Canadian media artist Garnet Hertz's Phone Safe 2.1.Handout
“24/7: A Wake Up Call for Our Non-Stop World”
Somerset House, London
“If I forget my phone, my brain feels amputated,” artist and novelist Douglas Coupland writes in his catalogue essay for 24/7: A Wake Up Call for Our Non-Stop World, which runs to Feb. 23, 2020, at Somerset House in London. The exhibition invites 50 international artists to examine the always-on nature of life today, and how technology has disrupted our natural rhythms and hijacked our neural configurations. One of the first works visitors encounter, at the ticket desk, is Phone Safe 2.1 by Vancouver-based artist Garnet Hertz, a member of the faculty of design and dynamic media at Emily Carr University and Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Arts. The work presents a simple enough challenge: deposit your device into a slot, crank a wheel that starts a timer, and wait. The phone will be returned, eventually – as long as passersby don’t hit the red button that adds more time to the lockdown. So why does taking part feel, as Coupland put it, like sacrificing a necessary appendage?
We know that too much screen time is bad for us. Three in 10 Canadians believe their mobile device “definitely” or “probably” listens to them without their permission, says a 2019 report by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. But like moths to a flame, our distrust doesn’t stop us from staying glued to our handsets’ glow for, on average, three hours a day. Exhibition curator Sarah Cook is game to accept Hertz’s dare. A veteran digital and media arts expert, she resists the incessant pull of the screen by “not checking e-mail on weekends, spending time in the garden and being aware of natural world signals, like when the moon is full.” But suddenly, a brief moment of panic: the latch on the safe, slightly banged about after being shipped from Vancouver, won’t open. Cook dips below the ticket desk and switches off the power. The door swings open. She retrieves her phone – and breathes a sigh of relief.