Review: ALL BY MYSELF, VAULT Festival

It's not an overstatement to say that vloggers changed the course of the history of media. Whether they did so for better or for worse is still up to debate. When nearly everyone seems to have abandoned the internet due to the impending end of the world, a lonely DIY YouTuber tries to keep broadcasting through shortages and blackouts. All By Myself is a dystopian 5-Minute Crafts kind of thing.

Jessica Bickel-Barlow and Charlotte Blandford's production is amusing in its oddity. For one, the character (performed by Blandford) never speaks. While this is exceptionally naturalistic as we generally don't tend to narrate our lives to ourselves, it gives the show a performance-art spin that doesn't truly hit the mark in this case. From finding the best setup to film herself peeling a potato to mushing it together sexily with an avocado (lest we forget that many of the more kooky five-minute-hacks are known to be targeted to weird sexual fantasies), she relentlessly seeks perfection.

Armed with a ring light and a phone stand, she ignores a sudden lockdown but briefly panics about the immediate cut to the delivery of goods. After all, she's just wasted food to make a silly facemask for clout. The fallout of the Instagram photo she posted could be fatal for her, so she deletes it immediately. She jams to Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" silently as she cleans her room to strenuously find ideas to shoot, but her background is never sleek enough for her liking. She is compulsive in her search for content, but nothing else happens.

It's meant to be a satirical look at our obsession with our online personas versus the reality behind the screen, but - like everyone's day-to-day life - it's just a little too mundane. Bickel-Barlow and Blandford (gotta love the alliteration) succeed in showing the fickleness, fakeness, and absolute inconsequence of social media, but has a lukewarm approach to it. It's an interesting experiment, but it unfortunately isn't of viral importance.

All By Myself runs at VAULT Festival until 12 February.

To post a comment, you must register and login.