Overview
The term “ultrashorts”refers to audiovisual media forms under 30 seconds in duration and disseminated via out-of-home media, on urban screens, on Internet-based video platforms, at film festivals, in the context of art projects, in (viral) marketing and in commercial art. These “ultrashorts” indicate an evolution in media and culture marked by a trend towards abridgment of audiovisual narrations on the one hand and crossing medial boundaries on the other.
The “Ultrashort” project conceives of these extremely short sequences of moving images as an independent format, describing this format in context as the result of technological, social, and economic convergences and analyzing it in view of its specific aesthetic characteristics, such as keyframes and blank spaces.
The corpus of the investigation is comprised of a collection of approximately 1400 entries to the Ultrashort Film Competition 5-10-20 mounted by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences (HSLU) between 2007 and 2011, supplemented by audiovisual material from the online services Vine, Viddy and Tout.
