Without a Camera recreates the experimental classic Man with a Movie Camera (1929, directed by Dziga Vertov) using 325 YouTube videos shot by humans, machines, and objects. Pekünlü’s video follows the original editing by Elizaveta Svilova, one of the main protagonists of the original movie, while the other protagonists, the camera and the cameraman, are replaced by new recording technologies such as mobile phone cameras, selfie sticks, GoPros, POV cameras, dashboard cameras, EarthCams, built-in computer cameras, drones, and more. Pekünlü’s scene-by-scene recreation of the movie also gives the viewers a chance to reflect on the early twentieth century’s utopia becoming today’s dystopia: hasty urban life, the mechanization of labor, people becoming appendages of the device, and the camera as a machine being unhanded and independent from human manipulation and human gaze.

Sound design and original track of Without a Camera is created by FitiSound, based on his earlier sketches of "sounds for an inexistent movie." FitiSound makes music by playing sequences he has programmed with a collage approach and which are reconstructed each time they are played in a set. The making of the movie and the making of the music correlate in their approaches of sampling, reconstructing, and collage-making, as well as being produced solely on desktop. Pekünlü and FitiSound will create a contemporary movie experience accompanied by a live music mix in which viewers are invited to engage, participate, move their bodies, and dance. The event takes its inspiration from music compositions played over movies by live bands during the silent movie era. It also pays respect to the dozens of other soundtracks created for the original movie ‘Man with a Movie Camera’. Every generation finds another entry point into this film, a way to discuss rapidly evolving digital realities, and this screening event is another take on it.

More information can be found here.