| Summary: | This article explicates the assemblage of devices, software, and human action that enabled the riotous success of BEYONCÉ, a "visual album" released in December 2013 without prior fanfare. Drawing on concepts of media and bodily "techniques," this study posits the networks and planes of social media as key sites of circulation, discourse, and meaning-making for the album. However, despite the novel apparatus of the album's circulation, I push against a reading of the BEYONCÉ release as a wholly groundbreaking rupture, demonstrating instead the deft ways in which viral logics and pathways were co-opted into extant industry frameworks.
|
|---|