Exhibited among others // Exclusive to
rotoscoped experimental film // 5:20
The rotoscoped short film is based on visual material from virtual realities, found on platforms such as YouTube or played through in video games. Individual sequences are digitally “traced” frame by frame, transforming them into delicate animated line drawings. Hints of violence and pornography, self-staging and voyeurism—as they are omnipresent on video platforms, image boards, in video games, and on social media—appear softened, yet at the same time, and paradoxically, also more concentrated. The drawings, oscillating between the playful and the brutal, literally contour and focus the extracted episodes and the observed or exhibited patterns of behavior from the online environment. As a result, these become more open to interpretation, but also more unsettling.
The isolated gestures—separated from their corresponding facial expressions—are accompanied by muffled to brute soundscapes, as if the sounds were emerging from the deep “subconscious” of online unreality. Aggressive self-presentation on social networks and images of violent acts—whether circulating intentionally on certain platforms or unintentionally leaked online—collide, merge, and seem to suggest that the staging of violence and the violence of (self-)staging in the struggle for attention may have more in common than we are willing to admit in our everyday online lives.
Text by Ellen Wagner
Exhibited among others // Exclusive to