Touch Me, Screen

I am sitting in front of my cold laptop screen while its fan is roaring, and I am sweating. Not because it is hot, but because my body is in stress mode, realizing that the examination which is happening on screen is not any less real than it would be if we were all in one room. So, this time, not only my eyes got tricked by the screen, my whole body was fooled.

I am a maker, and what I miss most during corona lockdown, is touching. Sometimes not even the sensation of my skin contacting another surface or body, but the bare feeling of the presence of another person in the same room. The combination of sound, smell and tactile perception that makes me aware of others even though they are out of sight is something that cannot be transported via the screen. On screen, they are all visible but not perceptible; While my body felt the negative stress (damn you brain!) of fear of failure (oh so much worse, as it is now not only us who can fail the situation, but the technology that might let us down) it is not capable of feeling the presence of other bodies just by seeing them on a screen.

During the last few months the internet tried to fill in whenever physical presence was not possible, trying to keep the experience as original as it would have been without Covid-19. We spent hours in front of our laptop screens, listening to lectures and participating in seminars, so university curriculum could go on – “as normal as possible”. Exhibitions were moved online, nobody minded reading ebooks anymore and movies became preferred references. When our life was restricted in its range of motion and physical experience, the internet was helping out, and the crisis was turned into a chance to finally “catch up on technology”.

There is this saying that one should not bite the feeding hand, but as technology is not only man made but also in the strict government of a few experts, a sudden rise in its spread and power should be carefully digested. More than that, it is our task to look closer at what the use of technology does to us individuals and our communities – because if this could be the “new normal”, we better save out seat at the conference table.

I wonder whether the reason for why I still feel isolated, yet I am “connected” to so many people via the internet lays within the product range that simply cannot provide the bodily experience I am missing. And I wonder whether this anger in my body that grows with every insufficient, boring, or simply untouching conversation I have via a screen, is a result of a surface that is too dead in order to react to my body. Dead not by assemblage of its parts, but by the role it is given. I believe that this is about politics, about ownership. That the reason why I do not feel touched by my smartphone lays in the relationship we have.

I constantly feel respect when I am in contact with other human beings, disregarding personal preferences. That is being social, I acknowledge the body of the other as much as my own body. When I work with material, it is not much different. I work with the medium, as much as it works with me, it guides me, as much as I guide it. When I touch a material, it has a unique feeling, and in the way it reacts to my body heat and pressure, it touches back. Of course, our technological devices are made of material, they are existing in our physical reality! And yet, it is something else, when I touch a stone I find on the beach or the screen of my smartphone. It is about the small shifting that occurs when we humans process material so it becomes something that can be sold on a marketplace, and suddenly – I own. I cannot own other people, and I seldomly feel like I own the medium I work with in my practice. But I would agree that I possess my smartphone. As my laptop. Maybe because they do not seem to have had a life before, they were made to be owned. But this is not supposed to be about whether its right or wrong to possess something that at one point was dug out of the ground, it is about what the knowledge of ownership and the hierarchy it is building up does to the quality of touch and physical experience. Because what expectation will arise once we have fully learned that “touch” is something you can purchase within a laptop screen and “connection” will come with an internet contract? I do not at all want to argue against the digital, but for a deeper consideration of the relationships we have with the devices that help us sustain human activities and necessities, and with which set of morals we encounter them on a capitalistic market space.

Karen Modrei

Erik*a Umdichtungen Domestic Coding Attempts On Her Kind Corporate Machine The Length Of A String YOKO Aphorisms The Rest Will Be Familiar Collective Writings Bewegte Räume Selam Bauhaus About Courses Shop Texts Contact Instagram

deutsch english ©2024 Karen Modrei

Erik*a
Umdichtungen
Domestic Coding
Attempts On Her Kind
Corporate Machine
The Length Of A String
YOKO
Aphorisms
The Rest Will Be Familiar
Collective Writings
Bewegte Räume
Selam Bauhaus

About
Courses
Shop
Texts
Contact
Instagram

deutsch
english

©2024 Karen Modrei