It always starts with a shot of the alarm going off and then the youtuber stirring in their bed. Up till the moment where they rise and switch on their lamp, the lighting is spare with a blueish tone that is meant to convey darkness. The brain of the viewer can never accept the conceit that the youtuber is actually waking up. The viewer knows that a great deal of time and effort was expended in setting up this portrayal of the day’s first pang of consciousness. The youtuber rises to make coffee and water some plants. A soundtrack emerges that might or might not be lo-fi hip hop and a voiceover relays the vicissitudes and drudgeries of the life of a twenty-something middle class American. An inspirational chord is often struck and the video has a title with a vague, self-help tenor such as “the work begins now” or “things are fine as they are”. The viewer feels old and jaded. The video wasn’t intended for them. The video is intended for viewers who still see their life as a film. Whatever message the Youtuber intended to convey is quickly forgotten by the viewer, who cannot stop thinking about the moment in the video where the youtuber pretends to wake up and how art can be judged primarily on the sturdiness of the lie that sits at the fulcrum of its many moving parts. Whether it can survive the merciless barrage of the viewer’s gentle attention. The viewer’s mornings have become a race against the incoming klaxons of memory and their evenings are utterly lost to distraction and neurosis. Their day hangs between these poles like a tightly stretched sheet of parchment that was once the skin of a shy, nervous mammal. It sometimes still manages to catch and diffuse a sudden beam of light on days that are better than this one.
(autumn 2024)
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