Hand Addressed, Digital Postcards Series 1

This video is part of a trilogy Hand Addressed, Digital Postcards Series 1-2-3.

This short video trilogy originates from an artistic exchange between longtime collaborators Claudia Brazzale (Italy/UK) and Blake Morris (US/Mexico). From 2022 to 2025, Brazzale and Morris explored the potential of mobile phones to create interactive connections across distances. Their exchange emphasized friendship and scholarship as fluid and integral aspects of both academic and artistic practices. With their phone cameras, they made short videos following a set of rules and procedures to explore their surroundings, which they then shared through a call-and-response format through WhatsApp and on the digital cloud.

Rejecting the urge to impose on the landscape, Brazzale and Morris focused on small-scale explorations, highlighting tactile, relational, and sensory interactions with their environment. With their fingers, they examined the small details of their everyday landscapes, while their phone cameras zoomed in on this microcosm to capture their playful ‘finger walks.’ These videos served as a way for the duo to connect, creating a tactile, small-scale, and slow-paced experience of their environment shared through digital space. By using their phone cameras to view and capture angles of their surroundings, they highlighted everyday details that often go unnoticed, emphasizing moments and disruptions in daily life marked by curiosity, playfulness, and unexpected joy.

Often occurring during travels, some of these video exchanges were edited into three series of ‘digital postcards’ titled Hand Addressed, Series 1, 2, 3. Each series had its own unique approach to the iterative process, but all focused on balancing structure and improvisation, and were edited into a split-screen video, allowing the duo to explore emerging connections while maintaining a steady pace of exchange.

Series 1 was filmed between January and February 2023, when Claudia was in London and Blake was in Mexico. This first iteration was structured around a temporal exchange, where one week a participant created and shared a video, and the other participant responded in turn, with roles alternating the following week. By editing the footage together in a side-by-side montage, similar to Claudia and Blake’s call-and-response, the final piece reveals the subtle differences and similarities between their spatial experiences and everyday worlds.

Series 1 was screened at the IN OUT exhibition in Stratford, London (January 2024) and at the Project Space Gallery at the University of Leeds (February-March 2024 ). It also served as a foundation for workshops, encouraging participants to engage with their finger walking methods as an inclusive and exploratory practice (including the ‘Exploring Intimacy at a Distance Through Lens-Based Haptic Explorations’ presentation and workshop for the Reading and Writing Bodies in Space group (https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/fine-art/events/event/3046/reading-and-writi... )

This short film carries on with "Hand Addressed, Digital Postcards Series 2": https://repository.uel.ac.uk/item/8z2x9 and continues with Series 3: https://repository.uel.ac.uk/item/8z2x5