is a New York-based artist working across video, performance, installation, and web-based media. Her practice centers on online culture, self-identity, loneliness, and the desire to connect, using social media platforms as both medium and subject. Soda is an adjunct professor at NYU in New York City and has work in public collections at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum of the Moving Image (New York City) and the Thoma Foundation (Dallas, Texas).

KARI PAUL: I know you got your start on Tumblr and you make a lot of art surrounding the social media space. In your life, and in your practice, do you distinguish between being a user and being an artist? Did you always think of what you were doing as art, or was there a moment when you decided consciously to make a switch?

MOLLY SODA: For me, that’s a big part of my practice – this tension between user and artist, and where the line is. I do feel like it was a conscious switch, insomuch as I started thinking about it through an artistic lens. I grew up on the internet, so I was using the internet like everyone else when I was a teenager. It wasn’t until I was in school, when I started my Tumblr in 2009, that I realized there was a way for me to apply this space I was already comfortable in [to my art]. It has always been a learning process figuring out how to work within these networks and systems. In the beginning, I was still trying to figure out how to make those delineations. Some other artists are able to create boundaries around whatever it is they’re doing online. Whenever I tried to do that, it didn’t feel interesting to me–now, I’ve embraced that blurriness.

KP: I’m curious how you would characterize the ways the internet has changed since you started your career, and how that impacts your work.

MS: There have obviously been a lot of major changes. The giant [one] was when [the internet] went from this thing that you intentionally went to, and did in a specific room of your house, to when we started using smartphones and became constantly plugged-in. That was the first major shift–and I think about what that does to our relationships with ourselves, and each other.

Now we are at a strange turning point when it comes to how we connect online. It’s hard not to be depressed about it; it feels less connected [and more anonymous]. Though, I do think there is a freedom in anonymity that we’re going back towards, because people have so much anxiety about [our online] relationships and how loaded they are, and what it means to be looked at.

KP: I really appreciate the ways your work explores that tension between identity and vulnerability online, and I was wondering if you could talk about the idea of “cringe.” That word is talked about so much surrounding online posting. How does that relate to your work, and the idea of vulnerability on the internet? Do you think people are more afraid to be “cringe” now?

MS: I think so. In a lot of ways, to be cringe is ultimately a failure to move people. There is something happening there where it is an emotional call to action, or something you are seeking from a post – but you fail to succeed at whatever that goal is.

There is also something about trying. To be cringe is to try at all. We are rewarded on a certain level in culture for effortlessness. Not just online, but the internet exacerbates any issues that we have in the real world. There’s always a reward for being beautiful without trying, for being rich without trying, for being talented without trying.

“Cringe” is sort of the aspect of seeing someone try. And in a sense, the internet is prime for showing us the “backstage” – there’s this collapsing of private and public that happens. There is a way that we show more vulnerable, intimate things. But even the backstage has been honed and twisted into something that also needs to be perfected and effortless– it is actually so, so, so laborious to appear natural. That is something I’m very interested in: peeling back the layers to show that we are all trying very hard, but we don’t want it to appear that we are trying, because we get punished if we try too hard.

KP: There’s a desire for authenticity, but also a fear of earnestness, or critique.

MS: Exactly, and that is what is so interesting to me.

KP: Where are you based now? Do you think where you’re based as an artist is important to your career, or do you find you can work from anywhere?

MS: I think it’s important, but it also depends on what your goals are. There are so many ways to be an artist, so I don’t think the answer to that question is the same for everyone.

I’m in New York, but I have spent a lot of time not being in New York. I spent time in Chicago, I spent time in Detroit. I always felt like because I was making work digitally, that it didn’t matter [where I was]. But actually, I think it does matter, for me specifically and for a lot of young artists, because you want to be looking at art in person. You want to be meeting people. You want to have community, and other artists, and people to collaborate with and give feedback to. So for me, it’s important to be here, specifically. Though I think there are a number of great places–I don’t think everyone needs to move to New York.

KP: As someone exploring the new media art world, I am always curious how intangible work is displayed and sold in gallery spaces. Do you feel like galleries are able to accommodate that?

MS: No. I don’t think New York galleries have, because the New York market still does not know what to do with non-physical work. That’s fine, I didn’t become an artist to be a market artist–if I did, I would have made different decisions in my career. But I think it is difficult to display. You have to really consider how it is being aided in the way you display it. If it’s a digital-born, or digital native piece, what are we gaining from seeing it in person? How does that complicate the piece? What is the best way to show it?

KP: Related to the intangible nature of digital works. If you were to do a retrospective, would you still have all of your work?

MS: I don’t think I would show everything, but there are things that endure. There’s work of mine I still really connect to, or it feels really relevant. The thing about, you know, being an artist and the question that I’ve been asking myself a lot is, what makes Molly’s work Molly’s work? What are the works that feel like Molly’s work, and what are the works that feel like I was maybe responding to like a moment in time – that don’t feel like Molly’s work? What is the affective tone that’s like coming across all of this, what’s the thread? And so for me, it would be more about that, as opposed to like, trying to be exhaustive.

KP: That makes sense – I feel like, since I switched from full time journalism to art, I’ve just been experimenting with every possible thing, and I don’t know what is going to stick.

MS: And I think that’s the other thing – we tell ourselves that we have to know right away. I always tell my students this: you don’t have to be a genius. But I think with the internet there is an anxiety that our work is already out there, and I’m not sure that is a good thing.

KP: Again, people want it to feel effortless somehow.

MS: I’m anti-effortless.

KP: Embrace the cringe.

KARI PAUL is a journalist, artist, and filmmaker whose work focuses on memory and materialization in the digital age. Drawing on a decade of reporting on technology and privacy for The Guardian, BBC, The Wall Street Journal, and VICE, her practice transforms ephemeral social media data into textile-based archives, exploring the construction of online identities and challenging platform control over personal histories. She is the director and producer of award-winning documentary short HANK.