Without loop or return

Unlooping Film approaches the ambivalences of the network as a space toward which all multitudes and masses flow, revealing the most extreme discourses in the contemporary political scope.
We depart from hashtags which are used by groups with radically different ideological aspirations, such as homophobia, terrorism, World Cup, among others. They are used in automatic searches in Instagram database.
The result is an endless slideshow that, in its contradictions, states the battle of language for visibility as one of the tightest political themes of our time.
Less idealized than we would like it, more pulsing and desirable than others would expect, the series shown here compose a patchwork of disputes, either astonishing, or stimulating, through the informational, transnational and local territory that flows on the networks.

Ways of seeing

The screens are divided in sets of 140 images. One may navigate through the screens in a vertical sense, or in a horizontal one in a slideshow format, with amplified images. In this format, it is possible to choose if the sequence will run automatically or manually, and to know the hashtags associated to the available images and to the username associated to that post.

Regarding the visualizations, it is possible to view Unlooping Film in three ways: Darwinist, Proportional, and Filtered.

In the first case (Darwinist), we present the data collections directly from Instagram to the networks. In that mode, the results reveal the strength of the data "natural selection" process in the architecture of the web 2.0. The strongest (most mentioned) always wins. It is usual, thus, in that option, to view long sequences of several images related to the same hashtag.

In the Proportional mode, the algorithm developed for the project presents the images reserving 40 percent to the most mentioned and 5 percent to the less mentioned. Therefore, the hierarchy of a certain hashtag's incidence is respected, and its predominance on others, but allows viewing all the 140-image set at once.
In the Filtered mode, the visitor has the chance of choosing the combination of hashtags he wants to view. It is possible to view just one, or to combine up to three hashtags among them. The results may be dumbfounding.

Metanarratives

Contemporary history is being written with hashtags. Much more than a simple keyword preceded by a hash symbol, hashtags are a fundamental resource in the process of content re-distribution on online networks. A type of "data that depicts data," they are information added to the content, creating a curious architecture of files and their associated layers. Unprecedented narrative options are opened, managing readings of the present that escape from the traditional standard of coherence with which we are used to receive the content filtered by intellectuals, analysts and professional media producers in general. In one hand, they put in circulation an undeniable plurality of voices; in the other, the differences tend to be eclipsed in the associations made with some predominant hashtags. To make their ambivalences visible, to maximize the reading options of the "feebler" hashtags with which they are articulated is already a challenge to the Unlooping film interpreters of our present.

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Unlooping Film is an artwork comissioned by Multitude project organized by Sesc, with coordination and curatorship by Lucas Bambozzi and Andrea Caruso Saturnino, and the Webby Awards for The Webbys 25 by 25.

The installation version of Unlooping film is at Multitude exhibition in Sesc Pompeia, from May 29 to August 16/2014.