An interactive video installation that plays with the audience's impact on the lack of queer movie kisses.
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‍‍Love Unreflective was created during my Critical Studies minor on the Willem de Kooning Academy. Queer love is still taboo in Western societies and too often met with weird looks, negative comments and aggression. This behaviour seeps into our movie culture as under- and misrepresentation of queer love. Especially the act of kissing is a scarce sight. With this interactive video installation I wanted to give the audience a direct insight into the relation between their gazes and the cultural repression of the queer movie kiss.

For the installation a kissing scene from Brokeback Mountain plays dramatically slower than the original, which is done with a video processing technique called ‘frame interpolation’. A webcam on top of the screen tracks the faces of the audience, for which I had to adjust and use a python facial recognition script. When the screen is looked at, the two kissing men are deleted from the scene using another form of video processing called ‘image inpainting’. The goal was to make the unfortunately shy and culturally repressed nature of a queer movie kiss be felt by the audience through subversion of expectations of well known movie scenes. I’ve reworked queer kissing scenes from other movies too, such as Black Swan and Call Me by Your Name.

Concept and execution by me.
Made interactive with technical support by the Willem de Kooning Academy.