Webcamgrams is an amusement that came out from a exchange of posts between yours truly and Davide di Nardo, my long time good friend. At that time I was experimenting with time-lapse video and, since -at usual- I didn’t have money to waste, I found a free software on the web to shoot webcam pics at customized intervals (AvaCam). Talking about the idea and showing Davide the test video I made, we start discussing how fun would be to put someone in front of a so set webcam and see how he/she would behave.

People act invariably strangely if they are left alone in a room with a video-camera at their disposal but usually the consequent video itself doesn’t show the weirdness of the behaviour at its best because realtime footage runs too fast and actions are compressed in an apparent -even if sometime peculiar- normality. But if you have the opportunity to pull apart the video and view the single frames as portrait pictures, well, you’ll have some surprises. A photograph, in its immobility, allow the viewer to freeze himself in time because what he’s watching is a moment frozen in time; and if you display an action divided in motionless seconds in front of him, he’ll perceive the passing of time with a distorted rhythm, submerging himself in an extended lapse of time. The result is an unusual outlook of the world where time doesn’t exists anymore but instead is narrated through a collection of moments invisible in real life which are, at the same time, fundamental concepts and final result of an action.

The way you display the pictures is also important; since the passing of time is recreated firstly dissecting the action and then pulling it back together again, the order you show the stills changes the perception of reality in the viewer. Like notes on a pentagram, the stills from a sequence can be played in an harmonic or inharmonic series increasing the sense of comprehension or dizziness in who’s watching. Same thing can be told about the physical position of the photos on a wall. The majority of people read and write horizontally from left to right, so if you hang similar pics in a straight line from left to right, that leads the viewer to interpret the space as a logical timeline where the action starts from the first picture on the left and proceeds until the last on the right. Hanging the shots in a straight line but this time vertically, still gives the viewer a sense of time but since this ideal upright line is something that seems to perpendicularly break a regular timeline, the actions portrayed in the sequence look like are happening in a very short period of time, almost simultaneously. And if you arrange the pictures in a group, the timeline is definitively compromised and the photos become a new object that’s isolated in time and contained in space by the comprehensive shape created by the picture’s assemblage.

The last one is my favourite method to show the stills and, in this specific case, I find useful to my purpose to arrange the portraits in an ordered square or rectangular shape because that’s how museums display objects (like insects or fossils in thecae); in this way, the viewer receives the feeling of examining a precious collection of moments detached from the original time or space and the result is a multi-faceted portrait of the subject.