In a culture that lets cameras eat first, we neglect to live in the moment and experience the world around us. Photos of our food are taken before we eat, and we record those who need help instead of giving them a hand. Out of Touch, a multimedia art piece by In Sun Oh, intersperses text with photographic images to examine our society’s habit of consuming images without really seeing them. In an era of smartphones, Oh suggests, people miss out on the world around them by living life through a screen.

In Out of Touch, Oh strives to reverse the norms of an image-obsessed generation by portraying a moment in time before an image becomes a picture. The catalyst for experiencing the moment comes from texts that describe the images about to be displayed. The images of the described scenes are only presented after the text, and only fleetingly. The text summons a mental image that we must invest our imaginations to sustain prior to the photograph. Leaning into everyday experience, Oh flashes images of everyday life, such as scenes of people in parks and on the street. These images—which are presented in black and white—evoke nostalgia and contrast how we have become out of touch with reality. These everyday moments often go unnoticed due to our focus on technology that blinds us to our current surroundings. We live within these moments without truly experiencing them. By immersing us into these scenes’ descriptions and restraining the visual, Out of Touch invites the audience to explore those moments and to invest in the imagination of images yet to come.