The Algorithm Made a Musical. Performing Ratatouille on TikTok’s Virtual Stage

The increasing presence of algorithmic platforms within daily life calls for a reconfiguration of how people create, and how audiences engage with creativity: both professional and amateur creators must now navigate the challenge of performing for a potentially limitless audience embedded within an endless, algorithmically curated feed. This article examines Ratatouille: The Musical, a (mostly) crowd-sourced project born out of pandemic-fuelled boredom on TikTok, as a case study of cultural production on a platform structured by algorithmic visibility. We use this to understand the role that recommendation algorithms play in the popularisation of a given phenomenon, as well as how algo-rithmically imagined audiences (Jones, 2023) can participate in the development of a project. More-over, we interrogate the concept of liveness, traditionally tied to co-present theatrical performance, to question how it might be redefined within digital, asynchronous, and algorithmically mediated contexts. By situating Ratatouille: The Musicalwithin these intersecting frameworks, the article high-lights how TikTok functions not merely as a platform for dissemination, but as a site of emergent, networked forms of performance and cultural production.