In the context of digital photography, superimposition refers to a technique where images or elements are layered or combined to create a composite image. In Over the Top, Lucía Símon Medina has superimposed familiar faces atop one another. The effect is somewhere between the familiar and uncanny, and amalgamated mixture of identifiable faces to form a cohesive “profile.”

In media universes, such layering of profiles is constant. We swipe through images of friends, politicians and potential lovers. These faces are processed by the algorithms, and by our brains, into a kind of collective singularity. Where the masses become reduced into one semi-human figure, accessible with the palm of our hand or swipe of a finger. 

The selected figures that form Over the Top are figures crucial to our understanding of digital technology, historically and presently. The first of such figures is “Clever Hans,” a horse that in early 20th century Germany was tasked with performing arithmetic and intellectual tasks – challenging conceptions of intelligence as reserved to non-human entities. We subsequently find the composite of Ada Lovelace, Leonardo Torres Quevedo; Alan Turing y John von Neuman: the figures who influenced the development of the modern computer. Proceeding them: Grace Hopper, computer scientist and the first scientist to devise the theory of machine-independent programming language. Hopper’s image is layered with visual interpretations of mythological characters La Anjana and La Lamia, ancient figures of justice and ecology, whose name META used for the deep sea cables landing in Santander.  Finally, we find the hybrids of portraits of each of the five largest technology companies in the world, Larry Page & Sergei Brin (Alphabet); Bill Gates & PaulGardner Allen (Microsoft); Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak (Apple); Jeffrey Preston Bezos (Amazon) and Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (Meta). Through these superimpositionings, Simón Medina calls us to consider the humans that drive technology, but importantly, how technology in turn renders our conception of the human. Working with a human hand, what does it mean to communicate what forms and drives the technology in a way that does justice to its materiality, and simultaneous abstraction? 

Though technology may feel immaterial, “a cloud,” a gentle touch screen, the soft voice of a smart assistant – it is absolutely material. “Material” is literally defined as “the matter from which a thing is or can be made,” that which is tactile, palpable, present. Materialism, the philosophy of material, is the study of how matter shapes being, and how conditions form structures. Materialist views on technology thus relate to the physical matter of technology (peoples, cables, heat, etc.), and close investigation on the actions, persons, and conflicts that have driven what Mackenzie Wark refers to as kind of vectorialism, or techno-feudal state.[1]

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In 2018, a major legal dispute between Bumble and Match Group—Tinder’s parent company—captured international headlines. Match Group, an internet and technology firm based in Dallas, Texas, owns a portfolio of dating platforms including Hinge, OkCupid, and Tinder, among others. With a market capitalization estimated at $7.52 billion and an enterprise value of $10.4 billion, the company describes its mission as “empowering connections through technology.” 

Upon opening Match Group’s website, two figures standing by a river at sunset are looped together by a glowing blue infinity symbol—a visual echo of the company’s logo—suggesting connection, duration, and capture through contact. This image accompanies a stripped-down mission statement: “We are unending in our pursuit to build and integrate technology that will bring people together. It’s the catalyst for everything we introduce—from the Swipe feature® to social discovery.”

That trademark symbol hovering beside “Swipe” is a legal relic—an awkward residue of Match Group’s battle with Bumble over ownership of the swiping gesture. The two-year patent dispute, initiated by Tinder, claimed that Bumble had copied its card-swipe-based, mutual opt-in interface. The lawsuit ignited a larger debate: Can an “abstract idea”—in this case, the directional motion of a finger across glass—be legally owned? Though the companies eventually reached a joint agreement to end litigation, the case exposed deeper questions about the boundaries between the material and the immaterial, the concrete and the abstract, within software design. When does a finger’s movement on a screen become valuable enough to justify legal protection? How do the valuation principles of the platform economy hinge on the evasion, erasure or necessity of physicality?

Dating apps like Tinder and Bumble are just one node within the broader platform economy. This economy does not merely refer to the rise of digital technologies, but to the way such technologies reshape markets and accelerate capitalist logics. As platforms proliferate, they crystallize not only into daily routines but into forms of existence—what might be called a “platformized being,” where the personal and professional blur into a neoliberal assemblage of work-as-life.[2] Within this state, the question of the material resurfaces repeatedly.

Software innovation often appears to expand by abstraction—or rather, it becomes abstract in its very expansion. As cloud computing grows in capacity, data centers emit more heat. Screens become more responsive, consumption faster, and access to people more instantaneous. In what Ofri Cnaani terms a “contactless condition,” we are prompted to ask: where are the limits of valuation in the platform economy? And where—if anywhere—can material limits still be detected? Is the act of touching a device already primed for commodification? Why does this question matter for how we think about the economics of digital experience?[3]

The dispute between Tinder and Bumble over the swipe—over who owns the design of how fingers touch glass with purpose—invites us to read technology through the lens of human-device tactility. While data may be abstracted, its generation depends on physical interaction—on gestures, touches, and the affective choreography of desire. 

How, then, do we discuss the materiality of tech? The binary of material vs. immaterial may not be enough. The seamless metaphor of “the cloud” masks the heat of the server farm. And yet, abstraction is not without touch. There is something profoundly physical—though partial—in the sleek interfaces we use daily. This is a cropped materiality, one that feels real but elides the weight and consequence of the infrastructure behind it. It is not the materiality of undersea cables laid by hand, or the slow assembly of hardware. Instead, it is a touch that grants immediate access—a gestural shortcut to gratification and the immediate urgency of possession. 

It is not a materiality grounded in repetition, friction, or burden. It is not patterned by labor, nor marked by wear. It is a choreography of convenience: a finger gliding across glass toward desire, toward a “match,” that is perhaps consumed to never be (physically) realized. 

In the work of Lucia Simón Medina, we are invited to imagine technology beyond the binary of material and immaterial. 

Medina doesn’t only show us the cables—at times, we are asked to hear them, disrupting the dominant logic of vision as the primary mode of understanding. What if we listened to the infrastructure? Would the digital become more physical—or perhaps transform into an atmosphere, one we must inhabit in new, more embodied ways? Medina’s work is not a quick glide towards visual consumption. She repeats, she charts, she asks us to look or hear extremely closely, as she has done.

Her works dance along the line of abstract affective understanding of technology as driven by human action and psychology, and physical, arduous sensibility. She asks us to think with this double gaze, to see technology through its dualisms. 

Recently, a friend asked: What if instead of swiping through images on Tinder, we heard voices? I extended the idea—what if there were options beyond yes or no? Would patents emerge from such an interface? What kind of legal disputes might erupt as a result? Could a voice, or a pause, be litigated? Could refusal be owned?

[1]  Wark, M. (2019). Capital is dead: Is this something worse? Verso.

[2] Mörtenböck, P., & Mooshammer, H. (Eds.). (2021). Platform urbanism and its discontents. nai010 publishers.

[3] Cnaani, O. (2021). Measures of closeness: The contactless condition. In P. Mörtenböck & H. Mooshammer (Eds.), Platform urbanism and its discontents (pp. 229–238). nai010 publishers.