Touchscreen
The video shows a matrix of red, green and blue pixels, colourful lines and amorphous black surfaces of a destroyed LCD display in close-up. Fingers manipulate and interact with the errors, creating ever-changing abstract compositions. Pushing the screen and playing with its liquid crystals, the artist produces transient images. Instead of reproducing a digital picture, the technology is used and explored as an analog material. «Touchscreen» pursues the concept of the previous video «Screenshot» (where an arrow hits and fractures a screen), and by zooming in on the intentionally-created errors again calls the relationship between digital pictures and the physical medium into question. The process could be described as analog glitch art meets digital finger painting, while the abstracted aesthetic result is nostalgically reminiscent of lo-fi computer games and microscopic images of cells or crystal structures.
Swiss artist Timo Ullmann (b. 1987) creates interfaces and interferences between virtual and physical spaces. For Elementum he is developing «The Screen Series». The sequels address the platform as a dynamic, virtual and experimental space for a growing exposition. Playing with basic features, habitual practices and common metaphors of the medium, he’s investigating the computer screen as a display and interface. Timo Ullmann studied Fine Art in Lucerne and at the UCM in Madrid. In 2015, he completed his master’s degree in Art in Public Spheres in Lucerne. He has exhibited and performed internationally at various independent art spaces and Swiss art museums in Aarau, Chur, Lucerne, Biel, Interlaken and at festivals such as Jungkunst, Shift, science+fiction or One Of A Million Festival.
