The writer Philippa Snow has contributed an essay, The Eros of it All, to the forthcoming Somerset House Studios: A Reader, published by Elephant as a reflection on performance art in the age of Instagram. Snow opens with her own unease before a camera, an art-school exercise in which a tutor declared her not photogenic, and uses the memory to frame a wider claim: that performance art, the most bodily and sensory of art forms, now risks being flattened into shareable clips. Her central example is the Austrian pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, transformed by choreographer and artist Florentina Holzinger into SEAWORLD VENICE. Snow describes a nude woman circling on a jet-ski, another serving as the clapper of a great hanging bell, and a third suspended in a tank of purified urine. A video of the jet-ski figure kept surfacing on her Instagram feed until the work reached a mainstream audience for whom it could still shock. Commenters split over whether it was provocation or environmentalist satire; Snow suspects both, while insisting something irreplaceable is lost when ritual nudity and thundering noise are watched on a phone. The essay tracks two responses to that loss. Marina Abramovic's 2025 theatrical performance Balkan Erotic Epic banned all cameras, betting that the communion between artist and audience needs patience rather than instant capture. By contrast, the artist Candela Capitan made the phone her medium: in a 2025 Somerset House Studios performance she crawled on all fours, a cattle-bell at her neck, live-streaming from an iPhone she held or straddled, so her own uninterrupted broadcast ran alongside the audience's fragmented documentation. Snow reads this as a tactic of withholding, a way of taking the image back. A second model comes from Studios resident Nina Davies, whose 2024 piece Editers treats the body as a three-dimensional meme, dancers holding phones and dancing for phones in a loop of movement and screen. Drawing on ArtNet editor Kate Brown's reporting on audiences filming through illuminated screens, Snow concludes that the performance artists of the Instagram decade must find closeness rather than mere reach.