Vertical Cinema

2013
screening

Ongoing series of screenings and video compilations of found footage youtube user clips.

cooperation with Sakrowski aka curatingyoutube.net

Vertical Cinema
One night of the best vertical YouTube clips!
The future is 9:16 vertical video!

Enjoy an exquisite selection of hilarious vertical YouTube clips projected in FULL SCREEN at Kunsthalle Platoon. Cities are vertical. Books are vertical. The whole Internet is vertical. All phones today are made to be used vertical. Mankind took millions of years to learn to walk on two feet!! Vertical video is the new standard and redefines the moving image.

presented by
curatingyoutube.net & Aram Bartholl
hosted by Platoon Berlin,
8:00-9:30pm, Feb 18, 2013

DVD Dead Drop vol.6 ‘Vertical Video’
March 19 – May 7, 2013 at the Museum of Moving Image NYC

by curatingyoutube.net and Aram Bartholl. 2013, 62 mins. DVD.

Vertical Video is a one-hour selection of amateur videos captured in the 9:16 aspect ratio, first compiled for a special screening in Berlin entitled Vertical Cinema. The DVD includes a special How To video with instructions for adjusting a home theater or other viewing environment to properly experience these works.

Fueled by a proliferation of mobile, inexpensive, high quality cameras and free online distribution platforms, self-trained media producers continue to invent creative uses for media technologies that challenge contemporary viewing behaviors and expectations. Even though the 9:16 aspect ratio is often understood to be “wrong” €“the result of using a camera “incorrectly” €“videos in 9:16 are being created and distributed online at an increasing rate. Unchained from cinema screens, televisions, and computer monitors, media makers are free to create for viewing experiences outside of traditional horizontal exhibition hardware.

Vertical Video is a compilation of videos with a wide range of subjects including architecture, wildlife, bodies in motion, gaming, eyewitness accounts, and current events whose vertical treatment is a natural and fitting decision. Until now, many of these videos have only been seen online where they have been thickly pillarboxed and shrunk to squeeze into the existing horizontal viewing system. This compilation provides evidence that a new generation of media producers, freed from concerns about conventional screening requirements, reject the arbitrary restrictions of the horizontal screen and maintain a more fluid relationship with the frame.

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