*digital imagery, created using 3D scanning/photogrammetry techniques
What if our virtual world was to suddenly fall apart, if all screens were to cease to exist?
In reference to the actual fragility of the cyberspace that is generally dismissed within modern society’s everyday life during the post-digital age, these apocalyptic ideas about a hypothetical reality without the opportunities of the virtual world are represented visually, aiming to awaken contemplation within the viewer as opposed to the current state of overreliance commonly found within humanity’s contemporary behavioral tendencies. Within our technology-focused society, in which the virtual space has by now seemingly become equally “real” in comparison to the real life of the physical world, a new hyperreality has emerged on the basis of smartphones as devices with warranted portability, claiming their infallible reliability as external data storage devices in comparison to the human memory system’s multi-faceted limitations.
Based on photogrammetry as a method of digital imaging, the distorted and vague image of a retro phone—missing its display screen as the key feature of its functional existence—acts as a symbolical visualization revealing the intangibility of the digital space, especially questioning recent technological advances of mobile phones which have transformed them into apparently omnipresent external memory devices.
*While the title “Prosthetic Memory” initially refers to the eponymous concept first proposed by Alison Landsberg in her 1995 article “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner”, it is in this context also to be seen as a metaphor for humanity’s current overreliance on digital data storages and specifically on mobile phones as portable and versatile devices which have thus by now become more like an omnipresent part of ourselves rather than strictly external tools. Based on this analogy—implying smartphones as a contemporary type of brain prosthesis opposing the multi-faceted imperfections of our internal memory system—it critically questions the general state of dependency we feel towards these electronic devices, investigating both the present conditions of this trust relationship as well as potential threats within the future underlying the actual fragility of the virtual space based on its existential intangibility.
(2024)