I Love The Way You Use This integrates artistic and commercial strategies to highlight the role of technology in the mediation of romantic love. Adopting the language of a retail space, the installation includes stacks of pre-packaged works, various display models and a ’play table’ – a large sculpture which displays the objects and makes them available to be handled by anyone. The tactility of the handheld images literalizes the concept of the touch-screen by allowing the viewer to hold, flip, arrange and organize the images. The photographs, eliciting a generic or commercial feel of stock photography, are in fact all personal artifacts and romantic memorabilia represented through actual and staged events. The image substituted for the experience of romance is itself an experience — an experience of materials and surfaces.
This blurring reflects another confusion: do the tools presented to us (apps, emojis, social media, etc.) dictate our functions precisely as they serve our needs? The work reflects on the manner in which technological devices mediate, amplify, suspend or mutate our most intimate and personal experiences.
