Marcello Mercado
How leopards caught leopards,
20 min. 41″, stereo, 4:3,  black/white/color, 2014

 

 

 

I found these webcam streams during the final broadcasts of Breaking Bad. Most of them disappeared later. Dead platforms, deleted accounts, broken links.

People appeared alone in front of their screens. Smoking, waiting, barely speaking. Sometimes it felt like they were watching together. Sometimes it felt more like isolation unfolding in public.

 

The image quality was already collapsing: low bandwidth, corrupted compression, unstable transmissions dissolving into noise. I reconstructed the soundtrack later from damaged audio remnants and fragments of the original streams.

I processed the footage heavily to preserve anonymity, but also because the material itself already seemed half-erased. Faces breaking into pixels, gestures repeating through glitches and delays, bodies reduced to weak signals trying to remain visible.

 

What interested me was not the television series itself, but the strange temporary coexistence these online spaces produced for a brief moment. Anonymous people sharing smoke, silence, exhaustion and remote forms of presence inside disappearing digital territories.

The work moves somewhere between documentary material, transmission residue and network archaeology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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