Electronic junk!

The bunch of electronic junk, so typical for our times, which Pat Bray dropped by with, was obviously suitable for art making. I thought I would use the many flat surfaces in different shades of clear, grey and black to build a kind of faux Mondrian, using the slim aluminium edges as separators between the fields, and enthusiastically went to work, but then I quickly discovered something much more exciting. It turns out that a laptop screen is composed of several layers of thin plastic sheets, all performing their own functions, that sandwiched together becomes a unity. Taken apart, particularly two sheets interested me. They were some kind of polarizing filters, probably there either to direct all the light forwards or to reduce light glares from the sides. Held tightly together over the screen they only had that effect, but when you picked the screen apart and put space between the filters, they started creating very interesting visual phenomena. Suddenly, when looking at an object through the screen from a distance, the image would break up in different colours, producing strange and almost nauseating three-dimensional spectres hanging and warping in mid air. I guess the filters acted on the light a bit like a rainbow, diffracting it in it’s wavelengths, creating several overlapping images gradually blurring together.

Screen turned cube.

To enhance this effect and make it visible and available, I constructed a box frame with four sides but without a lid, where I mounted the plastic sheets recovered from the laptop screen. This way, one could lower one’s hand, or an object, into the “five-dimensional” frame and see it dissolve and spread depending on how it was moved around. Or one could place the frame around a sculpture or vase of flowers, turning a simple decorative embellishment into a surreal colour spectacle that morphed as one watched it from different angles. Without anything in it though, the frame looked rather bland, so that it needed to be activated to function, and at best by moving something around within it. Should be easy to try at home if you have an old laptop or other flat screen you are going to trash anyway.

Innocuous at a distant.

Object no. 32