Screens

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

It is difficult to overstate the impact the British journal Screen has had on the discipline of film and television studies. For the past 50 years, the journal has consistently been at the centre of debates around how we watch why we watch, and what all this watching actually means. Moreover, when it came to film theorising, Screen for a very long time set the agenda. Today the journal’s back catalogue reads like a rollcall of canonical, game-changing texts, and the most (in)famous fruit of this labour, so-called “1970s Screen Theory” – that curious mélange of Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis (with just a dash of feminist theory) remains an equally decisive and divisive point in film theory, marking either the height of activist political en gagement with cinema and contemporary culture more broadly, or the nadir of rational film theorising, depending on your vantage point.

In Digital Continuities. From the History of Digital Art to Contemporary Transmedial Practices,edited by Nick Lambert and Ernest Edmonds, special section of Transactions. Leonardo Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. 45:5 (September 2012), 474-475., 2012

This article presents the theoretical framework, con- ceptual background, hypotheses and aims of my on- going research on the place of the image in digital culture. I am investigating how the new generic mode of display, the screen, affects the conception and the production of images, and how the myriad forms, uses and mobilities of urban screens contrib- utes to the constitution of the shared space through which images and citizens circulate and communic- ate: the augmented city.

2019

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.

2025

Toward an Anthropology of Screens provides a deep anthropological and philosophical, as well as ethical and political reflection on our experience of screens, intended as interfaces mediating our relationships with the environment. More specifically, Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua aim to illustrate the crucial role that screens have played-and continue to play-in shaping human experience of the world. As we shall see in this review, this study on screens provides us with some effective conceptual tools for critically rethinking humanity in its constitutive processes. Here, far from being able to exhaust the vastness and richness of the book, I will present those passages that I found particularly relevant to today's human and philosophical condition. I will first contextualise this operation by referring to the introduction, in which the authors outline the framework of their project. Then, I will delve into the five chapters composing the book. Finally, I will offer some personal reflections on the relevance of this work.

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.

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

Screens, 2016

The former opening credits of the French TV show Les enfants de la télé 1 showed babies gathered together in front of a TV set, one of them kissing the screen. Other TV credits are in a similar vein, notably those of the series Dream On, whose successive shots show the evolution of a child, from baby to adult, in front of a black-and-white television set; or those of Homeland where little Carrie is shown from behind sitting watching TV, particularly attentive to the political images displayed on the screen. This obviously suggests considering both the sociological and cultural issue of generations discovering life through television on a daily basis. Dream On follows this pattern in its very structure, since, throughout the series, old black-and-white clips expressing Martin Tupper's (played by Brian Benben) childhood memories, feelings, or thoughts are constantly interspersed in the plot. But one can also see other things in these credits, whether it is the baby kissing the screen or the child growing up in front of it. One can see the fascination for this object or, rather, part of this object, that has become a ubiquitous part of our lives, whether today or in the past: the screen, whether it regards the cinema, television, computer, tablet, laptop, etc. I will therefore try to address here the psychological and cultural phenomenon of this fascination for the screen; I will analyze it from the point of view of the iconic effect it producesand of the denial of representation that follows-in relation to its ambivalent physicality as a medium aimed at transmitting energy, that is, light.