Zoe Spehr

Zoe Spehr is a Berlin based media artist. She is currently studying visual communication at the University of Arts Berlin in the class New Media of Jussi Ängeslevä. Her work is influenced by multi media and digital art. It can be understood as digital / post-digital experiments. Most recently she exhibited at CLB gallery as part of the group exhibition „Berlin_lokal_Zeit“.

face without a face

Digital communication, such as video calls, functions as a virtual gathering place for faces. Our society focuses on the face as value and expression of human individuality. By the predominantly digital depiction of the human face the decoding of facial expressions is obstructed and the access to the face is blurred.This shift of reality to the screen leads to a disassociation of the face and an overstimulation of the retina.Within digital communication the screen becomes a third protagonist in an originally dual communication. It acts as a projection surface of faces and distorts the interaction. Thus the communication with real people is to an equal extent a communication with a machine, which creates a human-machine-hybrid relationship. The work illustrates the distorting of relationships due to our increasing reliance on screen to screen contact. The search for a face results in a face without a face.