TOUCHING THE IMAGES – Yvon Chabrowski

Floods of images and streams of sensory impressions inundate the spaces for thought in a
society steeped in communication. In contact with the sensory interfaces of our devices, we
develop a private, almost intimate, relationship to these devices, which in turn leads us to
forget them and ultimately replace our perception of self. The resulting immersive proximity
almost entirely supplants what was originally the communicative function of the media.
Yvon Chabrowski’s work Touching the Images addresses precisely this sensory relationship
between the medium and the user, and the associated ambivalence with respect to image
production and sensory experience.

Chabrowski has a human hand stroke the smooth surface of a transparent medium like a
choreographed sequence, and perform standard gestures such as tapping, swiping,
touching, holding, and pinching.

As the body merges with the medium by means of touch, the device ceases to be a
separate object. When encountering this installation consisting of a display panel hanging
freely in a room, beholders of Touching the Images experience how the relation between a
user and the visual realm is reversed.

By switching between a perspective from inside a device and that of the user perceiving the
device, the work embodies how we no longer apprehend the world we might see through
the window of the medium, but rather only through our interaction with ourselves. The
images produced can no longer claim their own right to exist, but are limited to what
gestures can express.

Whatever one may think of them, these gestures in their abstraction embody the new visual
forms of the networked world, in which the opposition between that which is digital and that
which is real has long since been replaced by what is behind and in front of the glass.

(Text: Robert Sakrowski)