4. momaspeed.run — Brennan Wojtyła
On first-person shots, livestreams and Instagram-based art.
In one of the chapters of this newsletter, we discussed artists who appropriate video game landscapes in order to construct the space-time sections that make up their films. This time, we focus on artists who appropriate video game tropes and aesthetics and translate them into the physical world to reflect critically about it.
There is a whole story to tell about how certain aesthetic and functional traits of video games have been adopted throughout the history of cinema. One of the key moments in the history of this hybridization can be found in the two homonymous films Elephant (1989) by Alan Clarke and Elephant (2001) by Gus Van Sant. The tension between these two films — the latter being inspired by the former — serves here as a useful lens to describe what happens to what we’ll call, for now, the “follow-shot,” and what transformed it from an alienating semi-POV shot into the third-person player perspective typical of video games.
Let us start in 1972: Alan Clarke, a British director working primarily for television, releases an experimental, strange, and extremely bleak film inspired by the events of the Northern Ireland Conflicts. The film is titled Elephant, after the well-known Anglo-Saxon expression “the elephant in the room”: an obvious, enormous problem that one pretends — quite uselessly — not to see. The film adopts a very specific aesthetic: it (literally) follows a series of cold-blooded murders through follow-shots, with the camera positioned behind the backs of the protagonists in the frame, tracing their trajectories as if it were an intruder shadowing each killer’s steps.
The shot chosen by Clarke is perfectly attuned to this narrative intent: the spectator embodies the camera, is forced to assume the status of a person within the story, and is compelled to do nothing but watch the atrocities unfold on screen, feeling like a witness — and therefore complicit — in those murders. Precisely because it activates this embodiment between the camera’s eye and the spectator’s body, the follow-shot becomes THE shot of alienation: the spectator’s ‘stasis’ is mocked, discarded, and dragged across a landscape; here, a landscape of horror. The killer’s body becomes ours; we walk with him, and we discover things alongside him.
2001: Gus Van Sant titles his film about the Columbine shooting Elephant. The title perfectly suits the issue of gun use and youth nihilism in the USA, but it is not the only thing Van Sant steals (as every great director should steal from those who came before them) from Clarke. The follow-shot is taken up again in all its splendor, but this time, it is 2001, and third-person video games are far more widespread than they were in 1989. The third-person shooter is already one of the most recognizable languages in the videogame world. The common misconception is that this language, so close to video games, reveals a certain moralism toward games that supposedly “incite violence,” but this is not the case.
Van Sant realizes, like Clarke, that the follow-shot / third-person shot is a device capable of alienating and bringing the spectator closer at the same time. In the film, Van Sant forces the viewer to watch what happens in the hours leading up to the tragedy (one of the major media criticisms directed at the perpetrators’ families was precisely that they had not observed their children closely enough to foresee what they were planning), thereby demonstrating that horror is not composed of rational, closed narratives, but rather of unspoken things, silences, and ambiguous moments. The spectator is thus obsessively inside the film (embodied by the camera), while at the same time completely outside any possible exhaustive interpretation of the causes of the tragedy. The follow-shot / third-person shot is exactly what evokes this sensation.
Returning to video games: a third-person shooter suggests the same dynamic. When playing, I guide the avatar whose shoulders I see, making it perform actions as if I possessed it. It is not I who act, but the avatar, through me. This is where alienation —together with a spiritualistic factor — of the follow-shot / third-person shot originates.
We can therefore conceive of the follow-shot / third-person shot as a framing device that produces alienation due to double factor: on one side, it is a POV shot — the spectator “follows” whoever appears on screen. On the other side, it is a “spiritual” shot — the spectator enters the body of the moving figure, who drags them through the story. This duality is fundamental to understanding the role that POV shots play in contemporary media, and to suspect the reasons behind their adoption by so many contemporary media artifacts. Think of gameplay videos, vlogs, livestreams, but also of films such as Presence (a crucial film on the relationship between technology and phantasmagoria) by Steven Soderbergh, or Baby Invasion by Harmony Korine. The many declinations of the POV in contemporaneity thus come into play as representations of the multiplication of identities and points of view within the online ecosystem, and of the kinds of ‘feelings’ this generates: from alienation to identification, and all the micro-shades that lie between these two opposites. The Italian theorist Ruggero Eugeni has written extensively on this topic, going so far as to describe the ‘first-person shot’ (this new ‘subjective’ shot for the digital age) as one of the defining visual strategies of ‘post-cinema.’
The multiplication of perspectives within the same spatial plane is further exacerbated by the interfaces we interact with every day: a livestreamed vlog on Twitch evokes the gaze of the cameraman (the streamer), but also renders visible, for example, the chat with viewers’ comments reacting in real time. The possibility of interacting with a first-person audiovisual artifact through comments (made via one’s own user, another digital avatar) adds further layers to this multiplication of perspectives. Richard Prince understood this very well when he made New Portraits, his beautiful project composed of screenshots of Instagram posts in which his personal account was always visible as a “commenter” on those posts, as if he was leaving a virtual signature embedded within Instagram’s own interface. This is why films like Korine’s Baby Invasion, which mimics the aesthetics of livestreams, make use of a falsely simultaneous chat pasted along the edge of the frame, showing —within the fiction of the film — the real-time comments of viewers watching the criminals’ live stream.
The interface of messages and icons used to interact with streamers — I am thinking, for instance, of the various rewards one can gift to streamers during TikTok lives — has become increasingly familiar within the ecosystem we constantly inhabit online. When we encounter it in a film, crystallized into a finished product such as a movie, it never fails to gives us a sense of the overwhelming visuality of our visual culture. This happens because we see this visual chaos as frozen out of the eternal flow of the internet, sometimes viewed on a large screen, exactly as happened with Baby Invasion during the Venice Film Festival in 2024.
This tension between infinite scrolling and cinematic crystallization, between mimicked interactivity and an overwhelming excess of ‘identification,’ lies at the heart of the work of another artist who, like Gus Van Sant, has stolen both title and aesthetic from a previous work and author. This time, however, the robbed author is not a director from the 1980s, but a YouTuber named Matt Herzog. The name of the artist-thief is Brennan Wojtyła.
4. momaspeed.run by Brennan Wojtyła
“Ed Ruscha, you know, he’s ok, great artist for computer wallpapers. But in museums, you can see…not a soul wants to come here.”
— Matt Herzog
‘Museum of Modern Art 100% Speedrun in 20:17 [All Rooms, All Art] [Sub 25] [NEW PB!!!]’. Published on YouTube January 9th, 2024.
Speedrunning is “the act of playing a video game, or section of a video game, with the goal of completing it as fast as possible. It often involves following planned routes, which may incorporate sequence breaking and exploit glitches that allow sections to be skipped or completed more quickly than intended.” (Wikipedia)
Doing a speedrun is always performative: not only because it records personal movements within a digital space, but also because the very act of setting a record inherently challenges others to beat it. When Matt Herzog uploaded his MoMA speedrun on YouTube, completed in just over 20 minutes, Florida-born artist Brennan Wojtyła — who perfectly embodies the archetype of the post-internet trickster artist I described some time ago in this essay — decided to attempt to traverse the entire museum in an even shorter time. Not only that: he realized that surpassing Matt Herzog’s record was also a way of re-proposing what was already, in itself, an artwork, and that repeating the challenge initiated by the YouTuber could become a means of paying homage to, and therefore consecrating, Herzog’s artistic endeavor — not outside of YouTube video culture, but firmly within it.
momaspeed.run is a performance, an artist film, and a net-art piece that, inspired by Herzog’s idea, reflects on artistic gestures and on how these gestures are framed on online platforms.
The rules of the speedrun carried out by both Herzog and Wojtyła are numerous and often complex. One of them — the most memorable — requires stopping to take a selfie with The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh as a mandatory checkpoint for the speedrun to be considered complete. Both videos contain POV footage of the speedrun shot inside the museum by the two authors, as well as a simulated chat that mimics the comments of viewers of a ‘livestream’ — one that, in neither case, actually took place. The POV — the first-person shot — is thus used here ironically, to reference the world of livestreams and video games translated into real life, while the fake chat functions as a device that allows both artifacts to take on the appearance of a real livestream captured from the online flow and re-published in the form of a screen recording, as it happens in Korine’s Baby Invasion. Compared to Herzog’s video, Wojtyła adds new widgets to the chaotic interface of his film: fake logos of companies that allegedly ‘sponsored’ the speedrun (NVIDIA and the MoMA itself among them), as well as a heart rate monitor.
Wojtyła’s operation therefore adopts the aesthetics of some of the most familiar audiovisual forms in gamer culture, while at the same time — as it often happens in his practice — mocking the stiff seriousness of the art world and the way mass media have completely redefined not only the role of the artist, but that of the spectator. How does a viewer react to an artwork when it is published in the format of a YouTube video or as a piece of net-art? How is it really possible to determine whether a ‘creator’ can be considered an artist? In the era of ultra-fried everything and the ultra dank-ification of each serious theme or aspect of human life, how can the spectator still appeal to that aura of ‘authority’ that distinguishes an artistic gesture from others? Brennan Wojtyła, trickster-artist of our time, is interested precisely in these questions.
Through a stroke of algorithmic luck, his work became far more than he initially expected: the Reel published on his Instagram profile @wojtyl.a in March 2025 went viral, thus making Instagram user engagement and algorithmic rules additional constitutive factors of the artwork itself. The comments under the viral Reel offer further insight into this shift in the status of spectatorship in the internet era. Here are a few examples:
“10/10 art appreciation/ critical analysis/ practice wrapped in a devils on horse back”
“had to do this when a friend at a conference in new york really wanted to see the starry night about 2 hours before our flight.”
“better art than the actual museum”
“This video should go in the MOMA”
“This is some peak premium quality reel pull right here. I didn’t knew that the speed run fans could do this with museums. Probably the best thing MoMA has to offer”
and my favorite ones:
When I spoke with Brennan while preparing this chapter of the newsletter, he told me about an artwork that inspired him — and which I, like him, deeply love: Filip Kostic VS Filip Kostic (2019), a work I consider fundamental within the current landscape of contemporary art. At its core is about the ‘battle’ over the Instagram username of artist Filip Kostic, orchestrated by the same artist when the PR team of a homonymous professional footballer contacted him to buy his nickname on the platform. Many elements of Kostic’s work resurface in momaspeed.run: the livestream interface as a language (the idea for the sponsor logos probably come from here), gameplay as a force that influences and shapes real life, and Instagram as a fundamental constitutive component of the artwork.
Ultimately, momaspeed.run is a work that beautifully stages the contemporary use of the first-person shot by reconnecting it to the context in which we most commonly encounter it — livestreams — thus crystallizing a moment of the chaotic internet flow into a cinematic artifact, and showing us how a language that was once disruptive in cinema (as it was for Van Sant in 2001) has today become the primary language of online visual culture. A symbol of that visual chaos, of that hyperlink culture that unfolds entirely within a single spatial area.
As a spectator, and art writer, I think it’s thrilling to see the walls of a museum desacralized and suddenly transformed into the map of a video game, complete with RNG and tricks to be exploited in order to solve it. If you were to ask me, this is one of the very few possible ways of talking about art today.
You can watch Brennan Wojtyła’s MoMA speedrun by typing momaspeed.run into your address bar.
Until the next chapter, thank you for reading. And happy 2026!
x
Arianna
gotta go fast