Hand Addressed, Digital Postcards Series 3

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 3 employed a weekly keyword exchange as a structured method to facilitate video responses. Each week, one of the two participants chose a primary keyword, and the other responded with a secondary keyword, creating a dialogue between the two words that then acted as a prompt for videos reflecting on their interaction. The editing process for the series followed the back-and-forth of the exchange, while remaining flexible to the material itself. In some instances, the editors favoured side-by-side juxtapositions of images when they best highlighted connections or contrasts between contributions, allowing for the editing to reflect the cumulative structure of the project.

This short film finishes a series started with "Hand Addressed, Digital Postcards Series 1": https://repository.uel.ac.uk/item/8x6y1 and continued with "Hand Addressed, Digital Postcards Series 2": https://repository.uel.ac.uk/item/8z2x9.