OCEAN VIEW: WE CAME ALL THIS WAY TO LOOK AT A SCREEN
Margarita Ceko | EXISTENTIAL OBSERVATIONS
A person can travel to the other side of the world, spend a considerable amount on a holiday and sit down in front of the ocean with their eyes on a phone. Someone they came with may be sitting beside them doing the same thing, while a place that took money, planning and effort to reach becomes the background to whatever is happening on their screens. This familiar situation became the subject of OCEAN VIEW, my acrylic painting from the Existential Observations series.
I see versions of it throughout daily life, from people checking their phones between exercises at the gym to an audience recording a concert. Even when filming is prohibited, someone will try to capture a fragment, perhaps the applause, so there is something to publish showing that they attended. The desire to have evidence of an experience becomes part of the experience itself, and the people watching the recording later receive attention from the person who is still there.
A publication can also serve as a way of announcing that we continue to exist, that something is happening in our lives and that we are participating in the world. We attend, photograph, upload and wait for a response, using the device to maintain contact with people who may be geographically distant while someone within speaking distance receives considerably less interest. The same technology supports both activities so comfortably that the difference can pass without much consideration.
AN OCEAN OF INDIFFERENCE
At a bus stop, a phone gives a person something to look at while waiting, including a way to avoid meeting another person’s eyes. An unoccupied moment could allow a conversation, but reaching for a device fills it immediately and provides a familiar activity with an apparently endless supply of things to read, watch or respond to. Speaking to someone nearby requires a different kind of effort, including the possibility of awkwardness, an unexpected response or a conversation that fails to become interesting.
The device also provides an effective social hiding place because its purpose is private. Someone may be managing a business, answering a consequential message, writing something substantial or watching cat videos, and a person sitting opposite them has very limited access to that distinction. Holding a phone and looking absorbed is enough to communicate that we are occupied, which allows us to avoid explaining why we are giving our attention to it.
This becomes particularly noticeable when people have chosen to spend time together. A couple at a restaurant or friends beside a swimming pool can spend long periods attending to separate screens, with their conversation fitted around whatever appears on them. When someone looks up, the other person may still be absorbed, and reaching for their own phone provides an immediate way to fill that interval. Both have access to something more familiar than trying to recover the other person’s attention.
OCEAN VIEW also refers to an ocean of indifference between people. Someone sitting beside us can become part of the surroundings while a person, image or conversation on a screen receives our active interest. We may fail to notice the person nearby, or we may prefer to avoid the encounter, with the device accommodating either possibility. A shared table or holiday can contain this distance even when everyone appears comfortable and everything has been arranged for people to enjoy being together.
There is a form of social bankruptcy in having so much available to communicate through and finding so few reasons to address the person beside us. For someone accustomed to handling every pause with a device, conversation can feel demanding by comparison. The screen already contains familiar interests and offers immediate alternatives whenever something becomes tedious, while another human being requires patience and a willingness to engage with something we have not selected in advance.
HOW A PLACE BECOMES DESIRABLE
The device may also have helped create the desire to visit the place where we are now sitting. A hotel, beach or restaurant first appears as an image, perhaps repeatedly, until it becomes familiar enough to imagine ourselves there. We begin to consider how that experience might fit into our lives, what it would feel like to visit and what it might look like to be the person in the photograph.
Travel advertising, personal recommendations and other people’s holiday posts all participate in this process. A view becomes a destination, and the destination becomes something to save for, book and anticipate. By the time we arrive, we may already know the angle from which we want to photograph it and the impression we want to share. Considerable effort can go into recreating an image that originally made us want to travel.
An ocean view has a particular place in this economy of desire. Hotels and property listings identify it as a feature worth paying for, and people make decisions about rooms, restaurants and holidays around the prospect of looking out at the water. In OCEAN VIEW, that desirable setting is available to the people sitting there, alongside the phones that continue to occupy them. Having access to the experience leaves the habit of reaching for a device intact.
Our gadgets participate in what we want as well as what we do with our time. The next destination may already be appearing among messages and photographs from the current one, offering another place to imagine ourselves enjoying. Someone can be sitting in a location they previously admired through a screen while using that screen to consider where they would prefer to go next.
CREATING, CONSUMING AND LOOKING OCCUPIED
These devices also contain real work, responsibilities and relationships, which makes the scene more complicated than a collection of people wasting time. Someone creates the material that someone else reads or watches, a business depends on a reply, and a conversation with a distant person may matter deeply. Phones, tablets and laptops allow much of this activity to continue in the same places where other people are trying to rest or spend time together.
From the outside, very different uses produce a similar posture. We see someone looking at a device, with their availability to the surrounding people reduced, while the reason remains uncertain. Productive work, entertainment, obligation and avoidance can follow one another within the same session. The person using the device may move through all of them without giving much thought to how long they have been occupied or what is happening around them.
That uncertainty is part of the observation in the painting. A viewer can recognise the behaviour immediately while having their own interpretation of what each person might be doing. We have become familiar with this social arrangement, in which people share a physical setting while directing their interest towards separate activities on their devices.
THE OBSERVATIONS THAT BECAME OCEAN VIEW
OCEAN VIEW grew from seeing this behaviour repeatedly in ordinary life and bringing it into a scene of leisure. The poolside group gives it a setting associated with pleasure, travel and the opportunity to spend time in desirable surroundings. Looking at the phones within that scene raises questions about what people seek from these experiences and how much attention they give them once they are there.
The ocean of indifference belongs within the same image because the people have more than a view available to them. There are other human beings close enough to speak to, share something with or acknowledge, and a device offers a convenient way to avoid all three. Someone may have travelled a great distance to enjoy the company of another person and still spend much of that time with a screen between them.
Perhaps one of the people in the painting is already comparing hotels for the next trip, looking for another setting that promises something worth experiencing. Their next ocean view may already be taking shape on the device in their hand, while the person beside them continues looking at their own.
OCEAN VIEW, 2026. Acrylic on canvas. EXISTENTIAL OBSERVATIONS. Margarita Ceko.
