Attending to Screens and Screenness

Visual Communication, 2006

The screen may be understood as a designed interface (e.g. television set, computers, information signage) and has a central place in representation and communication of the social landscape, and in the cultural and technological imagination, as well as having economic significance in the digital era of the 21st century. Traditional notions and functions of the screen are continuously shifting-a shift made all the more dramatic by the development of mobile and ubiquitous technologies. In this special issue of Visual Communication on 'Screens and the social landscape' , we explore the 'screen' and related information technologies and ask what its implications might be for how people communicate and interact in public spaces as well as in their display and function in the urban environment, museums and galleries. We set out to explore this question by bringing together professionals and academics working in the broad disciplines of design, computer science, digital technology, linguistics, sociology and cultural studies to focus on the 'screen' as a common reference point. This collection of papers explores the different ways in which a range of disciplines understand and use the screen as a way of communicating and engaging visually either in the generation of their own messages or those of their clients. Some of the authors of these papers are multidisciplinary collaborators (e.g. Reas and Fry; Small, Botez and Rothenberg; Hooker, Sweeney and Triggs), some engage with the language/approach of disciplines other than their own (e.g. Struppek, Manovich) and others comment upon the screen as outside observers (e.g. Kress, Gere). The changing concept of 'screen' resonates in important ways across disciplines in the changing communicational and representational landscape of the 21st century and has important implications for the practices of artists and designers working with screens, computer scientists and engineers, and more broadly the shaping of forms of knowledge, popular culture and technology-mediated interaction. This issue focuses on changing notions of 'screen' in its broadest sense, including mobile and widely used technologies

Organizational and Social Perspectives on …, 2000

In this paper, we attempt to show how phenomenology can provide an interesting and novel basis for thinking about screens in a world where screens now pervade all aspects of our daily existence. We first provide a discussion of the key phenomenological concepts. This is followed by its application to the phenomenon of a screen. In our phenomenology of the screen, we aim to give an essential account of a screen, as a screen, in its very screen-ness. We follow Heidegger 's argument that the screen will only show itself as a screen in its functioning as a screen in the world where screens are what they are. We claim, and aim to show, that our analysis provides many insights about the screen-ness of screens that we can not gain through any other method of investigation. We also show that although our method is not empirical its results have many important implications for the empirical world. R. Baskerville et al. (eds.), Organizational and Social Perspectives on Information Technology

Human Studies, 2006

This paper presents a Heideggerian phenomenological analysis of screens. In a world and an epoch where screens pervade a great many aspects of human experience, we submit that phenomenology, much in a traditional methodological form, can provide an interesting and novel basis for our understanding of screens. We ground our analysis in the ontology of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time [1927/1962], claiming that screens will only show themselves as they are if taken as screens-in-the-world. Thus, the phenomenon of screen is not investigated in its empirical form or conceptually. It is rather taken as a grounding intentional orientation that conditions our engagement with certain surfaces as we comport ourselves towards them "as screens." In doing this we claim to have opened up the phenomenon of screen in a new and meaningful way.

THINKING C21 Center for 21st Century Studies, 2020

We needed the Coronavirus pandemic crash-test, about thirty years after the beginning of the Internet spreading, to massively realize, in our collective experience, certain potentials implied in our relationships with screens. Actually, screens are not — and never have been — simple surfaces showing images, but surfaces operating as interfaces, that is, establishing relationships and opening experiences. And yet, screens studies mainly considered screens as mere surfaces showing images, and certain visual culture studies too. It seems to me culturally relevant to wonder on the reasons that led to this cultural delay.

Proceedings of QualIT2005: Challenges for …, 2005

This talk was held in the context of an internal research seminar on the topic of "Icons/Screens". It was preceded by another presentation (to which the conclusion refers) on Byzantine icons. Many concepts within this text are simplified and exposed with the sole purpose of being discussed in a seminar context.

2016

We live in an era of screens. No longer just the place where we view movies, or watch TV at night, screens are now ubiquitous, the source of the majority of information we consume daily, and a crucial component of our basic interactions with colleagues, friends, and family. This transformation has happened almost without us realizing it-and certainly without the full theoretical and intellectual analysis it deserves. Screens brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to analyse the growing presence and place of screens in our lives today. They tackle such topics as the archaeology of screens, film and media theories about our interactions with them, their use in contemporary art, and the new avenues they open up for showing films and other media in non-traditional venues.

Dail S for Screen Studies 2019 Workshop Luke Cromer and Luke Robinson In 1952, in his Theory of Film: Character and the Growth of a New Art, Béla Balázs (1970, 21) argues that film theory is an activity of futurity, it is a means by which we can chart the future of film – or screen – practice. For Balázs, theory should be ‘an inspiring theory that will fire the imagination of future seekers for new worlds and creators of new arts.’ He also says: ‘The traditional arts which have proved themselves by the momentum of a millennium of practice have less need of theoretical support than those which have barely appeared above the horizon of the present.’ As both a theorist and a filmmaker, Balázs’s work is a good starting point for considering what the future of screen theory and screen practice might be. In the CFP for Dial S for Screen Studies we asked several questions about the future of screen practice. We asked: What is the future of screen practice? How will screens be viewed in the future and how does creative practice respond to this? How have shifts in screen culture affected current screen practice? Have developments in new technology impacted the work of the practitioner and the types of creative work they make? What is a/the ‘studio’ in current screen practice? And, what does it mean to be a screen artist in the age of alternative screen culture? In this workshop, we will return to these questions and reflect on the ideas and challenges raised by the papers throughout the conference. Quotations from a range of screen studies texts will prompt further conceptual engagement and debate. For both the 2018 and 2019 Dial S for Screen Studies symposiums we have encouraged people to submit papers that explore the intersections between theory and practice. In this workshop, we will also discuss the future of such intersections between theory and practice and we will consider what the future of an organisation, such as the Screen Studies Network, might be.

2019

The technological revolution which legitimised the everyday use of computers shows that we are increasingly moving from textual cultural expression to visual/hypertextual. Following books, the Internet has become the new data-medium invention involving a new type of literacy, and it still remains relatively under-researched. Aside from art, new media connected with technical advances has the potential to transform the culture of mass society by means of easily available visual data with various purposes and functions. This contraposition of postmodernity and technologism is also significant in analogue artwork because it determines a new approach to working with visual information as well as changed attitudes towards means of expression in art education. Contemporary life in our globalised society has already been manifested in two ways: everyday 'biological life offline' in the present without devices and 'virtual life online' though screens. The Screeners project is inspired by David Cronenberg´s screenplays about our obsession with new technologies, in terms of our desire for something new, and the threat of us becoming dominated by these technologies. In his work, Cronenberg also attempts to depict the transition from humanity to post-humanity up to robotics. Everyday situations contemporarily manifested through frequent use of various screens (smartphones, tablets, TV-screens, computers) might already signify the end of traditional communication. Moreover, mobile phones enable us to switch our minds into another virtual reality within a single moment. A growing number of people are increasingly beginning to find it natural to integrate their 'self' as an additional new virtual identity into their life. My focus is on my students born after the year 2005.

2011

DASTS er en faglig forening for STS i Danmark med det formål at stimulere kvaliteten, bredden og samarbejdet inden for dansk STS-forskning samt at markere dansk STS tydeligere i nationale og inter-nationale sammenhaenge.