Molly Soda channels the implicit voyeurism of a public YouTube channel into her publication Molly Soda YouTube. The artist recycles screenshots of herself in the context of her YouTube videos, juxtaposed to images of the comments that each video received from her subscribers and from strangers on the web. Some screenshots fill up entire spreads of the large-format paperback, amidst smaller versions that are suspended in the white or black background of each page; the contrast brings to mind the critical nature of scale to digital work, particularly in regards to the choice of its media output. In the context of Molly Soda YouTube, the decision to publish in book form underscores the generative friction that occurs through the convergence of different media formats. For a multimedia artist like Soda, whose work engages the anchoring line between performance and radical accessibility of the self, a fluctuating medium such as web-based-book allows for more congruence between the thematic and conceptual motivations behind her practice and their production as legible art objects.
Library of the Printed Web is a project by Paul Soulellis, including a physical archive, research, teaching, and experimental publishing. In 2017 the physical archive was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York.
