Put together an Instagram reel the other day after a long hiatus from engaging with that sort of thing. It was a process bit for the above-pictured piece; around six hours worth of work squeezed into 2 minutes. Positive reactions were received, but looking into the reel's analytics I was surprised to discover that the average watch time was in fact no more than 36 seconds. Now, I know it's trendy to lament the demise of human attention spans, but it actually got me thinking in the opposite direction, about taking it on as a challenge. What would it take to create a solid video--with a coherent beginning, middle, and end--amounting to no more than half a minute?
And it got me thinking about comic-strips. The ones that used to run in newspapers, 3-4 panels tops. That was all the page real-estate at the cartoonist's disposal to deliver their punch. Which is actually really really hard. And they did it every day! What a feat! It isn't a stretch to look at the super short video content of the mobile phone era and think of it as a kind of newfound comic-strip equivalent. Mind you, comic-strips never obliterated peoples' attention spans for the books or radio dramas of old, so I don't see the same argument holding in regards to present social media content (otherwise, we wouldn't see folks binging entire shows on streaming platforms). The infinite scroll and the way the algorithms work might be problematic, but the ultra short video format in and of itself? Not so much. It's actually very interesting.
In fact, shortform thinking is part of what also got me to create the above-pictured piece. See, I'm used to painting big. The bigger, the better (you can blame my mural-painting days for that), and what's the shortform equivalent of painting big if not a much, much smaller painting? Hence the birth of CAIRO DIARIES, a series of 20x28 cm (give or take) mixed media works on paper that all begin with a page of erasure "poem" ripped straight out of a book. A new challenge that I've been thoroughly enjoying.
