Making eye contact, a once unavoidable feat when packed into a crowded train car or museum, is now a nearly impossible mission as those around you are almost guaranteed to be sucked into their phone’s screen while scrolling through Facebook or killing digital zombies. Our increasing dependence on the information devices constantly stuck to our hands was the inspiration for artist Antoine Geiger’s series SUR-FAKE, a group of digitally altered photographs depicting random people being sucked into the screens of their phones.

The images show children, businessmen, and tourists with their faces completely lost, the forms stretched like taffy into the portals we use for selfies, email communication, and mindless gaming. The blur imposed by Photoshop completely masks any emotion once seen on the subject’s face, rendering each a personality-less drone. With this altering of the body the artist explains that the project is “placing the screen as an object of ‘mass subculture,’ alienating the relation to our own body, and more generally to the physical world.” All images courtesy Antoine Geiger. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

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