Phantom Reels is an installation of four augmented super8 projectors that can be accessed through a smartphone or tablet. When QR codes are scanned, film projectors appear hovering on their own power cords, sitting on a railing or hanging from the ceiling. They project images of performative films that deal with the relation between bodies and water.

The projected film can be ‘seen’ in such a way that it takes over the screen of the smartphone, or one can walk around the phantom projector itself focussing on the turning reels, flickering light, and various knobs and levers. In this sense the ghostly projectors shapeshift between waypoints to be navigated through, objects that leak into space, and grainy images that overtake the retina screens of the smartphones. Encountering film in digital space defamiliarizes how we experience the material presence of media. The film-materiality that is often so central in experimental film discourse is replaced by a strange kind of re-mediation, that makes the smartphone the strange object instead of the film.

Four films are projected with the augmented reality projectors. Stone (2021), is based on a story of Spanish villagers who walked over the bottom of a river carrying stones, in Watercamera (2019), a camera floats on a water surface, Washing (2023), originates from a dream in which I washed my laptop and in Long Sand and Water (장사동) (2023), made in collaboration with Hyeisoo Kim, images alternate between bodily immersion and distance. Film is a form of technologically induced hallucination; in Phantom Reels the hallucination is doubled.