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Metanoia

2024 · Video

The artist creates a total multiscreen from 6762 shorts — short videos on YouTube — that he watched from March 2022 to July 2024. Arranged in a mosaic, the video clips are essentially equalized and stripped of their a priori utilitarian hierarchy. Conditional usefulness, "content quality", facts, motivation recede to the background, exposing the unified affect of the established video format. At the foundation of the artwork is an archive of data with viewing history on YouTube, requested from Google Archiver service. Each original short is decomposed into frames: at the standard of 30 frames per second, a 60-second video turns into 1800 images, and 6762 clips — into nine million files, programmatically laid out in corresponding folders on the hard drive. Then the reduced original frames dynamically fill 25800 final frames in 8K format (7680 px × 4320 px). Together with programmatic synchronization of the audio track, everything together is re-encoded into the final video. It's important for the artist to work with source data as moving pictures outside of video editing programs and to overcome the censorship and strict regulations of interaction embedded in software. The work condenses 78 hours of video content into 14 minutes, inviting the viewer to contemplate a private "as-if-world" — a world contained in a single gaze.


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