Dances For Mobile Phones: Paraguay

Courtesy Upstream Gallery

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Dances for Mobile Phone presents the surface of a screen as our most immediate access point into the Internet's physicality. Our mobile touchscreens are perhaps our most intimate connection to the Internet, rarely leaving our sides. Here, video recordings show people performing everyday tasks on their mobile devices. Shot with an infrared camera pixels ordinarily visible to the human eye become invisible, and those signals normally invisible are made visible. In obscuring the digital interface, the new and unnatural movements we have adopted become all the more apparent. By contrast, the only illumination visible from the phones is the ordinarily invisible infrared beam, emitted from LEDs in the top section of the phone near the earpiece and used primarily for facial recognition. This illumination is controlled not by the user, but by the device, and displayed together these works prompt the question of who or what is controlling our gestures as well.

— Carroll/Fletcher

Exhibited

  • Bienal Internacional de Asuncion, 2015
  • Lehmbruck Museum, On Surface, Duisburg, Germany, 2016
  • Upstream Gallery, Shifting Optics IV, 2017