Screenshots as digital self-portrait in new Vertical Video

March 2026, interview

Every two months, Vertical Video presents a new video work in Amare’s public space. In March and April, the featured piece is @echo__bot ScreenRecording_02-24-2026 13-22-15_1. We asked the artist, Sjef van Beers, five questions to find out more about the piece.

From March to April, your video artwork will be on display in Amare. Can you tell us more about its meaning? 
"The video is a scroll-through of posts made on the Instagram account @echo__bot over the past three years. It’s an account that automatically posts the screenshots I take on my laptop.

I think screenshots are an interesting and relevant medium. It’s very direct, very quick. A bit like photography, but not quite. I try not to think too much about the fact that every screenshot I take ends up on the Instagram page, but to just keep taking screenshots in the same intuitive way as I always did before.

I see this collection of my screenshots as a kind of self-portrait. They are all shots of images and texts that I find interesting, funny or surprising, or that I recognise as saying something true, or getting something wrong. Things that I wanted to save for later, or share with someone. Posting my screenshots on Instagram is like an extended performance, and something of an intervention on the platform. Instagram is after all not intended as a place to automatically post screenshots. Posting my screenshots in this context not only changes their function, but also adds content to the feeds of account followers that was created less deliberately or for different reasons than the other posts they scroll through.

The first post I made on the account is a screenshot of my Notes app where I reflected on my relationship with and my ideas about screenshots and the account:

Observing and browsing and engaging and appreciating and assessing and resonating and scrolling and encountering and looking and seeing and appealing and choosing and capturing and sending and laughing and chatting and saving and archiving and sharing and posting

Screenshots taken on my macbook will be automatically uploaded to this instagram page"

Is there a connection between Amare and your artwork?
"The vertical image format is well suited to the screen recording of the Instagram page that I made using my phone. Because the work is on display in the hall, I did not want to create something with a narrative of several minutes that has to be watched from start to finish. Rather, I wanted to make something that already fulfils its function when a passerby casually glances at it. And once I started scrolling through all the posts, I was surprised to see that there were quite a few references to music among them, so there’s a connection with Amare in that.”

Can you tell us more about the creation process?
"So it’s a screen recording of an Instagram page to which a bot automatically uploads screenshots taken on my MacBook. I prefer to say ‘taken on my MacBook’ than ‘that I take on my MacBook’, in case someone else happens to take one of those screenshots. A bot is a software program that automatically performs certain tasks – in this case, uploading screenshots to Instagram. The bot runs on a separate laptop that I bought second-hand for this project. It checks whether any new screenshots have been taken every three to five minutes, and if so, it posts them.

I am not logged in to the account on my phone or my personal laptop, so I don’t get any notifications of likes or reactions. Sometimes I’m actually surprised to see a screenshot I took a few hours ago in my feed, because I had already forgotten about it. Every now and then, you get an accidental screenshot in there, too: I have an ergonomic keyboard where the Print Screen key is immediately above the Backspace key, so there are times when I press it accidentally, especially when I haven’t used the keyboard in a while and need to get used to it again. I leave those posts up – they belong in the project, I feel, and I specifically do not want to curate what does and does not get shared on the account. Screenshots taken on my phone are not shared, though. That was technically more difficult to arrange, and anyway I often delete them right after sharing them with someone else, before they have time to end up in my photo library."

What else do you do as an artist and what inspires you? 
"I usually work with digital media that I encounter on a daily basis, and try to find meaning in them. Instagram is one example, but it can also be self-service checkouts, or gaming keyboards. My work is often about online culture, how ideas spread via online platforms, or the connections between work and technology."

What do you hope passers-by and visitors will take away from your video artwork?
"The video is about how I view and react to images and occasionally texts, online and offline, both by taking screenshots and in creating the bot and Instagram page. Visitors may feel a spark of recognition or appreciate it as something they too think about, but really that’s entirely up to them. If they just happen to see something that surprises them, catches their attention or arouses their interest as they pass by, I consider that a success too.” 

Discover more about Sjef and about Vertical Video.

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