Reconfiguring

I have been reconfiguring my response to our group manifesto in a couple of different ways. Probably the most literal sense has been playing with my acrylic phone models in space. I cut out some pieces of clear acrylic to hold up the phones in a linear and circular configuration with uniform spacing and each configuration completely changes the tone and look of the piece.

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The circular configuration would imply some sort of cycle, which perhaps engagement with the phone is. However, I wasn’t crazy about this format with this particular sequence of fingerprints. It made them look like a carousel, and the focus became much more about the circular form than the progression of fingerprints.

Then I spaced them in a linear sequence with added spacing between each cross-section of touch. This allowed for a much larger depth of field into the fingerprint sequence with this object, which I liked.

Later in the day, I had some conversations with Ian and Nathan that changed my perspective on the places I could go with this exploration of the touch modalities and the ‘social’ behaviors that are associated and constrained by the phone. Are there ways to bring in humor and absurdity into this?

Ian referred to the phone as the ‘deity in your pocket’ with regards to its sacred nature and governing principles of attention. Phones and art objects have a certain halo around them, and touch in that sense, can be seen as ‘ruination’ or as a component of the worshipping tradition. We touch things to get a component of them on us; they rub off quite literally by transferring molecules in contact. However, those molecules of contact and the dirt, oil, and acidity of human touch can ruin the purity of objects that are non human. There is a sort of Tinkerbell paradox here with the touch of the phone. The heat of human touch is required to activate the phone, yet touching it to keep the screen lit and alive seems to be in service of keeping it alive rather than us activated. It ‘needs’ us, but then we end up ‘needing’ it.

However the ironic part of it is that the deity of the phone is so compelling because it is a curated version of ourselves. It creates a feedback loop of our own preferences which elevates our importance within the constraints of the algorithm. This is the narcissistic outcome of the phone becoming an extension of self, but there is also a way of thinking of the phone as a type of body adornment and an embodiment of identity–everything from apps to phone cases to brightness levels.

Before, in my approach to touch, I was highlighting the differences between the human and the screen, but now I am interested in exploring the idea of the phone as an extension of the self.