( Self)exhibitions

The very first YouTube video back in 2005 was pretty tame: it had Jawed Karim, one of the online video channel’s founders, at the San Diego Zoo. Its title, however, was revealing: “Me at the Zoo.” And it’s that first little word that’s the giveaway. Over the subsequent 10 years, YouTube has become the go-to tool of the self-promotion era. The billion viewers per month milestone was passed in 2013, and some 60 hours of footage is currently uploaded every minute. And it’s not all home videos of cats, bloopers in the backyard or birthday parties. The predominant subject is “me.” For her video installation, Florencia Aliberti collected videos made by YouTube users in intimate, vulnerable moments: fretting about their weight or coming out of the closet to their parents. The line between self-expression and exhibitionism seems thin on the Internet, where these videos’ pretense of domesticity and familiarity contrasts starkly with their worldwide dissemination. This blurring of the lines between private and public inevitably evokes feelings of shame, amazement and irritation. The most striking thing is how uniform the scenes we see are. Vloggers respond to and imitate one another. YouTube – home of the most individual form of expression – becomes the great leveler.