Could you take a picture?

Could you take a picture?

Cinzia Campolese installation modified screens - 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 generates interference patterns visible only through a smartphone camera. The visual outcome results from the interplay between the default rolling shutter speed of the camera and the duty cycle of the internal LED system.

Titled Could You Take a Picture?, the work invites visitors to use their cameras to reveal visual compositions hidden from the naked eye. This gesture mirrors a broader cultural shift, our increasing reliance on devices to mediate reality. The act of documenting has become so ubiquitous that it often replaces direct experience, reframing our memories and emotional connections through screens.
By asking us to look through another screen to experience the work, and by exploiting the inherent limits of both the camera and our own visual system, the piece calls into question the authority of technological perception. It invites us to reconsider how these systems mediate experience and shape our understanding of the world.

The work inserts a poetic glitch, an intentional ambiguity, into the stream of mediated experience.
At its core, it critiques our dependency on digital mediation and reveals how our perception of reality is increasingly filtered, delayed, and fragmented by the very tools we trust to make it clear.