A celebrity has become an image of marketing. In some cases, there is a symbolism that can be seen in how a celebrity’s image is used in the culture. Some celebrities can be viewed similar to a multimedia piece of art with a commentary on parts of society and culture. Kanye West has an image that is full of symbolism of culture and art. However, as Kanye gained popularity, his image started to be part of an expectation within the culture. Kanye has consciously made efforts to break that expectation in order to reveal some failures in the digital landscape and how people have become dependent on a version of computational thought.

With Kanye releasing the album Yandhi during his appearance on Saturday Night Live he has found a moment where he is challenging the relevance of television. He is putting the Internet up against one of the most popular and classic shows on television. This juxtaposition is challenging the idea of who Kanye is in a live context to what he is as an expectation and image on the Internet.

Earlier this year Kanye built a lot of anticipation for his album ye. He appeared in the media at very opportune moments where it can be seen of as a calculated contribution to his social argument as an artist. The album ye only has 7 songs that run a total 23 minutes. Kanye’s seventh album is one of his shorter pieces of work. The overall length of the album is cavietted by the lack of noticeable singles that could appear in the mainstream. Most of Kanye’s other albums have been longer with more songs with qualities of a top 40 single and established his sound as an artist. Also, the album cover is a photo that was spontaneously taken with little thought to the relevance of the content. The idea that Kanye has not included any decisions in the album that reflect his expectation as a celebrity can also be seen as people listening to the album just because it is Kanye.

In May 2018, Kanye spent most of his appearance on TMZ Live disturbing reality. A reality built by media producers, like TMZ, and driven by the perception of individuals established through a media lens. Kanye’s actions and words disrupted that reality. Although a lot of Kanye’s rhetoric was inaccurate, his words produced a backlash and disruption of normality. The culture has started to depend on a media driven reality that is seen as the real perception of life. However, Kanye’s appearance on TMZ created a moment when the world was not seen through the lens that has been finely tuned by the different mediums of digital media.

The culture’s dependence on the digital world has developed computational human thinking. The way that we think has been manufactured into a system of steps and expectations. This system has been finely tuned by a reliance on the perceptions of reality built by digital media. The moment on TMZ Live where Kanye disturbed the expectation of his own reputation has challenged our computational thinking. The image of Kanye as celebrity, with a point of view that is different from what he is perceived, has broken the expectations that have been laid out in the system of our minds.

It is important to extract Kanye’s image from perception and view his celebrity as art. A celebrity is an individual that lives by a set of expectations that are part of their image. These expectations have been created by the way they are perceived in media. A lot of the time this image is developed over years where the celebrity will act within those expectations. When they are caught outside those expectations, people in the media and culture have a difficult time adjusting to the person outside of celebrity. Seeing Kanye as his cultural expectation creates an opportunity to view celebrity as art, where his actions and media coverage can be read for allegorical connections.

Kanye’s disruption of reality can also be seen when his image is placed next to the image of Donald Trump. When we remove our perceptions of Kanye and view the celebrity as art, then we can see a commentary on our understanding of the digital and physical worlds. Creating such controversy by associating himself with ideas that are outside of his perception of celebrity affects our conceived reality to produce an actual feeling of existence in our response. Kanye’s actions cannot be viewed as ironically motivated commentaries on the ridiculousness of modern culture, but we can look into how something we believe to be real can be changed by our perceptions of a certain individual. Kanye’s face placed next to Trump changes what we believe to be reality and exposes the frailty of that belief.

Earlier in 2018, Kanye trolled the Internet with the release of his new song Lift Yourself. A new Kanye track created a lot of anticipation, but the song was mainly random sounds made by the rapper backed by a beat and guest vocalist. The culture’s expectation was to hear music that is similar to Kanye’s sound. However, when listeners find that it does not meet that expectation, they accused Kanye of trolling the digital reality. The reaction to the song in the culture is a real moment that breaks from the system of computational thought. People in the culture felt something that is a direct relation to a manufactured expectation of celebrity. People cannot contain disappointment or jubilation, these are emotions that are inherently part of a free spirited sense of feeling.

With Kanye breaking the expectation of his celebrity image, he can be compared to the Dadaists from the early 20th Century. Dadaism was an art movement where artists challenged the expectations of high art. Kanye’s social media can be seen as a collage of reactionary pieces that support an argument of the culture’s understanding of what is real and fake. This is similar to the Dadaists work where their art challenged the idea of what constitutes art within the narrow ideals that have been attached to the culture. Retrospectively, the controversy that was created out of Dadaism has seen the art movement become a defining moment to help the culture better understand art in a modern world.

With Kanye breaking expectation, he is trying to generate the same sort of response as the Dadaists. It is a response to a war that is breaking out between two realities. The culture responding to Kanye’s appearances, shows the true perception of individuals that are stuck in the digital reality. They exposed a nonsensical reaction to things in terms of understanding within the confines of computational thought. Breaking cultural structures displaces the algorithm of human thought that is built by popular media. The negative reactions to Kanye as celebrity has shown the frailty of on online culture, produced reality, and computational ways of thinking.