Phone Art

This past summer I began to record 30 second videos on my cellphone, a Samung EnV2. (which is a really awful phone) I purchased a microSD card for it and a usb adapter to connect it up to my computer. I have been editing some of these videos and posting them online. All the music is by Zach De Sorbo.

Over the summer I was became interested in different video formats. Since the invention of video there have been many different formats, from VHS, S-VHS, DV, MiniDV, BETA and many others. Now with digital video we have an array of different codecs that videos are shot in and viewed with. And it really struck me that at this moment we are at a bit of a strange crossroads. People have become very conscious of video quality with the advent of HD. But, at the same time we are being stimulated with high definition video we are also being overloaded with very low quality video, that really wasn't common until recently and spawned out of necessity by the slow data transfer of the internet. On a daily basis people are viewing HD tv and surfing the web and watching low quality cellphone uploads.

Now, pretty much everyone has a camera, primarily on their phones. But, there is little stock put into the images that cellphones can capture and I wanted to experiment making videos with a phone. It was convenient to have on me at all times and was very unobtrusive while filming and allowed me to capture images I usually wouldn't considering filming.

By no means am I being original working with pixelated footage. But, I find it more pressing at the current stage of technology. A great video using pixelation is music video for Chairlift's "Evident Untensil (below)