escautville is a production and distribution platform for audiovisual arts

The World Wide Web of Sorrows, a 3-channel video installation, includes a few hundreds of fragments of videos that are to be found on YouTube and shows women while crying behind their webcams. Almost as self-proclaimed click bait, they try to catch the attention of random digital passers-by. Seated in the loneliness of their apartments - some whimpering, others sobbing in despair - they try to bend the laws of the attention economics to their advantage.

These seemingly hopeless girls ask for understanding, cry aloud for help or pray for salvation, or worse, they begin to mutilate themselves. Their sobbing grief, which we consider rather intimate, seems to fall prey to a stream of unhinged desire for attention. When such clips circulate on social media these days, they hope to reap responses in the capacity of thumbs-up, likes and commentaries, but here, in the form that Theys reorganizes them strategically, that one meagre consolation is also taken away from them.

You could argue that The World Wide Web of Sorrows

attempts to imitate the course of a mental breakdown. The situation starts out modestly, gradually becomes louder and more chaotically till stress arises, and subsequently, we unwillingly get entangled in a climax of hysterical crying and uncontrolled screaming. Only towards the very end, when the catharsis has managed to complete and the persons involved find resignation, a state of rest is restored.