Pieces of Reiss

"Enjoying aperitifs at the trattorias of Rome and dining at the pizzerias of Sicily is not just about the cuisine, or service, but must now also feel like a scene from a movie, an opportunity to unlock a meaningful chapter in your personal narrative. In TikTok terminology, the ideal holiday is a week of building core memories, where the vibe tourist feels like the main character. 

"With this in mind, the modern tourist cares less about recognisable backdrops, iconic landmarks or famous beachfronts. What’s more important is stitching together a collage of micro moments, like editing a mood film. Serendipitous nights at a local watering hole, a spontaneous ride on a vespa with a local stranger, an accidental discovery of a hidden treasure down a dark alleyway. The sort of stuff you can weave into a 9:16 video and add a vintage Italian pop track to.

"Firstly, the vibe tourist always wants the holiday to feel like it’s contributing to their personal narrative. 

And in order to increase their chances of sensory, audiovisual moments, the vibe tourist resorts to pre-planning with as much granularity as possible (in order to secure the most authentic restaurant, find the best possible viewpoint for the sunset, book the most charming, under-crowded hotel"

“Thanks largely to the spread of smart scrollable devices in the last fifteen years, a certain concept of public participation – what is now known in the managerial vernacular as ‘engagement’ – is common to events of this sort, and to the way they are framed by the media. The individual is not conceived in the same way as in the liberal philosophical tradition – as an autonomous agent, possessed of reason and interests – or in the psychoanalytic tradition, as shaped perhaps unconsciously by past conflicts and injuries. Instead, each of us (celebrities included) becomes a junction box in a vast, complex network, receiving, processing and emitting information in a semi-automatic fashion, and in real time. Information and emotions bounce between these junctions, mutating as they travel, as instantiated in the memes and jokes that spread virally via social media platforms. In this model, each individual reaction is one more item of information thrown back into the network, in search of counter-reactions.

“The status of photography in everyday life has undergone a profound transformation as a result of this reciprocal interaction between photographer and viewer. In turn, the design of public landmarks and home interiors has changed, with the aim of producing more engaging visual content.

“A kind of mirroring is enacted between human face and artefact, with each put in service of revealing the other.”