A recently viral art project–fine, let’s deem it “series” because “art project” has a tinge of the belittling to it–from Eric Pickersgill called “Removed” has people, for once, slightly questioning what they look like when staring into the abyss of their screens (not that these types of “statements” haven’t come up before in the art world, minus the aspect of actually removing the phone in a scene where socialization would appear more natural). Ironic, considering Pickersgill’s literally and figuratively black and white visual manifesto likely would have gone unnoticed were it not for the magic of screen-spurred virality. And while yes, the iPhone and its various offshoots and imitators have, to be sure, become the modern equivalent of Millie’s parlor walls in Fahrenheit 451, there is an undeniable faux profundity in Pickersgill’s attempt to underscore our “strange and lonely new world” dominated by the Luddite’s worst nightmare: technological enslavement.
But is it really all that strange? Stranger than the Vietnam War carrying on interminably for no reason or spies randomly offing one another during the Cold War or Hootie and the Blowfish being fronted by a black man? And is it really all that lonely? As human beings, we are born naturally that way, constantly seeking to identify with something or someone that will make us feel slightly less so. With the advent of the smartphone, our ability to scour the internet for signs that we are not totally alone–that we might, for as weird and freakish as some of us are–actually have, somewhere out there in the ether, a “tribe,” of sorts, is about the only comfort there’s been in this post-Empire existence so far.
With Pickersgill’s series, an inevitable backlash against the very thing people have become dependent on feels ripe to occur. The increasing trendiness of digital detox retreats (mainly for high-powered types and/or those who work in social media) is just one such sign that the smartphone, unlike when television first came to roost in the 1950s, is being taken seriously as a dangerous drug. Yet like all “drugs” (which everything can become when a person can’t employ temperance), the somehow impossible to use key, for most people, is simply moderation. Images of a couple turned away from each other in bed, two bro type friends barbecuing while staring at their hands where the phone would be, a group of housewives distracted from their accoutrements of cleaning (sorry, what century are we in again?) and children on the couch not engaging with one another, but instead, their invisible phones are all intended as “shocking” glimpses into what zombies we’ve become. As though humans haven’t been going down that rabbit hole since the era of the nickelodeon, but no, suddenly it’s all Apple’s fault, creating progress before enacting a devolution.
What Pickersgill, who had his subjects feign the classic hand pose with head turned downward (as opposed to Photoshopping the phones out, as some previously assumed), seems not to understand is that there is (very much so) such a thing as being alone, together. More than ever, the smartphone has enabled this once, as Mia Wallace succinctly described it, very rare ability to sit with someone in silence without having to worry about what to say, or struggling for a conversation topic. That the smartphone also allows the chance to perhaps breathe the possibility of a thought-provoking conversation topic into the equation as a result of coming across news items or “facts” (alternative, or not) is also part of its magic. Though most, of late, will call what it does something more akin to black magic. Putting a trance over people so as to make them totally ignore one another. Yet the masses seem to have conveniently forgotten that we were never really all that connected (certainly not during Hands Across America either). We have always feared the “other,” kept to ourselves, done little to break free from our own flock. The world is not a melting pot so much as globs of different flavors cordoned off in separate parts of the pan. The smartphone and the internet that comes with it is essentially the only entity that has radically broken through that once requisite divide between people from different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. And it doesn’t have to be so cut and dried, this insistence that the iPhone is an appurtenance of the antisocial. There can be moments when you use it in the company of others (also known as “phubbing”) and moments when you don’t. There’s nothing cataclysmic about that. But it’s easier to reduce the smartphone to being a tool of evil (even though every single artist–minus, perhaps, the more pretentious ones yearning for a more elitist and exclusivity-based past–has benefitted from the democratization of art, despite what protests they might give to the contrary)–particularly in our increasingly steeped in absolutism line of thinking. To join a now antithetical to the original bandwagon in saying, “No more, we must learn to truly connect with one another again.” The world is an amnesiac, clearly, failing to remember that existence before the iPhone was just as lonely and strange. At least now, the consolation is being able to document it.
