Heidi Benham

Brief: The Screen is not a screen…

Using surfaces and objects as time-based media.

Concept: For this very abstract brief, we decided to look at everyday physical objects as ‘screens’.  Mirrors became particularly intriguing to us due to the analogue images they produce. They afford looking into, forcing us to analyse and examine ourselves through reflection. We see this a lot in media like T.V dramas, to represent the moments when a character may be questioning their actions or looking deeper at their own personality. We were reminded of the story of Narcissus in Greek mythology; Narcissus was a hunter, renowned for his beauty.  Nemesis noticed and attracted Narcissus to a pool, wherein he saw his reflection and fell in love with it, not realizing it was merely an image. Unable to leave the beauty of his reflection, Narcissus died. Narcissus is the origin of the term narcissism, a fixation with oneself.

Final outcome:

We have created an object that aims to expose the narcissism within us. It toys with the ideas of physical and mental reflection; how one might become fixated oneself. Today, we might see this nurtured in our use of online profiles, photographs and reflective devices such as smartphones; we constantly have a ‘black mirror’ in our pockets. These ideas have been explored most recently in Charlie Brooker’s ‘Black Mirror’, research by Joe Krauss and films such as Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’.

 The object itself is a horizontal mirror, designed this way so that people must peer over it as though into a pool of water. It is placed on a large black box, giving it quite an ominous presence in the setting of a gallery, influenced by the monolithic forms in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ We painted the mirror using thermochromatic paint that appears opaque when at regular room temperature but becomes translucent over 30ºC; it must be rubbed, touched or breathed on to reveal a reflection. It takes the role of Nemesis, forcing the user to concentrate completely on their own image.

Do you believe in "digital dualism"?

Read this article and decide for yourself here.

This section was of particular interest to me, due to my current research into time and how new technologies might be changing our perceptions of time:

"There are the popular books that typically critique social media from the digital dualist perspective. Besides Turkle’s Alone Together, there is Carr’s The Shallows, Morozov’s The Net Delusion, Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, Siegel’s Against the Machine, Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, and the list goes on (we can even include the implicit argument in the 2010 blockbuster movie The Social Network). All of these argue that the problem with social media is that people are trading the rich, physical and real nature of face-to face contact for the digital, virtual and trivial quality of Facebook. The critique stems from the systematic bias to see the digital and physical as separate; often as a zero-sum tradeoff where time and energy spent on one subtracts from the other."

Experience Resolution: Mobile screens become one large screen.

Taking inspiration from the surrealist 'exquisite corpse' method, as a group we used our mobile devices to piece together our own corpse.

Each person within the group picked one part of the human body and (with no constraints but the screen) created their own digital version of this body part.

I had one the left ear and so chose to use an image of Stelarc's ear sewn into his arm, with the idea that he himself had become somewhat of an exquisite corpse!

This was the outcome!

Exploded Screen Elective RCA 2014