How to get in Touch web

The world comes to us through our smartphone screens and we show ourselves to the world via this digital frame. Yet as we interact with our touchscreens we never physically get in touch with the objects, places and people that we perceive. Which new modes of perception and interaction does the smartphone offer us and from which ways of being present inside an actual physical surrounding does it restrain us?
 
On of the most practical aspects of the smartphone is that here our images are stored and organized automatically. This is extremely useful, especially because we create so many different types of images that it would be hard to summarize them under specific folders- as we (used to) do with digital photographs. Inside the image archive of a smartphone an image does not have one fixed place any longer, rather due to algorithms analyzing its metadata, the picture can be linked to ever-changing topics, it can be related to a certain content, an other person, a place or a date. The installation How to Get in Touch focuses on these archive functions of the smartphone and presents a kind of cabinet of curiosities.

In a widely used, analog system of storage - metal shelves - one finds different images and objects produced during a stay in Paris. All objects are an interplay between the actual place I found myself in and the smartphone as a tool to interact with that surrounding. For example I became aware that whenever I wanted to contact a friend or get information about an event I used Facebook. Here, just like on Instagram, Air Bnb, eg. users are represented in the form of a circle. Interestingly this round format can also be found on French gravestones, where portraits printed on porcelain are used in a similar way: they give the physically absent person a face. In a series of 6 such porcelain plaques I document on analogue meetings with friends in Paris and represent the participants via their Facebook profile picture. Referring to Facebooks algorithms, which measure interac- tions between users, analyze common locations, shared interests eg. the composition of my plaques illustrate the duration and intensity of my relation to these friends. In doing so I set my personal valuation of friends relations against an automated information processing. In the metal shelves one also finds pixelated and crumpled paper prints, black and white clay-moldings and straight photographs printed on semitransparent or soft velvet fabrics. All in all objects which trigger the lust to approach, to look behind visual surfaces and to get in touch with what is present not only via the eye. With my installation I want to invite the beholder to reflect on the smartphone as a tool of everyday communication which in a subtle but incisive way shapes our perception of the world and (trans)formes our social relations.