SHOWING THE SEAMS

Within the report, Your Immoral Artificial Ear appears in “Showing the seams”, where Good Screens looks more closely at its visual language and construction.

Rather than enclosing its wires, circuit board and electronic components within a smooth, finished shell, the Artificial Ear brings these normally hidden parts to the surface. Its transparent casing keeps the internal structure visible; wires extend openly from the device, making it appear less like a sealed consumer product and more like a structure whose workings remain present.

Good Screens describes this as an “inside-out approach to design.” The report considers not only the visual effect of exposed electronics, but what it might mean to let a machine reveal itself today. At a time when technology is increasingly concealed behind seamless interfaces, uniform surfaces and inaccessible systems, showing the construction of a device can suggest a different kind of directness — even a certain honesty.

The report also identifies a sense of nostalgia, or anemoia, in this visual language: not simply a retro aesthetic, but a longing for another imagination of technology, before electronic devices became increasingly clean, closed and opaque.

This offers another way of reading the Artificial Ear. Its sense of the future does not come from inventing a new technology. It uses familiar forms of digital storage, electronic playback and Bluetooth transmission. What changes is how these existing technologies are put together, what kind of object they become, and what kind of relationship we are invited to have with them.