The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences began hosting awards ceremonies (the "Oscars") in 1927. The award for Best Picture evolved over the first three years into an annual distinction unparallelled in the film industry. Academy allows us to explore the temporal, formal, and aesthetic progression of the first seventy-five years of the Academy awards by taking each film and compressing, sound and picture, into a single minute. In addition, the peice attempts to interrogate issues of film canon by presenting the Best Picture winners in chronological order in a massively condensed timeframe. Using frame averaging and time-lapse phonography, the entirety of the film is present in this highly abbreviated snapshot. Repeat viewing of the entire piece allows the viewer not only to see cinematic history unfolding, but also to see formal tropes in cinematography, editing, and music direction exposed through the massive acceleration of temporal scale employed by the piece. This work, shown at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, presents American cinematic history as a timelapse film, jogging our cultural memory while giving into the attention deficiency of modern media.

artwork at bitforms