LIAT BERDUGO

The Artist

Conscious Isolation

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Liat Berdugo is an artist and writer whose work investigates embodiment, labor, and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. She lives and works in Oakland, CA, and received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Brown University.

Her writing appears in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, Real Life, Places, and The Institute for Network Cultures, among others, and her latest book, ‘The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East’, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2021. She is one half of the art collective (with @queerai), Anxious to Make, and is the co-founder and co-curator of the Living Room Light Exchange (@irlxsf).

Her work has been exhibited and screened at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), Transmediale (Berlin), V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), and The Wrong Biennale (online), among others. This year, she will have her work exhibited on the 4th International Bad Video  ArtFestival at the @khodynkagallery and later in 2021 @bostoncyberarts Gallery and @evergoldprojects.

The Zoom Series, exhibited at part of Digital Touch, is a set of video works that highlight and challenge the commodification of gestures in digital technologies. By enacting the “zoom,” “scroll,” and “rotate” gestures used to operate Apple devices without the devices present, the work highlights these new movements by removing the digital device from the picture entirely, leaving only their gestures behind, and by further asking the body to move in place of the device. Intimate relations are relations of proximity and closeness, both metaphorically but also quite literally. With intimacy, bodies get closer. Bodies have many gestures of getting closer, but digital technologies have mostly one: zooming - this gesture of enlarging what was once small, touching devices as if we wanted to become intimate with them -- or at least, with their contents.

Additionally, these series of work challenge Apple Inc.’s patents of these physical movements. Whilst Apple may hold the patent to such motions on responsive tablets, Berdugo filed for a US copyright for the “dance” of zooming herself into the camera (under US law, works of choreography are copyrightable). The US Patent Number 7877707 belongs to Apple while the US Copyright Number 913988071 belongs to the artist. This series includes works that explore other gestures other than zooming: rotating, panning, scrolling, and double-tapping. But as if by compulsion, she kept returning to the pinch-to-zoom — a gesture of enlarging what was once small, touching devices as if we wanted to become intimate with them — or at least, with their contents.