Could you take a picture?
Could you take a picture?
Sculpture - Installation, 2022
Material
Modified LCD screens, Electronics
Size
Variable
Info&credits
Technical consulting: Lucas Paris
Production design consulting: Pipo Pièrre Louis.
Finalist for the Aesthetica Art Prize
Research funded with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
The installation invites viewers to question their trust in digital devices and the ethical concerns surrounding our filtered reality. Echoing today's challenges with authenticity in an era where deepfakes, synthetic media, and generative technologies blur the lines between truth and fabrication, the work prompts reflection on how technology influences memory and perception.
Could you take a picture?
The work features a series of modified, upcycled LCDs of different brands and models. Each of these screens, through direct sight, emits a full and colored light without showing any content.
The Led lighting system, which is normally used to display visual content in LCDs, is replaced with a custom one and controlled by an integrated circuit that creates interference patterns that are only visible through the camera of our smartphones.
The visual outcome is created by the interplay between the default rolling shutter speed of the camera and the duty cycle of the led system installed inside the screens.
Documenting all sorts of moments that happen in front of us is a relatively recent habit.
This sometimes positions us as a kind of analytical observer, more concerned with producing souvenir images/videos, than paying attention to the lived moment.
"Could you take a picture?" invites viewers to contemplate how this shift in perspective affects our memories and feelings about an event. By asking us to look through another screen to experience the work, and by exploiting the inherent limit of both the camera and the viewer's visual system, the piece challenges us to re-evaluate our relationship with technology as a mediator of experience and consider how it shapes our perceptions of the world around us.