2012 – 2013. Digital video slideshow, digital photoframes, perspex photoframes.

Flickr Films reinterprets the structuralist film genre of Flicker Films, drawing on today’s constant flow of digital images. Each screen presents between 2,000 and 6,000 different images compiled from the photo-sharing website Flickr, reflecting the average number of images uploaded to Flickr per minute over the year that these images were collected. The volume of these photographic transmissions reflects the changing ontology of the photographic image and the transition from print to screen-based experiences. Photographic images are being integrated more seamlessly within the broader apparatuses of the digital realm and global communications. One could characterise this as a transition from recording to sharing; from a model of photography represented by the pointing fingers of indexicality, to one epitomised by the thumbs-up of images being ‘liked’.

This work also connects this constant and overwhelming flow of digital images to a history of perceptual experimentation in analogue film. Specifically, the work refers to the structuralist tradition of Flicker Films, which directed the cinematic apparatus towards an exploration of perceptual affect. The flickering operation of the film projector, exploited and exaggerated by these filmmakers to create overwhelming stroboscopic experiences for their audiences, here becomes analogous to the ever present, seemingly endless proliferation of digital images.