Mobilities in and Beyond the Frame
In the series Step by Step, Vegas Šimbelis aims not only to revisit the early 20th-century Futurist artistic ambition – to convey dynamic motion within a static medium – but also to reflect on the evolution of photographic technologies and their epistemological potential. The project directly connects to late 19th- and early 20th-century experiments by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, who sought to make motion visible and rationally comprehensible. By capturing its discrete phases through serial photography, they helped shape a new visual epistemology of mobility. Yet working within the context of contemporary digital technologies, Šimbelis moves beyond this rationalizing paradigm. He draws on not only photographic tools but also their disruptions – glitch effects, which become key aesthetic and epistemological elements. This distortion articulates not only the instability of human motion but also the agenticity of technology itself. In Šimbelis’s work, glitches expose the limits of visual control in conveying the experience of movement – it appears as slipping out of the frame, unfinished, and co-produced by technology and the conditions of viewing. In this way, the project not only brings movement back into visual narrative but also reveals the system of representation itself as incapable of fully capturing the experience of mobility. From this perspective, Step by Step functions as a conceptual commentary on a post-positivist knowledge of movement – one that, in contrast to Marey or Muybridge, is not grounded in order or rationality but opens up to glitches, contingency, and ambiguity.
Vegas Šimbelis
Step by Step
Exhibition at Prospektas Gallery (Gedimino Ave. 43, Vilnius), the group exhibition Mobilities in and Beyond the Frame. During the opening, the Lithuanian Photographers Association presented the 2025 yearbook Lithuanian Photography.
In pictures Step by Step project and the book with Step by Step publication.
Thanks Lietuvos fotomenininkų sąjunga / Lithuanian Photographers Association
Exhibition curator and publication editor: Agnė Gintalaitė
Design: Gytis Skudžinskas
