Downtime is a series of photographs made through the compilation, remediation and reification of screenshots sampled from open, freely accessible sexcamming platforms that show the unoccupied rooms where these performances occur while the livestream is online but no one appears in frame.

These images are digitally cropped, catalogued, processed, and then exposed onto 4×5” diapositive plates through a customized technique of contact printing from an electronic display onto analog film.

This is a hybrid analog-digital process that incorporates residual processes with contemporary picture-making technologies, and critically engages with the photographic dispositive. Through this process, unique, one-of-a-kind, tangible photographic objects are produced. The developed technique of contact exposure plays with the main intended uses and content of the source material. If camming revolves around images of people showing and touching themselves, and trades on the act of physical contact and its desire as metaphor; Downtime’s photographic-objects –the plates– can only exist because that desired contact is mediated by a screen.

The images focus on the uncanniness of these places when empty, looking through their apparent uniformity and banality, during the fleeting moments when the “always online” condition that these platforms demand from their users breaks down.

I show spaces we might feel familiar with, originally shot with devices most of us use in our everyday, yet where the framing, the position of the camera, the direction of the gaze, the objects in the shot, the selected moment –where nothing happens– feel slightly off. An incidental deadpan style from a smoothed, uniform globalized aesthetic that infiltrates itself more and more into our private, personal, leisurely, or even intimate spaces and transforms them, through photography into spaces of production and economic exchange.

They suggest that something -we don’t quite know what at first glance- has happened, or is about to happen, there.

The pictures of these spaces while empty of human presence –bodies– present a crashing of the systems that enable them, an accident. The unoccupied spaces of camming, seen “live” through the stream, are an anomaly. Without a human presence performing in front of the camera, interacting with an audience, these images present a brief rupture of the structures on which the attention/economic model of our current platform based image-world is based. They are missing images, their adoption presents alternatives to what can be done with images when and if, they stop serving their intended purpose. An allegory for a possible escape from its imposition.

The name of the project: Downtime is a direct reference to these breaks.

These unique slides, are each titled after the date and time when the digital screenshot was taken. They are presented on lightboxes in variable arrangements according to their exhibition context, echoing the flexible nature of the online repositories from which they are sourced. Within each lightbox, images are arranged according to general subject and formal relationships recurrent in the spaces surveyed, that emphasize the domesticity and simulated “everydayness” that happens within them.

My intention with this project is to transform the accidental and ephemeral byproducts of a preeminent mode of contemporary image production and consumption –real-time, interactive, platform-commodified, video self-portraiture– into unique, tangible objects mediated under a different material logic and scale that offer a different pace for reading what are often overlooked images in a slower, more meticulous manner, bringing the background into the foreground, turning it into a new subject for our gaze.

It presents a possible bypass for these conditions as it meanders between the increasingly diffusing borders of multiple porous categories –the private and the public, the intimate and the publicized, the leisurely and the productive, the moving and the still, the digital and the analog, the immaterial and the tangible, the authentic and the performed – on which we exist and that in recent times have been deeply transformed by the complex set of practices, procedures, techniques, devices, concepts and consequences that revolve around whatever it is we might still call “photographic” today.