” (Gidal 84). By creating films composed primarily of “dead,” “drug,” or “killing” time, Warhol is concerned most with putting the audience in a position where they have to acknowledge the matter at hand, embracing the idea that attention is simply a matter of endurance (Gidal 90). Sleep offers no incentive for those who are hyper-attentive, it simply exists as a film to fill time, to acknowledge the audience's existence alongside it, and to derive meaning from their interactions with one another.

    Yet, while Sleep’s primary function is to force the audience to be aware of itself, live streaming, structurally similar in its duration demand, produces the opposite effect, constantly reminding the viewer of the entertainment value at stake. A 2024 study of noticing-based practices in live streams identifies what it terms a “moral economy” of streaming viewership, where viewers actively evaluate whether a streamer’s audience is deserved (Song and Licoppe). Audiences judge whether what the streamer says, shows, or does justifies the scale of both their following, as well as their concurrent viewing. The spectator in a live stream is just as hyperaware of themselves as in Sleep, but for a different purpose. Where Sleep is intentionally boring to give the audience awareness of themselves as bodies occupying time and space, live streaming gives the audience awareness of their position as market participants, at any point able to withdraw their time and attention if the return of the media is insufficient. Song and Licoppe observe this as an economy in which the viewer’s attention is the primary commodity, and the streamer is evaluated on their capacity to retain it. Warhol’s work acts to dismantle elitism, pushing the audience to embrace boredom and attention as equally important ways to engage with time. Live streaming cannot afford this, its business model relies on every viewer’s attention as a data point, not as a human attribute, and so it trains and incentivizes viewers to incessantly assess the entertainment value of each streamer. Warhol sought spectator awareness as a form of freedom and as a way to queer time, live streaming platforms remind their audience that they are on the sites for entertainment, and that whenever one streamer is not sufficient for that, they should seek another.

    Seemingly the contemporary counterpart to the film Sleep is “sleep streaming,” a form of streaming where streamers take their night’s rest on camera, allowing their quality of sleep to be controlled by the audience viewing them. Where Warhol’s sleeping subject was immutable, sealed within the film canister, the chat on sleep streams are able to both watch and intervene with the sleep itself. Streamers configure the sleep stream such that viewers in the chat, depending on how much they spend, can play songs, trigger alerts, turn the lights on, etc. These streams adopt Sleep’s metaphoric structure where the experience is a product of the viewer and literalize it as an exploitative form of monetization. Where Warhol’s Sleep derived meaning from the audience’s physical presence and interactions, the sleep stream modifies the format to remotely alter the content itself via donation.

    Within the monetized form of streaming, hierarchies arise where viewers develop stronger “relationships” with streamers dependent on increasingly more expensive tiers of subscription they pay for. While there may be thousands in the chat at once, streamers configure the stream such that those who donate/subscribe receive special recognition on the video side itself. Those who give the most are also most visible, and most likely to not have their message accidentally skipped over. And, in this sense, the chat is not a democratic space but a market for buying the streamer’s attention. Warhol’s vampirism was one-sided, he extracted art from his superstars to create his art. With live streaming, however, the capital-driven incentive is so strong that the extraction is two-sided: the platform takes a percentage of the streamer’s profit, and in turn gives the audience the opportunity to purchase a streamer’s attention. Warhol’s films were a cultural commodity, they were available to all who were interested, financial status wasn’t so important as much as cultural capital was. In streaming the opposite is the case, financial status is what determines a viewer’s level of “closeness” to the streamer. The medium takes Warhol’s cultural economy, where a willingness to participate was all one needed, and replaces it with a fiscal system where the more you pay, the more you gain.

    The aforementioned month-long stream performed by Kai Cenat is the clearest illustration of what this economy looks like at scale. Streaming 24 hours a day, Cenat ended the month with 685 hours of broadcast, and over 306,000 concurrent paying subscribers, the most any singular streamer had maintained. The stream covered every part of Cenat’s quotidian: talking, eating, playing video games, hosting guests, and, especially, sleeping. The second highest watched category of the month-long stream was “I’m Only Sleeping,” where Cenat slept on stream in front of the camera, for all to see (Iyer). It is not incidental that the two most-viewed categories of the entire month-long broadcast were simply a man talking and a man sleeping. It is the logical endpoint of a medium that is built on the premise that each performer’s existence is essentially the content, training audiences to feed on acts that otherwise seem uninteresting. Privacy is none, there is nothing too small or too trivial to market and consume.

    The premise of watching mundane activity is especially important for Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, 12 reels projected side-by-side, all shot at The Factory and the Hotel Chelsea. Running on dual-screen projection with two simultaneous reels, one in color, one in black-and-white, each with independent sound, Chelsea Girls puts the viewer in a perpetual act of selection. The audience must constantly choose which film to watch, which audio to hone in on, when to shift focus, the film prevents the viewer from ever settling into the dreamlike absorption that conventional filmic structure relies upon. Where traditional film allows the audience to forget themselves, Chelsea Girls makes it a point that forgetting is structurally impossible, the viewer is conscious of their own attention as an active process. The vignettes depicted in the film are mostly people talking, or arguing, performing, or hanging out. There is no “plot” in a traditional sense, the domesticity and mundanity are the subject of the film. It refuses to categorize daily acts as exciting or dramatic, and instead asks the audience to observe these interpersonal interactions as what they are: nothing. Much along the same vein, the streaming equivalent arises in the “streaming house,” houses where multiple popular streamers pool their social status by living together, broadcasting from their own rooms and producing natural daily overlap between one another. The result of which is an archive of a specific form of domestic life for audiences. Where Chelsea Girls presents the residents intentionally as subjects of an artistic aim (Warhol arranged each scene formally), the streaming house presents its residents as the source of the content without framing. These streamers are farming content for one another by pooling their fanbases, communities, and personas into a single home. And, by doing so, they mislead the audience into thinking they are acting out of normalcy. While The Factory calls itself exactly what it is, the streaming house calls itself a home.

    While live streaming may mimic Warholian aesthetics, it ultimately fails to deliver meaningful purpose, inverting Warhol’s beliefs and manipulating its audience. In 1963 Warhol said, “I like boring things. When you just sit and look out of a window, that's enjoyable… Really, you see people looking out of their windows all the time… My films are just a way of taking up time” (Gidal 84). Films that came out of The Factory archive the quotidian by putting the spotlight on that which was too small for a Hollywood picture. Drinking coffee, eating, sleeping, watching a building at night; these are all things that are part of daily life for humans, but not for the hyperstylized life created in films. IRL streaming arrives at the same formal position, putting the mundane upfront, but by an entirely different route. It makes a spectacle of mundanity as a form of business. It cares little about the quotidian as something that deserves attention, but instead presents a model that grants continuous access to a performer’s every act, generating parasocial attachment and, with it, increased revenue. Audiences no longer look out of their windows, but instead to their screens. They read the chat, form virtual mobs to influence the streams they consume, optimize boredom into constant stimulation, and form false relationships with personas that exist only virtually. Duration used to unsettle an audience’s space-time-relationship by Warhol is used by streaming as a metric to retain attention. The mundane, for Warhol a critique against film’s hyperstylized human experience, is used in streaming as a content strategy to manufacture parasocial intimacy. Warhol’s superstars were deliberately constructed as a critique on the commodification of celebrity, where he converts humans into images, reduced to pure personas. Streaming does much the same, however, as a monetary requirement rather than an artistic statement, it is part of the revenue architecture. While nearly structurally identical through duration, mundanity, and a superstar-like system, live streaming is sentimentally antithetical to the value of Warhol’s films. Andy Warhol made films that exposed the machinery of attention and commodification as a way to critique, live streaming obfuscates it as a way to profit, preying on its actors and audiences, taking fiscal value where Warhol created critical meaning. In Guy Debord’s terms, the spectacle has finally reached its fulfillment, social life has been replaced entirely by its representation, “the world we see is the world of the commodity” (Debord 16). Where Warhol’s films made the machinery of spectacle visible as a form of human resistance, streaming completes the process Debord warned of, viewers no longer live their days physically, but spend eight hours living through streamers, lived experience is now a commodity that tricks audiences into conflating consumption with connection.

Works Cited

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