If you have a tablet or smartphone, chances are you are already well aware of how often these devices are used for regular interactions. The Huffington Post recently detailed a particularly interesting art project that highlights the intricacies of interactions with our favorite devices. The project comes from artists Andre Woolery and Victor Abijaoudi, who after observing oily fingerprints left behind on beloved touchscreen devices, decided to turn the smudges into art.
The two artists recently released series, called “Inside Hieroglyphics,” featured 13 acrylic paintings of fingerprints left on an iPad and was showcased at March's South by Southwest conference. The paintings used fingerprints that were left on the device from using a variety of apps. The Huffington Post reported that apps used included social networking site Facebook and highly interactive games like Fruit Ninja. On the Invisible Hieroglyphics website, collaborating artists provided a few words describing the project.
“Art is everywhere,” Woolery and Abijaoudi explain on the site. “As the world becomes more digital, we pull further away from an analog, handcrafted world. However, the one remaining human component of the digital experience is touch. Our hands have become the communication conduit through devices with a series of taps, swipes and pushes. Left behind are the oil-stained remains of finger smudges on a screen. We have extracted these marks and transformed them into vibrant, acrylic prints.”
The iPad as a symbol of human interaction
Explaining the title of the series, the artists noted that hieroglyphics served as a form of communication long ago, and are thus a representation of the world at that time. In the same way that hieroglyphics can be looked at as a window to another world, the artists see fingerprints on a tablet as representative of communication today.
“Today, the touchscreen interface is our window into another world and the writings are smudged onto the screen instead of carved into stone,” Woolery and Abijaoudi wrote on the Invisible Hieroglyphics website. “It's subtle, but if you strip away the hardware and software, what's left is a finger painting that illustrates the story of how we communicate.”
As tablets and smartphones continue to gain popularity, people will likely rely even more heavily on their iPads and iPhones to interact with the world around them. The art project can help us appreciate the influence the iPad has had on modern life, as an enabler of human interaction. However, the project also helps demonstrate how modern reliance on technology makes it even more important to keep your devices in top working order. If you should drop and break the screen of your iPad (after snapping a photo to flesh out your private art portfolio, of course), iResQ's iPad screen repair services can help get communication channels flowing once again.