Pixels move like silver confetti, glinting with each shift of the light. Behind and beneath them the stagnant, milky green pool of a fountain sits still.

I walk to meet Corinna and around me in the city blinking screens catch my attention; hyper-real lives in tropical destinations against grey skies, buildings clad in LED. Samsung. Intermittently I pass others flicking through the screens of their phones, some with intent, others on limitless, non-determined pathways; often, I think, I do this too.

They’re all green screens.

Turn around and Corinna is sitting, on a small screen this time; but it is not Corinna anymore because her face is a screen. Turn around again and the goldfish are back.

‘I was thinking a lot about Duchamp’s ‘The Large Glass,’’ Corinna tells me. An artwork to be looked both at and through, composed of many individually sourced pieces and two accidentally (perfectly) broken panes of glass. I think of glass surfaces, windows and light; if you look at the right angle, they form their own green screens.

Fingers are gently massaging something that looks fairly similar to whipped cream,

though you can’t be sure, and the colours change and its RGB green and then its CMYK black, and it is being slowly, slowly pulled back-and-forth.

If you take a photo what part of your memory of that moment belongs to you and what part belongs to the device it is stored in?

Baby pink, baby blue, it is rustling, beeping and shuffling in an ASMR free-for-all. Hello Kitty is floating in a balloon next to a pink unicorn with a blue mane, and the wind farms keep rotating in the distance.

It’s all hand-held, shot on a phone, ordinary, mostly things you could see every day depending on if and where you looked. Hyper real, but not in the same way the LED buildings are hyper-real; its super imposed and they aren’t, anymore.

The emergency flare is going off for the third or maybe fourth time (perhaps it never stopped) and behind it Corinna must have been walking through some lush German looking woods. On the other side what looks like another flare – or maybe the same – is passing through the ceiling light.

It’s a blinking monster and it’s shuffling and twisting and swaying from side to side, it’s a bride, she’s running away from her bachelors, it’s invisible vision. I can see a man with his Apple Watch on the street, he’s making a call through it and we watch on as his own host of spectators. There’s a system error; there’s no such thing as a private domain anymore.

I can see the fountain again, but the goldfish aren’t in it.

PDF download here: RebeccaMcCauley_Traces_of_the_Real