This piece emphasizes screen cracks and fractures—the accidental geometries created when smartphones shatter. The radiating crack patterns form crystalline abstractions, transforming technological failure into aesthetic beauty. Sukan isolates these damage marks from functional context, revealing how our intimate relationship with devices includes moments of destruction and fragility. The reflective metallic surface adds layer of irony: pristine artistic presentation of damaged technology, perfect printing of imperfection.
The physical gestures that make up our interactions with touch-screen personal devices are intensely intimate, yet abstract signatures of our everyday browsing and messaging patterns. In his ‘While you are surfing’ photographic series, Arslan Sukan scans the surfaces of smartphones and manipulates the resulting images in Photoshop to isolate and enhance the fingerprints, dust, and cracks marking the screens. Sukan separates the intimate swipes and taps of screen navigation from any digital content, enlarging the marks to form anonymous and abstract landscapes. Printed on highly reflective metallic paper using an inkjet printer, each piece mirrors the context of its place of display, transforming the physical world and the body of the viewer into virtual content for the image surface. But, unlike fingers on a screen, the reflections leave no physical trace on their object. With ‘While you are surfing’, Sukan questions whether our experiences with the digital world, which are mediated through a screen, are any less immediate or complete than our encounters with experiences in the physical world. ‘While you are surfing’ continues Sukan’s engagement with the role of artifice in presenting the real. Through a process that moves from the physical world to digital and back again, his work dissolves distinctions between matter and thought, gesture and image. This ongoing translation of material from one media format into another challenges viewer expectations at every turn.
Screen crack photography transforms smartphone damage into crystalline abstraction—technological fragility as aesthetic beauty. Reflective metallic print from While You Are Surfing. Available at The Art Design Project, Miami Beach.
