Sun S. Jaegal & Ryan Smith: Line of Death

About

Taking on two views of the author and the phenomenon, archived footage from YouTube tech channels, describing a peculiar phone glitch is played in the corner of the gallery. The phenomenon is then extrapolated across the gallery into physical materiality varying in natural and man-made mediums. 

On the opposite side of the room, there’s a reference book listing the source footage and material of the videos featured in the exhibition. After the show ends, the work is contorted and photographed multiple times and presented as a publication, which will be distributed at einBuch.haus in April 2019.

• “Samsung's 2016 flagship smartphones seem to be plagued by unnecessary problems. First, it was the Galaxy Note 7's exploding battery that caused the OEM grief, and now, it's been the pink line issue of the Galaxy S7 edge.  For the unfamiliar, Galaxy S7 edge users have been reporting a defect in the handset, which causes a strange pink line to appear on the device's screen. Users all over the world have encountered this bizarre problem and took to several online forums to voice their annoyance.  Now, Samsung has come forward and acknowledged the issue per reports. According to Tweakers, a Dutch blog, the representatives of Samsung Benelux have accepted the presence of the "purple stripe."                        

  Samsung Acknowledges Galaxy S7 Edge Pink Line Issue, January 2017
(https://www.techtimes.com/articles/194479/20170126/samsung-acknowledges-galaxy-s7-edge-pink-line-issue-promises-repair.htm)

• “It wouldn’t be the launch of a first-generation Apple product without a few hiccups — who can forget Antennagate and Bendgate? — and the iPhone X is no different. A handful of users report that a mysterious and inextinguishable green line has appeared on their device’s display. We can at least speculate on one part of that. iPhone Xs have a new diamond sub-pixel pattern in their displays, and as such all green sub-pixels appear in lines, while red and blue alternate. "
   
  Mysterious ‘green line of death’ appears on some iPhone X displays, Techcrunch November 2017 (https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/10/mysterious-green-line-of-death-appears-on-some-iphone-x-displays/

Artist Statement​

After meeting at Royal College of Art in 2013, Ryan and Sun have been attempting to physicalise digital ephemera. In the days of heavy duty data, they continue breaking down small hidden details in the everyday, often referring to experimental writing narratives, screen behaviours and authorship of the Internet. With the interest in the new aesthetic of the glitch and appropriation methods, they look at the relationship of author and technology. Previous works, Times and Ritual of Mechanical Reproduction looked at how scanners can be manipulated into a system, creating generative visuals. Their aim of this show is to further their studies of modern and past technology by bringing screen phenomena to physical space.