TURNING YOUTUBE COMMENTS INTO ART
By Max Norman | November 23, 2022
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Chiara Amisola took a close look at the stories and revelations that people leave below online videos.
If written today, "In Search of Lost Time" might well be an Internet novel. The Web has become the first port of call in any search for what we've once seen or even felt. It's our externalized memory—in the never-fading photographs on Instagram or Facebook, in the dangerously searchable chats, the indelible e-mails, or in our improbably granular Uber and Venmo histories. Our memory also lives, in part, on YouTube: every movie scene you've ever watched; every historical event you've ever (or never) witnessed; tours of every place you've ever visited; and recordings of every song you've ever listened to, or cried to, or loved to. But the thing about a shared memory is that it's not just yours—though you may recall it on your own, so can anyone else. And they leave comments.
VIEW QUOTE
"The YouTube comments section is 'one of the last sacred spaces of the internet.' In contrast to the hypercuration of the social-media profile, anything goes in the comments." — Chiara Amisola
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Amisola is fascinated by the commenters who, as she puts it, "gush out stories (real or fake?) about falling in love, being saved, or just tripping madly to some low qual upload of a post-rock song." Clicking on a song uploaded more than a decade ago, you end up falling down a rabbit hole—or hundreds of rabbit holes—if you take a look at the archive of feeling that unfurls beneath the video, like some mixture of bathroom-wall graffiti and Talmudic commentary.
ART PROJECT: THE SOUND OF LOVE
Thesoundof.love, a "web experience" Amisola created this past Valentine's Day, explores "the rawness of human intimacy and confession in the YouTube comments left under love songs." The page is minimal: each comment appears in large black text above the video in question, which plays inside a small circle that rotates like an LP. YouTube's hierarchy is reversed: the comment is moved from the margins to the center, taking the place normally occupied by the video, and the milky white background, free from ads and alerts, becomes a blank canvas for imagination. Most of the videos are still images or album covers; when there is, say, a performance of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows," you can watch it without too much trouble, but the videos are more to be glimpsed than watched. We're instead asked to pay attention to the text.
Many of the comments match the dime-store sentimentality of the songs—often indie and prog rock—that they comment on, redolent of online mawkishness and marked by the Internet's pervasive fetishization of trauma. There are many wishes to be stronger or better, memories of long walks and talks in woods and fields, fervent messaging, long phone calls that go deep into the night, regrets, mistakes—in general, lots of high school. But there are also some statements that have a near-poetic texture and lift.
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NOTABLE COMMENTS
VIEW COMMENT
"Now I'm on the other side guys, love is beautiful," reads one comment, on "Poison Oak," by Bright Eyes.
VIEW COMMENT
"sitting in Union Station at the end of summer and realizing that everything is going to change very soon," on "Friendships and Love," by Rocketship.
VIEW COMMENT
"The same guy who has loved me since I was 16 years old dedicated this song to me. I'm 43 now and no one will ever love me or understand me the way he does," someone writes about "Pictures of You," by the Cure.
VIEW COMMENT
"When he was laid to rest they buried him with a suit that he wore when we went to our last prom, the guitar necklace I gave him for Christmas that December and finally the polaroid picture he took of me at the lockers and they had put it in his pocket close to his heart. This song goes out to you Chris and to all who suffer loss but are brought together out of love."
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THE PHILOSOPHY BEHIND IT
The Internet's archives of human emotion prove the grand community of experience on a scale that, even a couple of generations ago, was unthinkable: even in the far reaches of YouTube comments, the most throwaway of online forms, we can find a record of the millions of private memories and feelings that flood our world like invisible radio waves. In their often hackneyed and humble language, the comments collected on the sound of love, an infinitesimal fraction of this motley corpus, point toward just how much feeling there is and will always be out there—how much longing, how much regret, how much love that, like the Internet itself, haunts our collective reality even when it can't be seen.
These comments are evidence of a song's work in the world, testimony to the multitude of ways it can be meaningful. Every song, like every work of art, proves, over and over, that there is no such thing as a unique feeling, a unique love. Or, rather, that shared feelings and experiences are always shared differently, and they can exist in tension.
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