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'Social Studies' expands filmmaker Lauren Greenfield's Emmy®-nominated FX documentary, which spent a school year inside the phones and lives of Los Angeles teenagers, into a walk-through museum experience. At Fotografiska Berlin, photography, screens, and two full-room projection installations turn the private language of teenage phones into something you can stand inside. Exhibition run: 26 Sep 2026 – 12 Jan 2027.

When Institute Pictures began building the exhibition, they approached Eric Jordan to solve two of its rooms: the Algorithm Room and Ella's Bedroom.

THE ALGORITHM ROOM

Goal: make the TikTok recommendation algorithm visible as a cold, clinical machine that visitors walk alongside, close enough to feel a feed narrow from broad curiosity into increasingly extreme material through ordinary taps and scrolls.

Jordan designed the wall as a dystopian executive dashboard, showing the view the platform sees instead of the view the user gets: grayscale telemetry, engagement funnels, session timestamps, and candidate channels. Six turn sequences play as optimization cycles. Candidates shuffle in black and white, one selection locks, and the chosen clip punches into full color, so the only warmth on the wall arrives at the moment the algorithm gets what it wanted.

The wall is roughly 32 feet wide and 9.5 feet tall, covered by two synchronized ultra-short-throw projectors at 1920×1200 with about 30 percent overlap. The blend was built into the delivered files, so the surface reads as one machine instead of two images meeting in the middle. Playback runs right to left, in the direction guests are already walking.

Jordan also designed the machine's sound layer as a track separate from the editorial soundtrack: a subtle mechanical bed that boots up in the intro and gives ground to each served clip. It was delivered in stereo as separate stems for the final mix.

ELLA'S BEDROOM

Goal: rebuild Ella's real teenage bedroom as a walk-through room where the imagery that usually lives only on her phone spills onto walls, furniture, and floor.

Working directly with Lauren Greenfield, Jordan directed the look of the room, led the previz, and defined the final projection layout. The room has to read first as a lived-in bedroom, and only afterwards as a space where most surfaces are moving. So seven focused projections land where that imagery would actually live: the mirror she filmed her fit-checks in, the bed, the wall above the dresser, the floor she walked across.

Three Epson PU1008b projectors throw the wall content, with smaller LightScene EV-115 units handling the bed, mirror, and dresser at close range. The floor projector was mounted outside the room and aimed back in with lens shift, because the ceiling was too low for a steep throw. The whole layout was previsualized in Cinema 4D with a camera built per projector and lens, so the AV team could check coverage against real inventory before anything was rigged.

CREDITS

Lauren Greenfield · Institute Pictures · Fotografiska Berlin
Projection design, animation, 3D pre-visualization and sound design: Eric Jordan
Opening photography: Julia Schoierer
Special thanks: Lauren Greenfield, Jennifer Kobzik, Catherine Bull, Frank Evers, Emma Beuthin