Screen Genealogies

From Optical Device to Environmental Medium

Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, Francesco Casetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040782255
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Digital Media

Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, Screen Genealogies argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen nor of the video display. Rather, screens continually exceed the optical histories in which they are most commonly inscribed. As contemporary screens become increasingly decomposed into a distributed field of technologically interconnected surfaces and interfaces, we more readily recognize the deeper spatial and environmental interventions that have long been a property of screens. For most of its history, a screen was a filter, a divide, a shelter, or a camouflage. A genealogy stressing transformation and descent rather than origins and roots emphasizes a deeper set of intersecting and competing definitions of the screen, enabling new thinking about what the screen might yet become.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Primal Screens
• 2 ‘Schutz und Schirm’: Screening in German During Early Modern Times
• 3 Face and Screen: Toward a Genealogy of the Media Façade
• 4 Sensing Screens: From Surface to Situation
• 5 ‘Taking the Plunge’: The New Immersive Screens
• 6 The Atmospheric Screen: Turner, Hazlitt, Ruskin
• 7 The Fog Medium: Visualizing and Engineering the Atmosphere
• 8 The Charge of a Light Barricade: Optics and Ballistics in the Ambiguous Being of Screens
• 9 Flat Bayreuth: A Genealogy of Opera as Screened
• 10 Imaginary Screens: The Hypnotic Gesture and Early Film
• 11 Material Human Divine Notes on the Vertical Screen
• Acknowledgments
• Index