One room, a different story every day. Welcome to Sunshine Royale Motel. Four walls, eleven stories, told in twenty-two cinemagraphs. You are in an unknown city, staying in a run-down motel taking a shower. As you close the tap and turn to use the scruffy towel to dry yourself, you walk back into the room you just entered for the very first time. This is your sanctuary now, your home. Yesterday it belonged to someone else. And tomorrow, after you’ve checked out, it will do so once more.
The main theme in this series of images is the motel room itself, where individual passengers briefly occupy the space. It's like a snapshot that is taken when the outside world is temporarily ignored, once the door is closed. The room itself remains undisturbed, as it is a silent and passive witness to time. Only the guests color the mood inside the walls, over and over again.
Cinemagraphs are in a class of their own, somewhere between photography and video. Just like in a regular still frame, in a cinemagraph, time is frozen, yet subtle moving elements bring the frame to life. Individually they will play back in an endless loop, creating the illusion of never-ending motion. The partially frozen parts, combined with the recurring movements give the images a strange and hypnotic effect.
NFT SPECS: 3840 x 2160 (4K) 40 sec seamless video loop
Michel Mölder is an Amsterdam based photographer who specialises in cinemagraphs. He started his career as a camera operator shooting mostly travel shows for Dutch television. Years of experimentation with the combination of both motion and still-imaging media has ultimately resulted in his current and all-out passion for cinemagraphs.
During the course of his career and years of traveling, Mölder has visited and stayed in countless hotel rooms around the world. And it is from a fascination for these soulless places he has so often had to call 'home' that the idea for Sunshine Royale was born.
This collection contains 10 artworks.