A Mobile View

A Mobile View is an artistic response to the experience of Saskatoon-based artist Emilie Neudorf who contributed to the online work of BlackFlash Expanded across 2022. Thinking between physical print material and its digital counterpart at the magazine created an opportunity for Neudorf to raise questions within her own artistic process around how materiality and ephemera operate in physical and digital forms. These exploratory spaces take on different functions and meaning for us, and the ways we relate to both form and memory differ within each. Hints of impermanence and temporality nudge viewers to consider feelings of nostalgia, recognition, and curiosity along with the sense of possibility often found in digital material. Combining her design skills and research interests, Neudorf created a series of interactions between an arrangement of layered screenshots, printed photographs, and paper ephemera, combining them to create evocative GIFs that allow us to consider our lived experiences as they shift between analog and digital.

In her earlier drawing exhibition “Socially Constructed,” Neudorf compiled close observations of buildings allowing her to consider questions about what is public and what is private as we experience social spaces. There is an evolution of those same questions within this set of GIFs. By collaging both physical and digital material from BlackFlash magazine’s archive, Neudorf alludes to a similar interest in how we move through private and public spaces online. In the first image, a digital screenshot shows the homepage for BlackFlash Expanded, highlighting two recent articles. The second image replicates the screenshot using cut paper from the hard copy back issues of the magazine. Though the loop only runs for a few seconds before repeating itself, behind that flash is an extensive process of construction on top of construction that creates a visual process linking itself between “real” and “virtual” spaces.

This act of bricolage becomes a meta-ethnographic look of Neudorf’s experience with BlackFlash Expanded and plays with the ways in which we can consider visualizations of memory; a collection of sensory information triggered through spontaneous acts that flash into mind when we try to recall them. Within Neudorf’s work, the time taken to print, to search through paper material, to combine, and then fuse together is a private, personal act motivated by her memories and experiences. The GIF itself is a way to engage with a public, one that is easy to access, transfer, send, share, and view.

This process of  moving between analog and digital formats allows us to question what the materials themselves evoke in us. As our culture is dominated by the efficiency and convenience of digital media, there is an unspoken exhaustion for many in navigating questions between “real” or “digital.” This may lead us to question many types of print and digital media, including print magazines and online publishing, and whether some publications should go entirely digital or remain faithful to the creativity of print. But digital and print media don’t have to be mutually exclusive as Neudorf’s interventions illuminate. 

Nostalgia, impermanence, and archiving inform much of Neudorf’s practice as she moves along this border between material and immaterial terrains. Neudorf’s experience working with BlackFlash Expanded allowed her the time and support to explore the experiences of what is permanent both in physical and digital forms, including the accessibility of the online archive. She contrasts the seemingly permanent online archive with re-photography of the receipt paper collage. While the viewer sees both representations at the same time, they recognize the symbiotic relationship between the physical and digital. Working with physical materials that will degrade adds a feeling of discomfort and worry, while the digital is interpreted as a convenient way of archiving and preserving memories. Neudorf’s GIFs preserve both the original and the altered together in one flashing moment while also increasing the ease of access to an audience that compressed files offer.

This series of work creates an aesthetic, digital experience similar to that of flipping through a magazine. Developed through experimentation while working on the back end of the website, Neudorf’s work helps us see the harmonious ways in which computers and software can lead to interesting questions about the importance of physical publishing. It is reassuring to remove the “either/or” scenarios that attempt to highlight tension between physical and digital publishing. Within her work, there is an echo of analog media that informs how we experience the digital and allows the viewer to contemplate the history of technology and how it will continue to move with us.

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Emilie Neudorf is an emerging artist from Saskatoon SK, treaty 6 territory. She holds a BA double major in Sociology and Fine art (2019) and a BFA (2021) from the University of Saskatchewan. Her work has been shown at Nuit Blanche Saskatoon 2019, Nuit Blanche Eve USask 2019 & 2020, Saskatoon Fringe Festival, PAVED Arts (Saskatoon, SK), and The Gallery/Art Placement (Saskatoon, SK). Working in drawing, painting, and photography, Emilie explores the histories and shifting functions of social spaces – presenting questions about what public and private architecture reveals about the people and cultures who create and use them.

Athanasia Perdikaris holds two Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Saskatchewan (U of S). She is an educator within the public school setting, is a program guide with Remai Modern and teaches painting with Community Arts. Through her volunteer and academic experiences she is fortunate to continue her relationship to arts and culture and seeks to serve the public in ways that allows connection between community and the dynamic work done by Prairie artists. As a writer Perdikaris looks to continue to support artists and grow the relationships and benefits that can be availed through the arts with audiences by valuing their interpretive experiences.