Stephen Burstow. Moving-image installation portraying a couple whose shared bed is invaded by the small screens of their smartphones and tablets.
Screening Bedtime is a three-channel moving-image installation that portrays a couple whose shared bed is invaded by the small screens of their smartphones and tablets. Through these devices, they work, play, attempt to sleep and are finally pulled back into the waking world. Their screens heighten the pleasure of mutual face-to-face engagement and also facilitate the building of private zones to exclude the other, even in this most intimate of spaces. The struggle between the proximate pull of the bed partner and the virtual seduction of the screen image is played out in Screening Bedtime using thermal imagery: a visualising of body heat that radiates out beyond cutaneous barriers.
The performances were improvised by two of Australia’s best-known contemporary dance performer/creators, Kristina Chan and Timothy Ohl, based on their own life experiences. The sound design, by Daniel Jenatsch, while operating as a film score, also uses sounds from the natural world as analogues for somatic processes.
Stephen Burstow is a Sydney-based visual artist, lecturer and filmmaker. As a director he has specialised in performing arts projects for film, television and digital media. His dance films have been awarded internationally. His recent PhD research investigated the circulation of images of people on smartphones and tablets, through historical parallels (the nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photographic portrait and the sixteenth-century portrait miniature) and contemporary contexts. The twenty-first-century engagement with handheld screen devices was explored through the insinuation of these screens into the most intimate domestic space: the shared bed.
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