What we see, feel, read, and hear mediates the world outside us and shapes the universe within each of us. Mobile phone screens and the devices behind them function as extensions of these modes of perception, constructing multiple versions of the world around us. We touch screens to interact socially and to perceive the world; our haptic gestures animate this interaction, and something of our gaze and thoughts passes to the other side of the transparent LCD. Life, memory, and attention animate these screen-objects, while the data from mobile devices coalesces into a digital body that follows us everywhere.
The installation represents a circle traced with fragments of mobile phones embedded in the wall. This incision hybridizes the everyday — our present-time engagement with screens — with another temporal and haptic gesture, evoking the ritual touching of cave walls in the Paleolithic. The painting of negative handprints or the embedding of bone fragments in rock historically invoked the presence of the dead and previous generations, but it also asserted a living presence: “We were here.”
This act of of communicating with the past, evoked by parietal reminiscences, also speaks to us, to those from the future, even if we do not understand their meaning and wonder what they wanted to convey to their fellow humans from that time. The invocation inscribed in the wall of the white cube stems precisely from the idea of not seeing, of not understanding what we are looking at. What we are used to seeing via the screen becomes invisible once the screen is embedded in the wall of the gallery (the device that guides our gaze).