The image is easy to describe. A subject positions itself, a trigger is pressed, and a moment is recorded. The subject in Lignier’s project, reported by CBC, happens to be a rat. The discomfort comes from how little that changes the picture. The rats do not understand photography, identity, or performance; they respond to reward systems. Yet the results are recognisable enough to make the experiment worth taking seriously.
Conditioning and the Camera
The rats learned through reinforcement. They pressed triggers associated with cameras because doing so produced food. Over time, the behaviour became routine, requiring no deliberation and no awareness of outcome. Social media platforms operate on a remarkably similar logic. Likes, comments, and shares function as the food pellet: intermittent rewards that reinforce participation and encourage repetition.
Research into social media use and behavioural conditioning is not new. Studies on variable reward schedules, including work drawing on B.F. Skinner’s foundational research, have long suggested that unpredictable rewards produce stronger behavioural patterns than consistent ones. Platforms built around likes and follower counts are, in effect, applying that principle to human attention at scale.
Performance Without Reflection
The rats produce images without constructing narrative or meaning. Their participation is mechanical. Human behaviour online involves intention, but it is also shaped heavily by platform design, which rewards certain forms of visibility and quietly suppresses others. Users adapt, often without noticing, learning what generates response and adjusting accordingly.
That adaptation is not cynicism. For most people, it is closer to instinct. A post goes up, numbers rise or fall, and the next post adjusts. The feedback loop replaces reflection. What appears as self-expression is often, in practice, a performance shaped by an algorithm that the user never sees and did not design.
The Camera as Constant
Photography once required deliberate effort. Cameras were separate objects associated with specific occasions. Today, they are integrated into devices carried at all times, and platforms actively encourage documentation as a default mode of experience. According to estimates from Visual Capitalist, approximately 1.8 trillion photos were taken globally in 2023, the vast majority on smartphones.
The exceptional has become the routine.
Lignier’s rats respond to stimuli within an environment built around a single behaviour. Contemporary digital life often works the same way. The camera is always present, the platform is always waiting, and the incentive to produce is always on. Participation stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the natural state of things.
Art That Observes Without Judging
Lignier’s project does not accuse anyone of anything.
It does not argue that social media is destroying culture or that selfies are a symptom of narcissism, a claim made so often it has long since stopped meaning much. It simply places animal conditioning next to human behaviour and allows the resemblance to sit there, uncomfortable and unresolved.
That restraint is part of what makes the work effective. Art that illustrates a structural dynamic, without demanding a verdict, tends to stay with people longer than art that lectures. The rat does not know it is part of a system designed by others.
The human does know, most of the time, and continues anyway. That gap is where the project lives, and it is a more honest portrait of digital culture than most commentary manages.
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