Greetings, fellow DIY enthusiasts! Last week, we turned our attention to a dripping faucet by listening closely, catching what we could, or just accepting that jiggling the handle counts as problem-solving…or at least a form of performance art. If you clocked in for a few minutes with that drip, redirecting frustration into attention, welcome back. Your attention to attention is what a creative person (that’s YOU) needs to survive in our high tech, over-caffeinated world.
This week’s creative nudge lives between you and everything else: the screen smudge.
You know the one. That cloudy streaks on your phone. The soft palm-print on your laptop. The mysterious blur on the television that makes you wonder whether you need a new screen or new eyes. Is this technology failing, or am I?
I have this thought more often than I’d like to admit. Am I due for a new television, or do I need to tidy up? Is this laptop display failing, or are my eyes tired? Is the movie poorly shot, or am I looking at it through a layer of fingerprints, dust, and snacks?
Screen smudges live in that uncomfortable middle space between object and observer. They are not glitches in the software. They are not failures of design. They are the inevitable residue of human contact—link clicking, doom scrolling, nose prints from leaning too close in moments of YouTube mesmerizing. They are proof that bodies are still involved in this supposedly frictionless digital world.
Here’s how I negotiate this issue. I tilt my head. I squint. I wipe the screen with a part of my T-shirt, making things worse. Or I ignore it because I’m not sure what the problem actually is. Plus, the lens cloth is in an entirely different room! The smudge begs a philosophical question: is this an upgrade issue, a maintenance issue, or a self-care issue?
Didn’t our mothers teach us anything? In a world increasingly designed for seamless digital experiences, screen smudges are stubbornly human. A robot world would not have smudges. A purely digital world would not need screens at all. Smudges only exist because we insist on touching things.
This matters for how we experience art.
More and more, art meets us through glass. Paintings flattened into pixels. Films compressed into handheld rectangles. Sculptures swiped left on social feeds. You are definitely reading this right now through a screen. We judge composition, color, and meaning through screens already compromised by glare, fatigue, compression…and smudges.
Artists have always known this. Vision is malleable. Perspective is biased. Clarity? Temporary. So instead of treating the smudge as something to correct, let’s spend a few minutes treating it as evidence. A record of interaction between human and machine.
Put those busy fingers to good use with one or more of these small provocations:
1. Smudge Study: Look at an image, artwork, or video through the smudge. Then clean the screen and look again. What changed? The image, or your relationship to it?
2. Touch Screen: With a soft cloth or your finger, gently trace the shape of the smudge. Or lay a sheet of white paper over the image and copy it. Treat it like a map of use, habit, or attention. If you uncover a password, keep that to yourself!
3. Smear Job: Make a deliberate smudge somewhere appropriate. One fingerprint. One swipe. Then stop. What’s the difference between accidental marks and intentional ones?
4. Curmudgeon Smudging: Write a short paragraph about something in your life that feels “smudged.” Not broken. Not clear. Just slightly obscured. What would happen if you stopped trying to wipe it away immediately?
Screen smudges remind us that perception is always negotiated. We rarely see things directly; we see them through tools, habits, expectations, and fatigue. Art doesn’t arrive untouched, and neither do we.
Enjoy a few minutes for yourself this week. Before you wipe the screen clean, sit with the flaw. Ask what’s really obscuring your view. Sometimes what looks like a technical problem is really a perceptual one—and sometimes the smudge is just proof that you are here, touching the world, trying to understand it better.
This column was written with the help of ChatGPT 5.2, used as a creative collaborator in my ongoing exploration of how humans can stay human in an era of unprecedented technological change.
