The Screen Media Reader

Stephen Monteiro

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501311673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

As mobile communication, social media, wireless networks, and flexible user interfaces become prominent topics in the study of media and culture, the screen emerges as a critical research area. This reader brings together insightful and influential texts from a variety of sources-theorists, researchers, critics, inventors, and artists-that explore the screen as a fundamental element not only in popular culture but also in our very understanding of society and the world. The Screen Media Reader is a foundational resource for studying the screen and its cultural impact. Through key contemporary and historical texts addressing the screen's development and role in communications and the social sphere, it considers how the screen functions as an idea, an object, and an everyday experience. Reflecting a number of descriptive and analytical approaches, these essays illustrate the astonishing range and depth of the screen's introduction and application in multiple media configurations and contexts. Together they demonstrate the long-standing influence of the screen as a cultural concept and communication tool that extends well beyond contemporary debates over screen saturation and addiction.

SECTION ONE

Screens and Their Histories

Introduction to Section One

Is there anyone who does not know what a screen is or how it works? This is a reasonable question when toddlers recognize and effectively manipulate screens before they can walk and talk. A screen could be anything from a smartphone to the side of a building, however. It has developed in different directions over the centuries, contributing to some of the oldest visual media, such as drawing (through projection tracings), as well as to most of the newest.

With its frequent appearance in the everyday, one would think the screen is relatively easy to define, even if it is often overlooked or taken for granted. We all know a screen when we see one, after all. But this is becoming less and less the case as screens increasingly mimic other forms of image systems and become embedded more deeply in other objects. Describing the screen presents a remarkably difficult task. Smartphones equipped with “transparent screen” effects and laser-projection keyboards, for example, at once diminish and amplify the screen for their users. In many circumstances it may be easier to survey one’s surroundings and point to specific examples of the screen than formulate a satisfactory general description. In truth one might point just about anywhere, since nearly any material surface or object can serve as a screen. Light may be projected onto an opaque plane or pass through any semi-translucent material to produce visible forms or images. Screens, or at least screen-like occurrences, can be observed in nature, as when we watch the shadows cast on the ground by objects intercepting sunlight. Nevertheless, we tend to think of screens as products of cultural practice, designed specifically for the display of changing—usually light-based—visual information.

This section of the reader presents several approaches to explaining what screens are and how they got to be this way. Essays in the first part, entitled “Screen Identities,” take on the task of identifying the screen’s fundamental properties and functions, a critical exercise if one is to study the screen in greater depth. Charles Acland points out the potential obstacles in this pursuit. The screen “is not in and of itself a medium, format, or platform,” he states. “Rather, it is often an in-between manifestation of all three, one that materializes how we come to see and describe the differences and connections among television, film, computers, electronic signage, and digital spaces.” In his essay, Acland supplies several examples that complicate our sense of screens and suggests that their abundance along our path often makes us less aware of them. Not only have they become part of our environment but, like plastic in the mid-twentieth century, they come to define that environment. Any attempt to impose a hierarchy of screens, then, ultimately hinders our ability to study screen culture.

FIGURE I.1 Early steps in learning to live through the screen: a toddler interacts with an iPad, 2012. Photo: Tia Henriksen.

Francesco Casetti explains that we have reached a critical point in the history of the screen, where the term “screen” may no longer suffice to describe our relationship with these image surfaces. The metaphors of window, frame, and mirror that imply a viewer gazing at scenes that bear a resemblance to physical reality are no longer valid. Casetti offers in their stead the metaphors of the monitor, bulletin board, and scrapbook to better convey our contemporary screen views and habits. As a frame for the continual flow of data, whether we pay attention to it or not, the screen transforms into a simple display surface for Casetti, one that presents many forms of information, from the time to texts.

No matter what information they display, or how we interact with them, screens follow certain rules determined by technical constraints and cultural patterns of organizing visual information. Sean Cubitt has charted the relation between these, exploring the ideological, ecological, and cultural consequences of the screen’s development and deployment. From the mining of rare earths for color screen components to the endurance of the raster grid as the surface’s organizing pattern, Cubitt demonstrates that a basic understanding of the screen’s technological aspects and their political economic implications remains beyond most users. Yet, he argues, “these technological features both express a particular quality of contemporary social life and retransmit it: They are normative technologies. Here lies their importance, for such structures express the nature of public life in particular, and they rearticulate it.” If we do not make an effort to question the screen and what this material object tells us about global socio-ideological dynamics, he warns, then we are only shortchanging ourselves and the possibilities for positive change.

Anne Friedberg, who wrote what may be a field-defining book for studying the screen, identifies the multiplication of on-screen frames as a defining characteristic of digital interface. Ironically, the window metaphor returns in her account of computing’s contribution to the screen, but the screen-as-window is replaced by Microsoft’s Windows and its derivatives. “For Alberti, the metaphor of the window implied direct, veridical, and unmediated vision, transparency of surface or aperture, and transmitted light. The computer ‘window’ implies its opposite,” Friedberg explains. Screens guided by software manifest an increase in screen representations within the frame, breaking down the cohesion of the surface and complicating our understanding of what screen and screen space entail. It is only our direct interaction with these surfaces and frames that give them their sense and meaning.

William Henry Fox Talbot lived in the relatively screen-free environment of Victorian England. However, as one of the inventors of photography, he would make a major contribution to the technologies behind modern screen culture. In this regard his fantastical poem “The Magic Mirror” is an intriguing text. This Romantic ballad of a wizard, his daughter, and their castle centers on a veiled mirror that perfectly matches Acland’s definition of the screen as “a surface for animation.” The mirror not only presents moving images of an imaginary space, but also literally reshapes the world that surrounds it, as human interaction with the surface has direct—catastrophic—consequences. Is it a prophetic, cautionary tale for the screens that surround us today? That Talbot wrote his poem in 1830, several years before he embarked on the experiments leading to photography, makes it all the more remarkable, speaking to a “screen” sensibility in play behind the embryonic stages of modern visual technologies.

Understanding what the screen is rests in part on knowing what it has been as both an idea and an object. The second part of this section, “Evolution and Revolution,” brings together essays that trace the varied roots of, and historical influences on, today’s screens and our feelings about them. Plato’s allegory of the cave opens this section because it is one of the oldest and most widely disseminated descriptions of a screen world. It would be hard to ascribe to Plato’s work any direct influence on the rise of the screen or screen culture. However, this ancient conceptualization of being and knowledge where “the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images” may help explain the enduring uneasiness that often accompanies our reliance on screens. The common and paradoxical belief that all screens offer both more and less in their influence on our perception finds its seed in the paradigm of Plato’s imaginary cave.

Erkki Huhtamo, a pioneer in the branch of media studies known as media archaeology, considers the historical development of objects, narratives, and practices that manifest—and contribute to—the idea of the screen as visual mediation. As he states, “Identifying the inherited lurking behind the ‘extraordinary’ may lead to a better appreciation of ‘the new’.” Huhtamo introduced this endeavor in his 2004 essay “Elements of Screenology,” where he effectively differentiated researching the screen from what had misleadingly been called “screen studies.” In his contribution here, Huhtamo has revisited, updated, and expanded this earlier work. He offers new historical examples across several centuries while refining key aspects of his theories in demonstrating the complex histories and competing desires that have informed our understandings of—and engagement with—the screen as a cultural tool.

Unlike Huhtamo’s rhizomatic approach, Lev Manovich traces a more defined, teleological evolution of the screen and screen practices. In invoking a genealogy that begins with Leon Battista Alberti’s window of Renaissance painting, he describes a progression of three screen types—the classical screen of painting, the dynamic screen of cinema, and the computer screen where viewers can intervene in screen events. While this typology is a simplification that negates the historical diversity noted by Huhtamo and others, it nevertheless sets the screen and screen-like properties at the center of the development of modern visuality. In addressing the contemporary screen’s debt to radar and similar technologies, he places this within ideologies of power and war, an important consideration when studying the screen’s role in globalized networks susceptible to constant surveillance.

Like Manovich, Edmond Couchot sees the computer screen—or, more precisely, the digitally “computed” screen—as a significant change in our relationship to images. Where Manovich sees a shift, however, Couchot finds a rupture. The digitally ordered grid of the screen converts images into mutable things that need not have any other link to physical space. He emphasizes the significance of this by contrasting digital screens to painting and analogue photography. Where the act of recording is preeminent in both painting and photography, with digital screens it is the act of presentation that matters. Though this stance—developed in the late 1980s—might seem reactionary today, Couchot presents a condition that may help explain the fetishization of the screen today as the essence of the image.

Uta Caspary considers an entirely different history of the screen in emphasizing its architectural affinities. If screens have gotten smaller, fitting into our palms, than they have also gotten larger, with enormous outdoor examples popping up in urban settings. Caspary finds the antecedents of today’s large, public screens in medieval stained glass windows and modernism’s lighted glass facades. These may foreshadow and explain the current appeal of massive, “permanent” screen installations in large-scale building projects. Here screen environments and built environments amount to the same thing and screen interaction becomes a nearly permanent state.

Reference

Huhtamo, Erkki. “Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen.” ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image 7 (2004): 31–82.

Screen Identities

CHAPTER ONE

The Crack in the Electric Window

Charles R. Acland

You can always rely on Marshall McLuhan to supply memorably pithy aphorisms about media culture, even if his logic soon crumbles apart in your fingers. Reading his distinction between light on media, like film, and light through media, like television, he appears to have captured a fundamental aspect organizing screen technologies, namely projection versus emission.¹ But then he extends his observation to what are ultimately untenable claims about differing levels of cognitive and emotional involvement in each. As is the case with most dichotomies, it takes only a few counterexamples to reveal the wobbliness of the split. Film can be back-projected, video can be front-projected, and both were being done for years prior to McLuhan’s own technologically static projections.

McLuhan’s binary prompts him to declare that projected images situate spectators in the position of the camera, whereas the emission of light from television turns viewers into screens.² The notion of “viewers as screens” is provocative for screen culture scholars struggling to provide workable definitions for any and all “screens.” At the most basic level, regardless of the light source, our faces are the surfaces on which both projections and emissions settle. Our eyes register the light, reflected or not, and our ears receive the sound waves. One such iteration of viewers as screens—the wide-eyed child, bathed in the light of a television, computer, or film—is a conventionalized representation of absorption and hypnotic media control; it is a figuration of the innocent actually becoming a media screen. But we need not reinforce this version of what C. Wright Mills might have called the cheerfully robotic spectator. Maintaining the sensory condition of our human screen-ness—sentient bodies oriented toward audiovisual media—as a conceptual anchor helps film and media scholars avoid rigid typologies of mechanisms that stimulate sensations, which is a philosophical dead end toward which so many after McLuhan ...