By Max Norman | November 23, 2022

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.

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.

NOTABLE COMMENTS

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.