Freeze 24 09 20 Amirah Adara And Sam Bourne Fre Full May 2026
Sam Bourne, on the other hand, brings his unique flair to the projects he is involved in. His collaboration with Amirah Vann on September 24, 2020, was highly anticipated and certainly did not disappoint. Bourne's passion for his craft and his ability to connect with his co-stars make his scenes compelling and memorable.
On September 24, 2020, media artists Amirah Adara and Sam Bourne released a cryptic 12-second loop titled freeze 24 09 20. The piece, consisting of a single frozen frame from an unidentifiable source, generated significant discussion across experimental film forums. Unlike traditional freeze frames that conclude a scene (e.g., Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups), Adara and Bourne’s freeze refuses resolution. It holds the viewer in a state of perpetual anticipation. This paper asks: What does it mean to freeze time in digital media? And how do Adara and Bourne transform the freeze from a technical artifact into a narrative weapon? freeze 24 09 20 amirah adara and sam bourne fre full
The final element of our keyword set — "fre full" — appears in Adara and Bourne’s unpublished manifesto, Freedom Through Full Freeze (2021). They argue that a complete freeze (image, audio, interaction) liberates the viewer from narrative expectation. In an era of algorithmic recommendations and autoplay, the full freeze is the only true resistance. The September 24, 2020 work is considered their purest expression of "fre full": no plot, no movement, no duration promise. The viewer must decide when to leave. This decision, according to Adara, is the artwork’s true completion. Sam Bourne, on the other hand, brings his
Sam Bourne’s installation Freeze Protocols (exhibited online due to the pandemic) invited users to submit images of moments they wished to freeze permanently. Bourne’s algorithm then "aged" the frozen image by adding digital decay (pixelation, color shift, artifacting) over real time. On September 24, 2020, Bourne collaborated with Adara to freeze a specific user-submitted image for exactly 24 hours without decay — a "pure freeze." The image, later revealed to be a family photograph of Adara’s late grandmother, became a shared memorial. This case illustrates how the freeze can function as an act of preservation against digital forgetting. The final element of our keyword set —
On September 24 2020 an inexplicable phenomenon swept across a small coastal town in the Pacific Northwest: for exactly twelve minutes, every clock stopped, every heartbeat seemed to pause, and the world was locked in a perfect, crystalline stillness. In literature this “freeze” can be read as a metaphor for moments when life’s relentless motion halts long enough for us to glimpse the deeper currents beneath the surface. In this essay we will explore that frozen instant through the eyes of two fictional protagonists—Amirah Adara, a marine‑biologist wrestling with the loss of her mother, and Sam Bourne, a former investigative journalist turned community organizer. By dissecting their inner landscapes before, during, and after the freeze, we discover how a brief cessation of time can catalyze lasting transformation, illuminate hidden connections, and re‑anchor personal narratives in the larger tapestry of human experience.
Adara’s solo short Still Life with Interruption features a domestic scene that freezes repeatedly without warning. Each freeze lasts between 4 and 17 seconds. During these freezes, the audio continues but the image remains static. Adara has stated in interviews that she intends to mimic the experience of dissociative episodes. The September 24, 2020 collaboration with Bourne extends this by removing audio entirely, leaving only visual stasis. This silence, we argue, transforms the freeze from psychological symptom into a political statement about mediated silence during the COVID-19 lockdowns (2020–2021).
Amirah Adara and Sam Bourne’s collaborative freeze works, particularly the September 24, 2020 piece, represent a significant development in temporal aesthetics for the digital age. By removing narrative progression, they force attention onto the present moment as a site of both loss and possibility. The "fre full" manifesto suggests that true freedom in art may lie not in movement but in stillness — not in continuation but in interruption. Future research should examine how younger digital-native artists are adopting freeze techniques on platforms like TikTok (e.g., "pov: freeze" videos) but without the critical framework that Adara and Bourne provide.