The work is a part of a project, studying screenshots of smartphone feeds provided by more than 40 people. Nadia Koldaeva invites to witness the contemporary collective landscape by diving closer into the uncombed digital archive that each of us replenish every day.
Smartphones have become an extension of a human hand, thus creating a situation of expanding mind and memory into digital spaces. The practice of everyday documentation serves as a sort of legitimization: "If you haven’t taken a photo, that moment never happened." It doesn’t just capture what is happening, but also reconstructs existing memories, adaptates our practices, dictates the visuality, and provides opportunities to explore our memory and representations.
Arrays of screenshots represent a collective “photogenic image”. In the process of research some patterns of the public’s choice have been revealed: in almost every screenshot there were images, documenting landscapes and
environment, a common place, worthy of being stored in memory. This resulted into a monumental collective landscape assembled from a large number of other saved places. The screenshots are separated from their usual environment and are rescaled thus allowing us to recode the mode of perception and create a peering situation.
The work cumulates in the form of presentations in an art-space and also as an art-object – an archive folder with several dummy books, a printed art-work the size of 30x42 cm and a magnifier.
In the "Registration" dummy book, each received “slice of memory” is registered, the “Fragments[28]” dummy book includes close-ups from slices of memory (28 images each) and refers to the unity and diversity of the collective photogenic images.
