Smudgies

These were created for Smartphone Art Show’s Interface || Interference. They are based on the visual, oily, dirty artifacts left on our glass smartphone screens after they’ve been touched. The patterns left behind give clues about the type of activity the user engaged in. The smudges encode usage information, like what keyboard keys are tapped the most, although the smudges eventually obfuscate specifics like what password was used to unlock the phone. A fellow artist also compared these to heat maps, which I thought was interesting.

I based the compositions on the two best images from the dozens and dozens of pictures I took of people’s smartphones over 6 months or so. Then I created giant foam fingertips in the same proportion as my finger to the size of my smartphone screen. My self-imposed rules said that I would use the giant foam fingertips to create all the marks for these paintings and apply colors in a defined order if at all possible.

Click the large slideshow images to see the complete paintings.