2024
Mobile Phone, Camcorder, Projector
Size Variable
@24framesoftruth is an Instagram page and art installation work that explores the relationship between films, social media and perception. Films, as an art form to represent and depict time, are commonly consumed on social media platforms as fragments. The epitome is TikTok which is designed specifically for users to receive constant stimulation with seconds-long videos. Paramount, a major Hollywood studio, has once released an entire film on the platform, chopped into 23 parts.
I go to the extreme and reduce film sequences into individual frames, then post them one by one on Instagram, the social media platform dedicated to still images. Making use of its interface, by scrolling through of the profile page, the film stills are restored as moving images.
The “materiality” of Instagram is used to look into how films, as a century-old art form, are consumed in the most “contemporary” way. An installation comprises of a phone, a camcorder and a projector is set up to invite viewers to scroll through the page themselves. While having fun, the viewer’s finger is also projected on screen. Its scrolling movement is connected to early cinema history, when films were screened by rotating the hand crank of the projector. The installation’s ergonomics captures the same mechanical action that made cinema possible a hundred years ago. Now everyone can become an “instaprojectionist”.
The work demonstrates how one can challenge perception towards an everyday interface by using it not the way one is told to, and opens ways for viewers to re-imagine their interactions with these interfaces. Viewers can also scroll the page on their own phone, appreciate individual frames out of a film sequence, and even show their appreciation by liking, commenting and sharing the Instagram posts. The work also plays with the parallel of films and social media, as both are made by weaving montage of one’s life to form a stream of time. It questions our urge of sharing our lives as montages on these platforms, and examines how these tools (and their interface) shape us to turn our daily routines into spectacles.
Instagram handle: @24framesoftruth
Scroll it yourself:
@24framesoftruth is an Instagram page and art installation work that explores the relationship between films, social media and perception. Films, as an art form to represent and depict time, are commonly consumed on social media platforms as fragments. The epitome is TikTok which is designed specifically for users to receive constant stimulation with seconds-long videos. Paramount, a major Hollywood studio, has once released an entire film on the platform, chopped into 23 parts.
I go to the extreme and reduce film sequences into individual frames, then post them one by one on Instagram, the social media platform dedicated to still images. Making use of its interface, by scrolling through of the profile page, the film stills are restored as moving images.
The “materiality” of Instagram is used to look into how films, as a century-old art form, are consumed in the most “contemporary” way. An installation comprises of a phone, a camcorder and a projector is set up to invite viewers to scroll through the page themselves. While having fun, the viewer’s finger is also projected on screen. Its scrolling movement is connected to early cinema history, when films were screened by rotating the hand crank of the projector. The installation’s ergonomics captures the same mechanical action that made cinema possible a hundred years ago. Now everyone can become an “instaprojectionist”.
The work demonstrates how one can challenge perception towards an everyday interface by using it not the way one is told to, and opens ways for viewers to re-imagine their interactions with these interfaces. Viewers can also scroll the page on their own phone, appreciate individual frames out of a film sequence, and even show their appreciation by liking, commenting and sharing the Instagram posts. The work also plays with the parallel of films and social media, as both are made by weaving montage of one’s life to form a stream of time. It questions our urge of sharing our lives as montages on these platforms, and examines how these tools (and their interface) shape us to turn our daily routines into spectacles.
Instagram handle: @24framesoftruth
Scroll it yourself:
Film list of the accompany talk:
The Arrival of a Train by Auguste and Louis Lumière (1895)
The Kiss in the Tunnel by George Albert Smith (1899)
Train Again by Peter Tscherkassky (2021)
The Great Train Robbery by Edwin S. Porter (1903)
Odd Man Out by Carol Reed (1947)
Two or Three Things I Know About Her by Jean-luc
Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese (1976)
Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock (1960)
pièce touché (1989) and passage à l’acte (1993) by Martin Arnold
Land Without Bread by Luis Buñuel (1933)
The Automobile Accident by Auguste and Louis Lumière (1905)
The Vanishing Lady by Georges Méliès (1896)
How It Feels to Be Run Over by Cecil M. Hepworth (1900)
Passion (2008) and The Depths (2010) by Ryusuke Hamaguchi