YouTuber 9 2026 – 21 x 29cm, pencil on paper
YouTuber 9 2026 pushes the theme of self-consumption and dissolution to its most fragile edge, where the performer is on the verge of vanishing entirely.
The main figure, a woman, barely there, fills the sheet in a ghostly, almost spectral presence. Her form is rendered in faint, erased pencil marks: head bowed, features softened to near-abstraction, body dissolving into the white space of the paper. The erasure is not accidental; it’s deliberate, violent in its gentleness, the lines smudged, rubbed back, overwritten until only the faintest outline remains. She looks inward, perhaps at a screen or into her own exhaustion, her posture slumped, her expression unreadable but unmistakably depleted.
The swirling graphite loops that have haunted the series are subdued here, reduced to faint echoes around her head, like residual static from a signal that’s fading out. The inset screen in the bottom left is the devastating counterpoint: a small, rectangular frame containing a man’s head in profile, wearing headphones, mouth open in mid-speech. The detail is sharper, more insistent, the lines denser, the gesture more active, yet it’s trapped in miniature, a tiny broadcast within the larger erasure. This inversion flips the dynamic of previous works: the dominant figure is now the one disappearing, while the inset (the “watched” or “watching” self) persists, still performing, still feeding the loop.
The woman is almost gone, her presence leaching away, while the man in the screen keeps talking, as if the act of consumption has overtaken the consumer, the viewer becoming the viewed in a final, cruel twist. In the Extraction/YouTuber cycle, this drawing feels like a point of no return. The early pieces showed performers dominating the frame, insets as marginal echoes; the split-screens depicted mutual depletion. Here, the dissolution is total: the main figure is erasing herself through the very act of engaging with the platform, her body fading while the inset broadcast endures, a perpetual signal in the void. It ties directly to surveillance capitalism’s logic (Zuboff): human attention as raw material, extracted until only the data stream remains.
The faint loops evoke Foucault’s panopticon, constant visibility inducing self-erasure, updated to the digital feed where speaking and being spoken to collapse into the same corrosive cycle.
The small scale (21 × 29 cm) and pencil medium amplify the vulnerability: this is not a monumental scream, but a quiet vanishing, easily overlooked, like a forgotten tab in an endless browser.
Yet the erasure leaves traces, smudges, ghosts of lines, that insist on what was there, refusing total silence. The woman disappears, the man in the screen persists, and the loop rolls on.