Kamali/whathowwhy

Unedited Versions

Am I Missing Something? (2018)

"Am I Missing Something?" is a short 15 minute film. It is made up of three undisclosed chapters. Throughout most of the film we see two or more images playing at the same time, keeping each other in or out of balance. This project is about the digital relationship I have with my father and family who live in Curacao.

We see a zoom in shot of a young woman (me) looking at a screen. It is quite dark, the screen is the only light source. The light flickers on her face. She is not moving, she remains still, her only occupation is looking at the screen. The screen is not visible but we can hear the sound of a dog running through a yard.

We see two images. We see someone sitting in a chair, in a quiet room. Only her waist and legs are visible, in one hand she holds a mobile phone, in the other a cup of coffee. A film is being played on her phone. Next to the image of this taking place there is a larger image of this film that is being played on her phone. We see a hand reaching for sugar to put in his coffee, in the background of this film we hear people talking.

Through collecting images from my family and juxtaposing them with footage of me looking at these images, I was able to visualize my own abscence. By playing two or more images at once and putting a lot of space between them we are forced to make a choice at what image we will look.

I became fascinated by the feeling of being in two places at once. About being somewhere while not being there. I started questioning to what extent we are able to form a relationship with images of loved ones and if they will ever function as a substitute. Do social media like Whatsapp and Facetime enable us to be closer than ever or do they only show us what we are really missing?

A Farewell to Bugs (2018)

A farewell to bugs is a project that I made together with Marijn van der Ploeg. The outcome is an A6 format book, which is divided in pictures and words that on the first look have no correlation with each other. For example, you’d have a picture of an arm with a bruise with the word “sky” next to it.

If you have an iPhone and go to your photo album you can hit the search button. When typing in any character, a word will pop up. The words vary from ‘dog’ to ‘partly cloudy.’ When picking a word, your iPhone will search images in your photo album that it thinks resemble the word/words. The book is a collection of mistakes we found while using this search engine.

The project is called ‘a farewell to bugs’ because the artificial intelligence that is now up and running still has a lot of bugs. But as it is a learning machine, we expect it to be perfected in the upcoming years. Marijn and I did a lot of research about computational photography and AI, coming to the realization that it may be a quite unique time we’re living in that we can still catch a glimpse of the bugs that soon will vanish.

Home Sweet Home (2019)

"Home Sweet Home" is a vertical short 8 minute film. It is made up of three undisclosed chapters. The film has no sound and shows us moving pixalated images. The images that are presented are screenrecordings from live webcam footage from Curacao. Throughout the film we see a text appearing in the bottom of the film, that is in the form of a letter or an email. This text is copied from emails that I've received from my grandmother. They're rather poetic so I kept them in dutch.

We see a distorted image of an island. We see houses and palm trees. The sky is white. The palm trees are moving with the wind. A finger appears on the image, and another one. The fingers are able to move the image. The fingers are zooming out the image, it becomes clear that we're looking at a mobile phone. When the image is completely zoomed out, the fingers disappear. We see that we're looking at a live webcam website that is called "Home Sweet Home, Resort"

I started collecting live webcam footage of Curacao about a year ago, using the screenrecord function from Quicktime. Sometimes I would only record a small part of a live webcam stream and other times I would record the whole overview.

After discovering a couple of live webcams that are situated in Curacao I started wondering about their purpose. It seemed as if they were only put in a couple of places in the hope of attracting more tourists. For me, it serves more as a sort of mirror I can look through. Spying on the place I often think about and wish I could be. Putting the emails and the live webcam images together felt like an interesting mix. The emails are quite personal and the live webcam images are there for everyone to look at them if they want. They both take place in a sort of digital realm, somewhere to be untouched.

Edited Versions

Am I Missing Something? (2018)

"Am I Missing Something?" is a short 15 minute film. It is made up of three undisclosed chapters. Throughout most of the film we see two or more images playing at the same time, keeping each other in or out of balance.

We see a zoom in shot of a young woman (me) looking at a screen. It is quite dark, the screen is the only light source. The light flickers on her face. She is not moving, she remains still, her only occupation is looking at the screen. At first the screen is not visible but we can hear the sound of a dog running through a yard; nails scratching hard soil. After a while a second image is introduced in the film, it matches the sound source. We see a dog running through a yard playfully, waiting for the one who is holding the camera to run after him.

We see two images. We see someone sitting in a chair, in a room. Only her waist and legs are visible, in one hand she holds a mobile phone, in the other a cup of coffee. A videoclip is being played on her phone. Next to the image of this taking place, there is an enlarged image of the videoclip that is also being played on her mobile. We see a hand reaching for sugar to put in his coffee, in the background of this videoclip we hear people talking.

Through collecting images from my family and juxtaposing them with footage of me looking at these images, I visualized my own absence. The images I've received from my family were all made with an iPhone, the footage I made myself I switched between a small videocamera and my DSLR. By playing two or more images at once and putting a lot of space between them we are forced to make a choice at what image we will look. This also goes hand in hand with the feeling of sometimes missing something.

This project is about the digital relationship I have with my father and family who live in Curacao. I became fascinated by the feeling of being in two places at once. About being somewhere while not being there. I started questioning to what extent we are able to form a relationship with images of loved ones and if they can ever function as a substitute. Do social media like Whatsapp and Facetime enable us to be closer than ever or do they only show us what we are really missing?

A Farewell to Bugs (2018)

A farewell to bugs is a project that I made together with Marijn van der Ploeg. The outcome is an A6 format book, which is divided in pictures and words that on the first look have no correlation with each other. For example, you’d have a picture of an arm with a bruise with the word “sky” next to it.

If you have an iPhone and go to your photo album you can hit the search button. When typing in any character, a word will pop up. The words vary from ‘dog’ to ‘partly cloudy.’ When picking a word, your iPhone will search images in your photo album that it thinks resemble the word/words. The book is a collection of mistakes we found while using this search engine.

The project is called ‘a farewell to bugs’ because the artificial intelligence that is now up and running still has a lot of bugs. But as it is a learning machine, we expect it to be perfected in the upcoming years. Marijn and I did a lot of research about computational photography and AI, coming to the realization that it may be a quite unique time we’re living in that we can still catch a glimpse of the bugs that soon will vanish.

Home Sweet Home (2019)

"Home Sweet Home" is a short 8 minute film. It is made up of three undisclosed chapters. The film is vertical because of the place where it was presented, which had a vertical screen. The film has no sound and shows us moving pixelated images. The images are screen recordings from live webcam footage from Curacao. We see a horizon with the sun going down, people splashing in the water. Throughout the film there is a text appearing sometimes at the bottom. They're emails from my grandmother that I copied. They're rather poetic so I kept them in dutch. The title refers to one of the live webcam's websites of a resort that is called "Home Sweet Home."

I started collecting live webcam footage of Curacao about a year ago, using the screen record function from Quicktime. Sometimes I would only record a small part of a live webcam stream and other times I would record the whole overview. I kept all the emails my grandmother has sent me, when she passed away I found a lot of comfort in them. The three emails I used form a narrative. In the first email she asks me if I have also started to count the nights until my visit. The second email is a bit more poetic, she tells me that she doesn't know how to prolong our time together; as if this is possible. In the third email she says that she hopes my flight was good and that they miss me already.

After discovering a couple of live webcams that are situated in Curacao I started wondering about their purpose. It seemed as if they were only put in a couple of places in the hope of attracting more tourists. For me, it serves more as a sort of mirror I can look through. Spying on the place I often think about and wish I could be. Putting the emails and the live webcam images together felt like an interesting mix. The emails are quite personal and the live webcam images are there for everyone to look at them if they want. They both take place in a sort of digital realm, somewhere to be untouched.