:THE SHADOW PUBLIC

The Shadow Public is a video installation exploring the concept of “the public” in visual culture.

Digitized American movies from the 1950s and 1960s are selected from the Internet Archive. A moving-image collage is then produced algorithmically, using a technique based on the Gram-Schmidt procedure. The result is a collective portrayal of the construction of the category of the public in American culture during those years. In particular, the aim is to explore the relationship between two core themes “history from above” and “history from below”.

A detailed description of this work is available at the project website