Unlike many of the things we interact with on a daily basis, the technology we use bears very few physical traces from our contact with it, since most of the activity taking place is happening behind a screen.
One trace that is left behind however, is the marks made by our fingers; not always immediately perceptible, these marks are nevertheless emblematic of the intimate relationship we share with our devices.
We often take little notice of these messy fingerprints smeared across our screens, and yet, when captured in the right way – as in the case of photographer Tabitha Soren’s project Surface Tension – they become an interesting lens through which to examine our complex connection to technology and the online (and offline) world.
Shot over the course of nine years, between 2013-2021, Soren’s series hones in on the screen of her own iPad, covered in the usual greasy marks that come from frequent use.
Beneath the screen are images that have been taken from web searches, social media, text messages and personal pictures, forming a jarring array of scenes that is by turns loud, chaotic, visceral, intimate and quiet.
The actual content of the images includes a landscape shot of glaciers; a wildfire on a highway in California; protests following the 2014 shooting by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and a child blowing a kiss goodnight to her mother.
Considered as a whole, these artworks call into question various topics, including issues of authenticity and authorship (all of the images in Surface Tension are appropriated images that have been shared and disseminated with no real knowledge of their origins), as well as the role of technology in modern society. A link is established between the marks we make on our screens and the marks we make on our world, with the latter being shown here as both compassionate and destructive.
Soren invites us to consider the way we consume visual information, and how that impacts the way we engage and interact with each other and with the planet. In an essay written for the project’s accompanying book, also titled Surface Tension, Jia Tolentino explains: “The streaks provide proof of our mundane bestial reality—our hormones, our lunch, our particular whorls and spirals.
“Yet they also document a space of psychological estrangement, of blinking awake every morning to a stream of hallucinatory images a few inches from our face, of scrolling unmoving past so many scenes of catastrophe burning our stories down to bone.”
The series is currently on display as part of the exhibition Against the Image: Photography. Media. Manipulation, hosted at Ulster Museum for Belfast Photo Festival, and will also be exhibited in September as part of a solo show at Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia.
