It begins with the instructions telling you to position your head at one point and your shoulders at another. Then a disembodied voice slowly puts us in a state of relaxation and meditative concentration: “If you don’t want to drown, be an ocean. You are waking up to the sound of the waves. Your mind is an island. You are facing reality by yourself. Relax. Concentrate on the screen in front of you and face your own reflection.” Keren Cytter’s video work Ocean is an elliptical narrative about a family, a lover, a beach house and a lonely boy.
In the last shot a young man finds an iPhone buried in the sand. On the screen we see a film that shows exactly the same scene as the one in front of him: the calm sea, the sun, the beach. Digital media sometimes create a hypnotic pull, tempting us to give them our concentrated attention in exchange for the promise that we will feel better once we are embedded in their virtual world. But just as the sea was filmed with the iPhone, instead of simply contemplating it, so the flat glass surfaces of the screens insistently push themselves in front of reality until this seems just as untactile, as unreal, as the data streams from our beloved gadgets.
From Kunsthalle Wien, The Future of Memory