​Demo vs Spectacle is an artist talk by Tina Tarighian exploring an internet-based practice that treats digital systems as both medium and subject. The work examines how emergent technologies shape perception, authorship, and collective identity, approaching software as a material that encodes humor, bias, and desire. Rather than presenting tech platforms as neutral infrastructures, the practice frames them as expressive surfaces where social behaviors are staged, exaggerated, and made visible.

​Satire operates as both entry point and method, using humor to draw viewers in while creating room to reflect on scale, intimacy, and automation. These systems are not only observed but built as environments audiences can move through, allowing people to recognize themselves inside the structures they engage with daily.

​Rapid prototyping, iteration, and play become research strategies for thinking through emerging technologies in real time. The talk traces how making and thinking operate as a continuous loop in which experimentation feeds into form. 

​Demo vs Spectacle positions web-based art as a lens for understanding contemporary culture, proposing digital experience as a space where humor, critique, and intimacy coexist.