Frame Space

Frame Space explores how the relation between visual images and the frame has been constituted historically, technically, and perceptually. The project refuses to treat the frame as a mere boundary, instead understanding it as a continuous “mediatic act” that shapes the structure of the image and sets the rules of time, space, and perception in motion. Frames in painting can be traced to borders around murals and reliefs as early as 2000 BCE; after the Renaissance, perspective allowed the frame to function like a window inviting the viewer into a virtual space. Today’s screen-frame inherits that tradition while connecting viewers to virtual space in different ways. The frames of televisions, laptops, and smartphones adopt cinema’s aspect ratios and, through a sensory language, continually demand connections with fiction, virtual worlds, and what lies beyond them.

Such screen-frames no longer operate as fixed edges but as computed, decomposable spatial structures. Images on a computer screen are formed by countless sub-pixels (RGB), and spectacular and ordinary images alike are processed on the same layer, within a field of complete horizontality. Here, the spectator is reconfigured not as a passive receiver but as a figure endowed with the power of the average gaze. Perception traverses both inside and outside the screen, acting as an active element that composes distances among images and organises narrative. 〈Picture Frame〉 spatialises this altered visual language and attends to how editing and montage re-arrange reality. In time-based montage, each frame composes the last instant within linear time and forms a rhythm of fiction in virtual space—yet even that fiction wavers with the spectator’s position.

Within this work, the projector functions as an apparatus for the projection of memory. Just as the brain stores and recalls the structure of things through an object-centred coordinate system, the projector aligns and re-composes dispersed images along the axes of the frame. Perception no longer operates with the eye at its centre; the frame itself becomes a coordinate system and a structure. The screen is now another door and a point of contact with virtual networks. Within it, fiction and reality, and the opposed orders of fixed space and remote communication, coexist to form a new visual language. A screen once used as a tool of communication is becoming a unit of spatial composition. In this transformed media environment, Frame Space asks after the conditions under which we can say we see. By re-stitching image boundaries and narrative structures, the work evokes a spatial sense of expanded visual experience and proposes a critical reflection on the perceptual structures of the digital age.

Research