“I'm afraid that I just blue myself”
by chaz giese & andre c. filipek, from Phone Arts
A digitally crumpled, vaguely Escher-ish phone leans against a wall in an ambiguously corporate, very blue space.
This is a familiar recursion of a "painting on canvas of a painting on canvas," except that canvases don't come in standard aspect ratios. Rather, this pic suggests the phone as subject and author, with the vertically-oriented rectangle reminding us of the phone-based imaging software possibly used in its creation. We don't know for a fact that the topologically-challenged handset was fabricated on a phone, however, or merely displayed on a blog with other phone art. We also don't know if there was an original photo-reference or if the entire image is synthetic. But there is certainly compatibility between this blue world and the sleek, airbrushed look of Apple-era phone graphics and hardware. For those who might not use or desire a smartphone (a rare and ornery tribe who don't want to be tracked, marketed to, irradiated, or timesucked), this is how a phone should exist: as a dysfunctional, abject, uselessly aesthetic piece of sculpture.
