Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

During the recent COVID-19 lockdowns, I embarked on a series of Zoom experiments with a long-time friend and artistic collaborator, Selena Kimball. Intrigued by how screen-mediated interactions were reconfiguring our experiences of spatial and environmental intimacy, we investigated ways of shifting and subverting our customary uses of this technology. Instead of succumbing to the sense of flatness, numbness, and distance permeating the ubiquitous grid that had come to scaffold so much of our screen-based communication, we wanted to call attention to Zoom’s material structures of representation, to tap into the haptic potential of the screen, and invoke its sensory, affective, and spatial qualities. Manipulating the placement of our bodies and our computers’ cameras, generating new angles for viewing each other and our own screens, and engaging in physical movements such as extended outdoor walks with our laptops, all served as means to catalyze new Zoom ontophanies (Vial 2019), disrupting and reframing our habitual screen-mediated interactions and perceptual experiences. Kimball and I subsequently co-authored an article about this project (Grossman and Kimball 2021). But we also wanted to make an artwork that would materially activate our insights, to visually and tangibly disrupt conceptions of Zoom’s transparency as a medium, and viscerally render the role of screens as producers of embodied, sensory experience. My presentation will describe our current work-in-progress making a series of cyanotype prints on cloth, an artistic-anthropological project that amplifies our earlier research on Zoom and digital screens, through harnessing a photographic medium that is cameraless, screenless, and analogue.