In any case, if you actually have a scene bright for 1/24th of a second and then dark for 1/24th of a second, repeating, you're well within photosensitive epilepsy range. Don't do that to your actors unless you've discussed it with them and with your insurance company first.
Artifacts?
I bet that can be remedied by interpolating a new frame between every mask frame. Plus, when you mix it down to 24fps you can introduce as much motion blur and shutter angle "emulation" as you want.
Motion blur can also be very forgiving. You are more likely to notice artifacts in still or slow moving scenes and then the problem goes away.
Incandescent lights flicker at twice your AC power frequency -- to a decent approximation, their power is proportional to V^2. But this is input power -- the cooling of the filament is slowish and the modulation depth is low. Most people aren't bothered by this.
Fluorescent lights with old or very crappy "magnetic" ballasts flicker at twice the mains frequency, with deep modulation. The effect on people varies from moderate to extremely unpleasant, and it's extra bad if anything is moving quickly (gyms, etc). There are even studies showing that office workers perform worse under such lighting even if they don't experience personally perceptible symptoms. The effect is so severe that people invented the "electronic ballast", which flickers at much, much higher frequency and avoids low-frequency components. Phew. (The light might still be a nasty color, but the temporal output is okay.)
"Driverless LEDs" are deeply modulated at twice the mains frequency. These are very nasty.
If you actually have a light that flickers at the AC power frequency (certain LED sources in a two-brightness diode-dimmed kitchen appliance fixture will do this, as will driverless LEDs with certain types of failures), then it's extra nasty.
There are plenty of people around who find (depending on the actual waveform) 60Hz flicker intolerable and 120Hz flicker extremely unpleasant. And there are plenty of people who can often perceive flicker under appropriate circumstances up to at least several hundred Hz and even into the low kHz with certain shapes of light sources. You can read up on IEEE 1789 to find a standard based on actual research on what lighting waveforms should look like.
The effect of 120 Hz flicker is bad enough that energy codes in some places (e.g. California) have started to require that LED sources minimize this flicker, but, sadly, it's poorly enforced.
IIRC, the end that's negative looks orange, because the electrons emitted from the filament haven't gotten up to speed yet and can't ionize the mercury atoms at that end to the highest states.
If you didn't do this, you'd see 60 Hz strobing when you looked at one end.
Anyway, an old HN submission I still use when buying light bulbs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14023196
