Teresa Mayr—Google Earth Book

“Teresa Mayr’s drawings do not show a homogeneous image space but rather a confluence of fragments from different screen surfaces: A view from Google Earth, a WhatsApp message, an Instagram post, a text file, the result of an image search—all this and much more can appear on the same sheet, even overlap, and thus increase one’s awareness of how many different things one is offered almost simultaneously on one screen. Most of it also calls for interaction, at least entices you to get involved directly, and so anyone sitting in front of a desktop or looking at their smartphone is always already in multitasking mode. Teresa Mayr’s drawings represent the artistic reflection about and coming to fruition of all this; in many delicate strokes that often almost seem to be dancing, they visualize the ‘agility,’ and indeed the velocity, of the goings-on on a screen.

For many people, looking at screens is their everyday life; in purely temporal terms, it may even constitute their first reality. It's where they learn news from around the world, exchange private messages, inform themselves and converse with others. Via screen, they experience at least as much as they used to when they went outdoors and set off on walks or journeys. So it’s only natural now to rather capture what can be seen on screens than to draw in nature. This leaves the ‘added value’ of drawing unchanged: It immobilizes something one is otherwise actively connected with, and not even specifically aware of as long as one lives in and with it. Just as a peasant in Caspar David Friedrich’s time worked in nature and was only able to see his living world as such through drawings of trees or landscape paintings, today digital natives also need drawings or other static images without interactive features to be able to recognize what shapes their own reality at all.”

— Excerpt from Wolfgang Ullrich's essay Trips on Screen—Teresa Mayr's Drawings