Screen Mutations
DEFORMING REALITY TO FIT THE SCREEN, 2015
Louisa Zahareas (GR)
We are increasingly living our lives through filters. Through social networks, through smartphones, through the coil of fibre and unseen airborne signals. In the communication age, we very often speak to the ones closest to us through digital means. The screen is no longer a window to somewhere else; it is, instead, the here and now, while our physical surroundings are slowly becoming the ‘other world’. We’re closer, yet further apart, than ever.
Screen Mutations explores the growing role of video communication applications — such as Skype and Facetime — in blurring the line between the physical and digital world. It imagines a speculative future where our physical reality is deformed to be viewed through a camera. This is achieved by designing a set of props — cups, teapots, utensils — that look deformed off-screen, while on-screen they look ‘normal’ due to optical illusions achieved by the geometric distortion of a 3D object. Thus, the point of view of the webcam becomes the main design tool.
The result is like a reversal of a Salvador Dali painting: the objects have surrealistic and impractical shapes in the tangible world, while the image as it appears digitally seems to suggest otherwise.
BIO
Louisa Zahareas grew up in a diverse family with Greek, American, Spanish and Russian influences. After studying architecture in Greece and architectural design in Minnesota, she continued her studies to get an M.A. in Social Design from the Design Academy in Eindhoven, Germany. Louisa’s work has been focused primarily around perception, and it strives to challenge our increasingly visual culture. Her projects use illusion, perceptive tricks and other techniques to remind the viewer that the space between the real and the virtual is becoming increasingly blurred. Louisa communicates the story through the use of video and performance. She doesn’t consider the objects that she designs products, but props that facilitate and guide the plot of a fictional narrative.