Day 1: REMEMBER YOU WERE MADE TO BE USED
'For the following 7 days you will only be seeing screenshots from moving image - all of which have been a reference in some way or another for REMEMBER YOU WERE MADE TO BE USED.' Explore day one of REMEMBER YOU WERE MADE TO BE USED's Tumblr takeover.
'For the following 7 days you will only be seeing screenshots from moving image - all of which have been a reference in some way or another for REMEMBER YOU WERE MADE TO BE USED.' Explore day one of REMEMBER YOU WERE MADE TO BE USED's Tumblr takeover.
– COMMAND-SHIFT-3
The first screen shot I remember taking was roughly 5 years ago. I was watching Dead Man’s Shoes – Shane Meadows (2004). I abruptly paused the film during a grainy black and white flashback. The brother holds his brother by the throat. They stand head to head. One in power, one not. This still now reminds me of one from Rocco and his Brothers – Luchino Visconti (1960).
There were two other moments that got me obsessively dragging the film back and re-watching the same bit again and again until I hit command-shift-3 exactly as everything I liked about it fell into place. This time it was the way the camera was focused on a table of old, irrelevant men, but shot through a panelled door that reminded me of the ones from school.
I guess that’s one of the interesting things about screenshots; it’s a brief, missable moment within something much bigger. That singular image doesn’t always seem to exist until you notice it for whatever reasons and take interactive control of the footage. You become a different kind of voyeur - ripping this moment from its original purpose into your digital world, where it gets serendipitously dragged alongside other content pulled out of context to form a new, personal narrative.
Although that’s true for a lot of research, visual or otherwise, screen shots are specifically digital and a medium in their own right… potentially even fuelled by Tumblr – where having the subtitles fall just right over a candid hand gesture becomes the next excerpt of your (online) identity.
For the following 7 days you will only be seeing screenshots from moving image - all of which have been a reference in some way or another for REMEMBER YOU WERE MADE TO BE USED. There will be a lot of films, but extending beyond that into things like Mick Jagger filming himself touching himself while someone else plays the piano in Cocksucker Blues, a documentary by Robert Frank (1979) which was banned but of course is now on YouTube. There’s also police helicopter footage from earlier this year, capturing a stranger in Detroit fleeing his car and hiding under a trampoline. You wouldn’t necessarily know that background from just looking at the stills, so, when the original source is available online there will always be a link, because what happened a 1/24 of a second before or even 24 years later, has all formed significance as to why it got command-shift-3’d.
[ 01042016 - 08:27 ]