An Evening with Molly Soda
6 minutes
The artist became a regular practitioner of Internet-based art in the late 2000s, during the nascent years of YouTube and other social media platforms such as Xanga, LiveJournal, MySpace, and Tumblr. Her popular Tumblr blog garnered tens of thousands of followers for its cultivation of Web 2.0 aesthetics, including kitschy gifs, webcam videos, and desktop screenshots. Using these assets as props and settings for her performances, Molly Soda grew interested in the social conditions of online culture, often mediated through widely available, consumer-grade technology. Deadpan humor and responses to viral trends evolved into performative tactics for exploring themes of embarrassment, loneliness, and popularity as shared online experiences.