American sculptor and painter Seth Steinman combines digital civilization with ancient technology to recreate unique materiality and sensations. He projects digital images such as the Windows XP start screen, Club Penguin, MS Paint, and classic screensavers onto cracked stone surfaces and recreates them in layered wooden sculptures reminiscent of multiple Safari tabs.
“My work is not about the story of a single individual, but about the connectedness of a collective experience driven by the user experience,” Steinman said. “The work is done across a variety of media: woodworking, painting, printing, clay and sculpture. What’s important is not the method of making, but the structure, the surface, the physicality.”
By combining opposing technologies, it shakes the viewers’ existing stereotypes about touch and materiality, and takes them back to the Stone Age, the origin of technology. The sculptures made with ancient materials such as wood, clay, and stone, and with sculpting techniques, pose the fundamental question of what technology is, in an attempt to understand it in terms of touch and surface properties, rather than reducing technology to digital devices.
