An exploration of the grammar of our navigation in the digital realm. Up, down. Left, right. Scroll up. Scroll down. Swipe left. Swipe right. It’s flat, but we move through it. These motions have become second nature, yet they come loaded with meaning. Swipe left, swipe right. A decision, a judgment, a gesture.
I come from a generation that met the screen when it first came into the home — not as a window to everything, but as a place. My first computer was an Amstrad CPC-464, mid-to-late ’80s. It had a green monitor — all colours rendered as shades of that glowing phosphor green. Most games then — the ones with real movement, real action — used the keyboard. Q for up, A for down, O for left, P for right. Spacebar to fire.
Those keys were actual buttons. They required pressure. Muscle. Response. There’s something wholesome about that now. Something we’ve lost. The tactile is missing. Not just from digital media, but maybe from life more broadly. The feel of keys under fingers has been replaced by the swipe, the tap, the barely-there gesture on a pane of glass. The screen — our portal, our tool, our trap — is flat. Charlie Brooker called it the black mirror, and it is.
In this piece, I wanted to reflect that flatness — the artificial surface, the pixelated logic — but balance it with something more human. Something made. Traditional mark making. Hand-drawn lines, physical gestures. To bring back a sense of the body, the hand, the imperfection.
