Molly Soda has been uploading herself to the internet since before “content creator” became a normal job description. Her archive contains webcam performances, makeup videos, singing, dancing, crying, fragments lasting only seconds and projects developed explicitly as artworks. Instead of separating these categories neatly, she has largely allowed them to accumulate together.
On 28 September 2026, MoMA will turn that accumulated YouTube history into a roughly 75-minute screening. Some works are formal video performances, others resemble the everyday debris of early social media. Soda rarely deletes material from her online past, so the archive documents not only an artistic practice but successive versions of a person performing herself through changing platforms.
Her own website reinforces how strange the scale of that archive has become. Inbox Full lasts more than ten hours. That’s Me in the Corner documents an Instagram Live performance. There are Tumblr archives, zines, web series and videos whose durations range from a few seconds to half an hour.
Twenty years ago it was easy to think of an online post as disposable. Now early YouTube clips, Tumblr pages and webcam recordings can function like notebooks, photographs or Super 8 reels from an earlier generation. The difference is that these records were often made publicly, while the identity they documented was still being constructed.
The archive did not begin after the work.
The archive was happening at the same time as the life.
