Charlotte Otton shines light on the algorithmic darkness of the internet in new Fringe show
After several successful and award-winning seasons at festivals across Australia, creative Charlotte Otton returns to Fringe World for 2025 with her acclaimed new work, I Watched Someone Die on TikTok. Dark, rich, and raw with a comedic edge and a personal touch, Otton’s compelling new show interrogates the shadowy and vague entity of “the algorithm” and its role in “the unsettling experience of navigating today’s digital hellscape.” I Watched Someone Die on TikTok is showing from Tuesday, January 21, to Saturday, January 25, at Rehearsal Room 1 at State Theatre Centre of WA—with tickets on sale now. BEC WELDON caught up with Charlotte Otton to talk about the show, its digital inspirations, and the changing face of Australian art in the modern world.
Thanks so much for joining us, Charlotte! How are you feeling about returning to the Perth Fringe World stage for 2025?
I am beyond stoked to be back. Perth was my home for nine years, and I’m quite literally gagging to do my show at STCWA, get a drink at Picabar, and then eat some tofu bao at Old Lane St Eats. One of my favourite places and festivals!
If the title of I Watched Someone Die on TikTok is not immediately enthralling, the show’s premise certainly is. Can you tell us about the show itself?
This work is a chaotic deep dive into our current online nightmares. Utilising the short form of TikTok, I explore the cause and effect of dark digital content: why we upload it, why we watch it, and how we are desensitising to it further. Audiences can expect to feel the same whiplash they get when scrolling between content that’s funny and senseless and content that stops them in their tracks.
You’ve spoken about the inspiration for this show in the past, watching a video of a five-year-old girl dying, surrounded by influencer-led shopping sprees and haul videos. Can you tell us about that experience and how you found artistic inspiration?
Watching death online wasn’t necessarily new for me. I grew up in the era where people on MSN would send links to beheading videos. It was about how death is now positioned online, specifically within TikTok. The way a very real-life death plays between Princess Polly ads and dance challenges. The weight of how we can now interact, comment, and like a video of a child dying, for example, the surrealism of the time we’re in—that finally hit me.
I was able to zoom out and look at my algorithm and realise that 70% of what I was receiving was pretty depresso and harrowing. Which was fitting because at that time I was also depresso.
My algorithm was feeding me exactly what I was trying to escape and causing me to spiral further.
The internet, and particularly short-format social content platforms such as TikTok, are increasingly a part of the digital landscape for everyday Australians and people across the world. How did the structure and nature of these platforms that you reference influence the actual format of the show?
It was natural that a show with this title would fit a short form, staccato-like structure—like TikTok or Instagram reels. I also love short-form theatre, and I’m naturally drawn to writing in non-sequential scenes anyway.
Whilst this show is truly for everyone, it’s mostly for the people that watch movies on the big screen whilst holding their little screen and have their medium screen up ‘for work.’ This show gives anyone with a trash attention span, like me, a reason to not look away.
As an artist, you’ve produced a range of performance art pieces that speak to deeply affecting issues and experiences, such as Feminah, Let me finish and 30-Day Free Trial. How did you discover your unique voice through performance art?
There are a million ways to make theatre, and I think, naturally, through my background in improvisation, performance making at WAAPA, and generally being a little self-absorbed, I fell into this channel of making autobiographical works that are born from what feels important to me at the time. In my 20s it was definitely body politics, feminist anger, and sex. In my 30s—fresh 30s—it’s death, paranoia, and still kind of sex.
In this show, you are credited as writer, performer, AV designer, and producer—an impressive range of roles! With a piece that’s clearly so connected to your voice and personal experiences, how did you approach the creation of the show?
Those roles definitely speak well to each other, but they’re also a product of how incredibly hard it is to fund indie theatre… Sometimes you have to be a jack of all trades to get an idea off the ground.
Through each development of this show (Performance Space and Brand X – The Flying Nun), I would use any funding I received to bring on board artists: dramaturg (Harriet Gillies), director (Maddie Diggins), lighting designer (Annika Bertinat), composer (Solomon Frank), and my incredible mate who’s been there from the beginning as a collaborator (Lindsay McDonald).
These artists have helped me bring out the universal from the personal and truly elevate the work in a way I could never do alone.
The show is fairly multimedia-heavy and multimodal and strongly referential of the digital landscapes it investigates. As a performance maker, how do increasingly prevalent technologies and online social landscapes influence your art and its multimodal elements?
Because I’m so drawn to autobiographical and contemporary work, it makes sense that technology is a huge part of what I make. It’s a reflection of where we are in society, and the screen of it all can’t be ignored.
I Watched Someone Die on TikTok demands a heavy use of multimedia, as each question it poses or thought it has derives from our current digital sphere. It’s been so fun to find and experiment with social media in this way. To interrogate the evilness of it whilst fully capitalising on it for my art.
Where do you see the future of live performance going, in light of the increasingly prevalent and dominating digital and media landscape?
As technology develops, there’s an expectation, I guess, that theatre keeps up and responds to it in the same way that film and television do. I think there’s a future where theatre continues to integrate/interrogate/critique new technologies, like AI, but I don’t see a world where live performance depends on it.
Some of my favourite works are completely devoid of any digital touch, but some of the best, most exciting, sexy, funny, and fresh works are full of it.
I Watched Someone Die on TikTok is billed as being a raw look at the ‘algorithm’ and the increasingly nefarious role of online media in people’s daily lives. What are you hoping audiences engage with or identify with most in the show, and ultimately take away with them?
Whilst I was making this show, I was consuming so much harrowing content that my reality started to blur. For a while there it felt like my brain chemistry shifted. Death was always at the forefront of my mind. I would walk around Sydney paranoid that something horrible could happen at any time. So I want the audience to feel that. Jokes! Obviously. The audience is absolutely in safe and considered hands.
Melbourne audiences have said that they felt “sick to their stomach” and found it “deeply unsettling,” but they also said the work is “extremely funny” and “poignant as hell.” I guess that’s kind of the engagement I’m after…for audiences to sit in the nightmarish digital landscape but also relish in the comedy and chaos of it all.
I Watched Someone Die on TikTok is showing from Tuesday, January 21, to Saturday, January 25, at Rehearsal Room 1 at State Theatre Centre of WA. Tickets are on sale now from fringeworld.com.au