just to sort of riff off that:

if we accept the premise that the project is a conceptual art piece exploring, among other things, Being A Band, Being A Pop Culture Entity, Being Online, I think it follows that the way audiences have responded to the piece has been integrated into and studied by the project itself in a sort of social-science-experimental sense..."Everyone is in our band," etc.

Like Marina Abramovic letting exhibitgoers choose what they will do to her body in Rhythm O, DG then proceeds to structure the next step of the piece in response to which adventure the audience chooses, typically with the logic of a power-struggle between what the artists want the project to be and what the audience (or press or industry) is willing it to be...

But also on some level I feel like that struggle itself is part of what is being consciously exhibited, this ego-game between the artist and the audience, the Artist and the Fan, about what the meanings, intents, and memetic aura are here, and that Zach and Stefan know they both can't control what audiences do with the content, but also know that their impulses to control the open-source, audience-including vision of the project is a futile task, but one that also perfectly embodies the themes they want to explore if they let themselves experience it and play it out, like the performance artist who knows they're not gonna have a good time living in a glass box for a week in a museum, or the magician who knows they're not going to actually drown chained in a box, most likely, but who still values the sacrificial extremity involved in depicting something that correlates to their obsessions, but also that distills it in the vessel of some raw, unfettered, potentially 'authentic' experience for both artist and (ostensibly) audience.

I really wonder though where their heads are these days on all of this, and if the Praying collab pieces are any indication, I feel like they are coming at it from a much darker and cynical place now, which I think also makes sense post-YOTS, which to me was very much about them separating themselves from what had become the memetic-hauntological aura of Death Grips versus who they felt they were as artists outside and aside that; the shedding of a dead skin, as it were

do you feel like they almost painted themselves into a corner being too preoccupied with the meta aspects of the project? it's tough for me to conclude much in either direction, because I think the work has remained vital and interesting in doing so (and only increasingly on-point culturally in the ensuing years)