Simple eMotion breaks down stock videos of actors performing simple facial expressions, frame by frame, in order to explore not only the evolving nature and mechanisms of the ‘moving image,’ but also the hidden systems, labours and traumas that exist between the frames of the Neoliberal world.

Process: Stock videos of actors, each performing a simple expression, have been broken down into their individual frames. As the viewer navigates from frame to frame, meticulously replaying each expression, the interface presents them with each image’s history of online movement and digital translation, as well as a catalogue of every minute movement of the actor’s face, down to the scale of individual pixels.

Framework: This painstaking mechanism of simultaneous dissection, reconstruction, quantification and extrapolation mirrors the ways that digital imagery is stored, transferred, and exhibited, both online and off; with each individual file undergoing this process countless times over the course of its existence.

It is also used here to highlight the ways in which humans are themselves translated and extracted from by the contemporary systems which they must move through and intersect, as well as the degree to which human labour (whether that labour is physical, mental or emotional) is hidden by and subsumed within those systems; including the religation of its costs and traumas to the unseen machinery which underpins them.

Contemporary Capitalism is a system defined by constant exchange and deterritorialization; the dismantling of context, and the conversion of all movement (thought, feeling, et al.) to profitable action. Just as the expressions performed in these videos are the outcome of isolated and commodified images, stitched together into a pantomime of motion for the easy consumption of their audience, so too must we all constantly be performing both labour and the affect of labour, under the steady surveillance of our employers / customers / selves, for the benefit of whom we continually obscure the costs and non-profitable outcomes of our existence. Like mere images of ourselves, we undergo dissection, reconstruction, quantification and extrapolation, time and again, to produce the illusion of a smooth and singular productive self, free of stops or breakages.

Outcomes: Simple eMotion is a look at the intentionally understated trauma of everyday existence under Capitalism. At the ways in which our every thought, feeling and movement are constantly and exhaustively translated and filtered across much larger, and largely hidden, systems. It is also an investigation of the evolving nature of the 'moving image' and the mechanisms of New Media expression, and how they can inform our understanding of broader contemporary infrastructures. Above all, It’s an exploration of the hidden labour between each frame.