Film

Mon, Sep 28, 7:00 p.m.

MoMA, Floor T2, Theater 2

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

Member tickets available Sep 14

Explore category and above

All tickets available Sep 21

Molly Soda. Steadier Footing series. 2013-ongoing. Courtesy the artist

New York City–based artist Amalia Soto, who is best known by her online username Molly Soda, joins us for a screening of works drawn entirely from her personal YouTube archive. Featuring hundreds of videos she has made since 2010, Molly Soda’s YouTube channel is a wide-ranging aggregation of everything from her formal experiments with internet-based performance to clips of her singing and dancing, doing makeup tutorials, or crying in front of a webcam. An avid collector of digital files, Molly Soda rarely deletes anything from her online past.

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.

In video-performances such as Steadier Footing (2013-ongoing), Me Singing Stay by Rihanna (2019), and Meee (2025), Molly Soda alternates between her role as online performer and audience member, mimicking the multidirectional conduits for creation and exchange that define popular functions of the internet. At times banal, uncomfortable, or vulnerable, many videos uploaded to Molly Soda’s YouTube channel tiptoe along the boundaries of fine art video-performance and online vernacular image-making. Interwoven throughout this program will be a selection of videos that showcase what the artist describes as gestures towards a “performance of intimacy,” moments when she invites the online gaze to bleed into her interior world, and vice versa. These vernacular videos, rarely shown before in a film screening context, blur notions of private versus public, culture versus content, all within the dehierarchized apparatus of her online channel. Preserved long-term on YouTube, the work of Molly Soda probes the ways in which we contribute to our growing digital legacies through a porous accumulation of our online selves.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with the artist and Abby Hermosilla, curatorial associate in the departments of Media and Performance and Curatorial Affairs.

feeling my feelings. 2013. 6 min.
it’s so crazy that you live in a computer now. 2015. 31 sec.
Steadier Footing series. 2013–ongoing. 22 min.
2dancers. 2023. 1 min.
:-( 2012. 1 min.
i’m the worst girl ever. 2014. 2 min.
Who’s Sorry Now. 2016. 3 min.
is that better? 2022. 1 min.
Movie on 2012 09 20 at 11 03 #2. 2012. 4 sec.
Movie on 2013 01 29 at 00 53. 2013. 3 sec.
Movie on 2014 03 13 at 19 22. 2014. 3 sec.
Movie on 2012 09 06 at 22 04. 2012. 4 sec.
hehehehrhrhrhehehe. 2010. 17 sec.
Meeee. 2025. 25 min.
l0s3r fr33k. 2011. 25 sec.
AMERICAN GURL. 2011. 25 sec.
making an iced coffee. 2023. 3 min.
Me and My Gurls. 2018. 5 min.
Me Singing Stay by Rihanna. 2019. 4 min.
Program approx. 70 min.

This film accompanies Modern Mondays.

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