Emily Dunlop - Screens

The digital screen has become the primary means of processing visual information. According to an Ofcom research study in 2014, the average person in the UK now spends nine hours a day looking at a screen. We have developed extraordinarily intimate relationships with screens. I have created three sets of A3 screen-prints in the CYMK colours, which incorporate the many windows that pop up on our displays. These are digital collages of our digital footprint. In one set of prints I used a program to create a glitch, which distorts and decays the image. This is an error, something we are not accustomed to on our immaculate computer monitors. In another series of prints I utilised a font created by Sang Mun intended to create privacy on the Internet. Mun states 'we live in a life overloaded with extensive impalpable information that is gathered, intercepted, deciphered, analysed, stored and who knows what happens next’. Technology is so deeply embedded within our environment that we cannot know when we are being watched. Using this font I printed the word ‘interface’. The concept of the interface best describes our experience of digital media. An interface is a point where two systems meet and interact, a prime example of which is the screen. They are fertile zones that don’t just facilitate behavior, but constitute it. Rather than being seen as surfaces, they can be understood as doorways to something that opens to a beyond.