Welcome to My Channel

Trigger warning: The video contains discussions of suicide and suicidal ideation, which may be distressing for some viewers.

The project explores the vast ecosystem of video sharing, where telling personal stories through highly intimate and seemingly confidential—yet often standardized—videos has become a strategy for gaining visibility and affirmation. Within this landscape, mental distress risks becoming a powerful narrative device, blurring the line between genuine vulnerability and performative self-exposure.

By appropriating video blogs downloaded from one of the most prominent video-sharing platforms, the work reflects on the contemporary urge to confess online while simultaneously probing the platform’s recommender system. Tracing how one video algorithmically leads to another, it reveals how narratives of vulnerability are grouped, amplified, and endlessly recirculated.

In Welcome to My Channel, six young people recount their journeys toward healing, speaking candidly about anxiety, depression, trauma, burnout, self-doubt, and experiences related to suicidal thoughts and ideation. Their testimonies function as acts of self-therapy as much as public address—attempts to process pain, reclaim agency, and transform fragility into connection. Yet healing becomes entangled with visibility: recovery is narrated, edited, and uploaded, turning into both a personal necessity and a form of social currency. While some participants seamlessly integrate external sponsors and brand partnerships into their confessions, others speak without commercial backing. These contrasts—alongside differences in production quality—subtly reveal the economic and algorithmic forces that shape how mental health is staged, circulated, monetized, and recommended online.

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