Private Project

Passerbys

The world didn't end with a bang; it just got blurry.

Set in the drifting, post-COVID landscape of the late 2020s, this short film explores a reality where the line between human autonomy and algorithmic interference has finally worn thin. This isn't just a motion picture—it is a painting in motion, viewed through a prism of abstract liquid light that transforms the familiar concrete of New York’s Lower East Side into something spectral and uncertain.

Shot from one perspective with multiple angles, a detached voyeuristic perspective, the audience become accidental eavesdroppers. We catch the fractured, private conversations of anonymous passers-by, each a ghost in a machine they no longer control. Featuring a haunting, industrial score by Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, the film is a visceral meditation on displacement and what it feels like to lose your footing in a digital America.

  • TJ Norris
    Director
    Heaven & Hell, Infinitus, Elemental Studies
  • TJ Norris
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Music Video, Short
  • Runtime:
    2 minutes 40 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    December 15, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    2,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable

  • United States
Director Biography - TJ Norris

TJ Norris is an award-winning multidisciplinary conceptual artist and curator whose practice navigates the abstract psychology, social complexities, and the evolving friction between the natural and the manufactured. With a career spanning over forty years, his work is defined by a "wabi-sabi" sensibility and Surrealist influences, focusing on the beauty found within the fractured, the ephemeral, and the urban environment. Norris’s rigorous conceptual foundation was built at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design.

His cinematic practice has seen a prolific return since 2022, building upon early highlights like the micro-short 'auto-porto-matic' (1993)—curated by Cheryl Dunye for DCTV—and the two-channel installation 'Infinitus' (2008), which was a recipient of the New American Art Union’s Couture Grant. This recent body of work has earned international recognition, with screenings and honors at the Absurd Film Festival (Best Arthouse Film), the Los Angeles LGBTQ+ Film Festival (Best Short Film), the East Village Film Festival (Honorable Mention), the I, Immigrant International Film Festival, and the Faba Film Festival. Additionally, his 4-Channel AV installation 'Elemental Studies' is scheduled for an Asian premiere at the A4 Art Museum in Chengdu, China.

Norris’s exhibition record spans global institutions and biennials, including the Tacoma Art Museum’s 10th Northwest Biennial, Gallery X (Dublin), Millepiani (Rome), CoCA Seattle, and the South Bend Museum of Art. His photographic vision was codified in the 2018 monograph 'Shooting Blanks,' and his contributions to the field have been documented in esteemed publications such as Leonardo (MIT Press), Art Ltd, The Boston Globe, and PhotoBook Journal. As a freelance curator and founder of the gallery Soundvision, Norris has curated over thirty exhibitions for venues including Tufts University, Boise State, and the Linnfield College Art Center. His work is held in prominent international collections, including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Vanhaerents Art Collection (Brussels), Harvard University, the Fuller Museum of Art, Nike, and the Museo de la Ciudad.

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Director Statement

The apocalypse arrived not as a sudden rupture, but as a slow, corrosive softening of our collective focus. In the wake of the late 2020s, we inhabit a residual landscape where the boundaries of personal agency have been methodically eroded by the quiet hum of the machine. This project serves as a visual autopsy of that decay, transforming the grit of New York’s Lower East Side into a kinetic canvas of distorted, fluid luminescence. By rendering iron and brick as spectral echoes, the film suggests that our physical reality has become secondary to the data streams we inhabit—a world viewed through a prism that is as beautiful as it is fundamentally unreliable.

Adopting the cold, observational stance of an automated sentinel, the camera positions the audience as unintended witnesses to a dissolving society. Through a singular yet multi-angled perspective, we intercept the fractured dialogues of anonymous silhouettes, catching the stray signals of lives no longer under their own command. Anchored by the abrasive, industrial textures of Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, the experience becomes a visceral meditation on the vertigo of modern existence. It is a study of the moment the signal finally swallows the noise, leaving us adrift in a digital America that feels increasingly unrecognizable.