Palm Readings

Concept

Palm Readings are ceramic objects in the shape of smartphones, their screens impressed with screenshots taken during the recent wars in Lebanon. The work treats images that were, at the moment of capture, instantaneous and disposable, screenshots, the most throwaway form a photograph can take, and fixes them permanently into clay, producing what functions as an archaeological artefact of something that was never meant to last. The pieces play on the mismatch between the phone's usual role (a device for the instant, the scrollable, the forgettable) and ceramic's traditional role (a material historically used to preserve and be excavated), collapsing wartime digital ephemera into objects built to outlast it.

Execution

The clay was molded by hand to the size of an iPhone and impressed with 3D printed plates that translated a digital drawing of the screenshots' outlines into the material. The screenshots chosen demonstrate the GPS scrambling that took place during periods in the war, making it difficult to use map apps or simple "share my location" commands, often placing us at Queen Alia Airport in Amman, Jordan or in the middle of the ocean at 0,0 location. One of the ceramic phones also contains fragments of an absurd WhatsApp conversation as a friend flees to France and is looking for someone to look after her son's pet chameleon. These phones were exhibited at JaySevenInc. space in Brooklyn, NYC.