In his Screen Grease series (2017-ongoing), Pete Fleming focuses on the sticky residues left on touch screens. Noting the urge to wipe clear a smartphone before showing an image to a friend, he zooms in on this weird moment as a familiar experience that demonstrates the conceptual research behind the work. When a display is augmented by your own fleshy residue, the distinction between the body, device, and image is both emphasized and literally and figuratively blurred. Born in 1987, he sees these daily transgressions between bodies and images as an everyday experience of the cyborg, as defined by Donna Haraway in A MANIFESTO FOR CYBORGS: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIALIST FEMINISM IN THE 1980s (1985):

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organ­ism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction… The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transforma­tion.

Read in the present context, these passages capture the essence of a generation transformed by mobile data, camera phones, and social media. Previous iterations of this series have seen photographs embedded in silicone rubber, pierced and stretched within sculptural assemblages, becoming a vestigial and flexible image. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we have become closer than ever to our screens. The early focus on surface transmission and hand washing made the sight of fingerprints on shiny glass a combination of fear, shame, and a stark reminder of our mortality.