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Screen technologies, ranging from the cinema to the smartphone, are taken for granted in the contemporary screen landscape. This landscape has been referred to as the “screen-sphere” (Sobchack 2014) owing to the fundamental ways screens affect how people understand and relate to the world around them. It is particularly their structural and operative functioning as interfaces that influence not so much how we use screens, but, more importantly, how they affect our communication with and feelings towards others. In so doing, the screen as an interface profoundly transforms people’s capacity for empathy. This article exposes the intersection of the screen and the face of the celebrity persona in an artwork by Candice Breitz titled Love Story (2016). Since the installation focuses attention on the faces of its subjects, it utilises the enormous power of the face in generating empathic responses. More specifically, the face of the celebrity persona cultivates both fascination and empathy in this work. Through a close analysis of this installation, I aim to show how empathy can be controlled and manipulated just as much as it can be compromised due to our screen-based day-to-day practices and our interactions with the faces of others. This article also demonstrates the crucial role that an artwork can play in raising awareness about the consequences of screens on our empathic resonance with others.

This essay argues that the digitization and proliferation of contemporary screens has moved us from a “screen-scape” to an encompassing “screen-sphere” – a new topologically-bounded and systemically-organized domain that has not only radically changed our lifeworld but also our ontological and epistemological comportment in it. With reference to recent cartoons and other popular discourses as well as to Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela’s description of, and distinction between, “autonomous” and “autopoietic systems,” the essay speculates on the organizational structure of this new “screen-sphere” and, more significant, our positioning in relation to it.