nathalie lawhead

Reading about Nathalie Lawhead and looking at her artist profile on Rhizome, the visuals of a simple desktop screenshot brought on nostalgia and comfort. The blend of early and modern desktops was something that evoked familiarity, but also highlighted how much we have digitally achieved from so little.

These two works are screenshots, which makes these images so candid and personal. Creating a chaotic, lots-of-tabs-open desktop background was something I wanted to explore in my artwork, to capture a personal but collective experience of computer users in the 90s~early 00s.

Things I like:

• the whole vibe of the digital, online world when the windows were grey and no one really knew what was going on

• pixel art and mspaint = so much nostalgia, this is something I want to look into for future works

marian tubbs

This specific artwork inspired the beginnings of my artmaking, the chaos within this image was interesting and something I wanted to delve into, whether it be in a still image or a video.

I liked the grey, ‘default’ look of the rippled plane in the middle of the work, seems nostalgic (because of the familiarity of 3D software (blender, unity) and unfinished video game assets) and otherworldly almost because of the un-textured quality.

The very apparent chaos of ‘driver’ was also something I wanted to emanate. The swirls of colour make this work seem disorderly and animated in a still, rectangle image - this is something I wanted to replicate in my final work.

Things I like:

• i love the clutter in the work, especially at the bottom with all the swirls and blending of colour

• the white circles floating over the image, it almost looks like the top was bitten off cartoonishly

lcd bending

(not an artist) The interactive element was really interesting to me - the act of pushing into a broken screen, creating different colours, essentially continuing to break the screen further.

Cracked screens are so familiar now, people with any sort of screen has experienced this technological casualty. Taking this destruction and turning it into something visually appealing and connecting us to the window that takes us into the online world seems was very inspiring.

The act of an anonymous finger pushing into the screen really caught my attention - it’s almost like they’re torturing the device.

Things I like:

• all the light shining through the pressed screen

• the rainbows in each crevasse - reminds me of an oil spill

• it really does seem like you're torturing the screen when you push down on it slightly, imagine breaking it entirely to make something like this

  • it's almost visceral? personal, even?

  • but also emulates nature in its organic forms in breaking. the lines created look like leaves, tree branches, twigs, water