TAKE A CLOSE look at the device in your hand right now. Unless you're some kind of neat freak, that thing is smeared with smudges, streaks, and probably a little food, too. But where epidemiologists see more germs than a toilet seat, Tabitha Soren sees art.
Her latest series, Surface Tension, celebrates the idea that those slug trails the digital footprints of your daily journey through Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and the other apps devouring your time and attention. “The grime is more than residue,” Soren says. “It’s a map of where we’ve been and what we’ve done.”
Soren started pondering the gunk on her screen while reading an e-book during a flight in 2012, and realized the frenetic marks mirrored the chaos she encountered online. “I sometimes have so many windows up on my computer screen that I can’t find the one I’m looking for, or I come across an Amazon cart that I never actually hit buy, or a calendar entry where I meant to check the time but an email popped up,” she says. “I felt like those gestures reflected that push and pull.”
Meggan Gould explored this idea with a project of the same name in 2014, scanning blank screens to highlight the smudges and smears. Soren takes a different approach, choosing a random link from her browser history or pulling up an image of a cat or porn to provide a background. She takes a screenshot, then calls that up on her iPad, and shoots it with a large format camera. Then she cleans the screen, waits a few days or weeks for it to get smudged, and repeats the process.
In some cases, the streaks blur the images beneath them, giving Soren's photos a painterly look. More than that, all those smudges represent the countless notifications, reminders, messages, and swipes vying for your attention. Something to think about when you swipe or tap your phone for the 2,617th time today.
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