Günther Selichar
Screen, Cold # 6
Screen, Cold # 6, 1997-1998
Ilfochrome, 125 x 246 cm
Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur, gift Günther Selichar
2000-003-001
b. 1960 (Linz, AT), lives and works in Vienna, AT
Günther Selichar’s banks of ‘cold’ computer screens – switched-off monitors – underline the fact that the screen has become, in effect, the new panel painting of the twenty-first century. It is both a source of information and a portal for our desires. The ‘window’ of the screen does not open outwards, but radiates inwardly on to our faces. Silently, unemotionally, technologically it cancels our direct sensual perceptions, allowing signs to swim formlessly upon its milky surface. The cold screen embodies cool, quiet monochrome. The ‘hot’, or switched-on, screen is the epitome of chattering, ever-changing information. Selichar describes his stringent, cool photographs of these monitors, as “interfaces between seeing and showing”.