Screen Trails

 

In the work Screen Trails, the viewer is confronted with a closed-circuit video feed of themselves on a semi-transparent screen; however, its delay disorients one’s experience of time and embodiment. For the first iteration of this piece I extracted an LED screen from an old TV, and reprogrammed a webcam module to display a trailing image on the screen. The image formed on the semi- transparent screen appears as a ghostly afterimage of the viewers’ trailing reflection. The short time-lag creates a neurophysiological short-term memory that forms an immediate part of our present perception and affects this from within. If you see your behavior a few seconds ago visually presented to you on a screen, you will probably therefore not recognize the distance in time but tend to identify your current perception and current behavior with the state recorded a few seconds earlier. Since this leads to inconsistent impressions, which you then respond to, you get caught up in a feedback loop.