In his 1995 essay entitled "An Archaeology of the Computer Screen", Lev Manovich acknowledges the disappearance of a century-old media typology and the associated "framing" tendencies. Rooted in the birth of cinema, the era of "dynamic screens" (non-interactive animated images) was falling into disuse with the spread of multi-human workspaces of personal computing. Computers, ATMs and car dashboards were the new visual regime.

While much has changed in the two decades since Manovich’s survey of our viewing habits - we are now going back and forth between media on our smartphones and watching movies in web browsers - the screen always exerts an indisputable hold on our attention. This is the topic that Matthew was interested in to create Serial Mutations (z-axis), which is an installation playing with both the primacy of the screen and the perception of its viewers.