Abstract
The 35 essays in Monteiro’s volume expand a field of inquiry that brings together ideas and innovations derived from the ubiquity of screen-based technologies. As described in the volume’s introduction, this focus on the medium of the screen is premised on three factors surrounding its technology. They are (a) the increase in objects with screens; (b) the development of visual layers and spaces within them; and (c) the onset of mobility and tactility as features. Besides further embedding the screen within our lived experience, these changes have a tangible impact on the framing of images and the ways in which users interact with both medium and content.
The essays are divided into three sections. The first section, “Screens and Their Histories” examines the historical development of the screen and its conceptual models. In the opening chapter, Acland acknowledges that an adequate understanding of the screen entails more than the object’s technical specifications, and argues that screens simultaneously articulate certain notions of ubiquity, adaptability, and utility. The subsequent chapter by Casetti is a cogent elaboration of this approach. For Casetti, the screen can be conceived as a monitor that surveys and inspects our actions, a bulletin board regulating behaviour, and a scrapbook for constructing and sharing narratives. Casetti’s analysis is directed at the affordances of current social media platforms, and demonstrates how screens have evolved to present images that are both seen and modified by users.
While Casetti departs from the concept of the frame, Manovich’s genealogy in Chapter 8 uses it as a starting point to separate the virtual space from physical reality. Through the respective categories of the classical, dynamic, and computer screens, Manovich traces the evolution in these artificial fields of perception and demonstrates how the computer screen allows users to understand “a page as a collection of different but equally important blocks of data such as text, images, and graphic elements” (p. 126). Manovich’s paradigm may seem relatively linear and simplistic, but the relationship between image and data remains a crucial factor in current technological developments.
The essays in the second section, “Images and Frames,” shift the discussion to how the screen has facilitated the proliferation of images. Burnett’s commentary on gaming environments in Chapter 13, in particular, considers the data structures underlying the simulation within a game. Burnett argues that simulation delivers an illusory form of autonomy, as it draws on a priori structures of knowledge delimited by the screen and its interface. This limitation makes an invaluable point concerning the simulation that is produced through mediated screen-based relationships, rather than physical experiences.
This constraint from the screen is also explicated by Monteiro in Chapter 21, where he posits that the image is altered for the benefit of fitting the screen’s surface. The modification of the image in terms of the screen, Monteiro argues, not only affects the former’s integrity, but enhances the instrumentality of the latter; for even as televisions and computing devices attempt to “offer a seeming plenitude of the image by widening the screen, the deformation of the image in fact reasserts the presence of the frame as a defining factor in the composition’s properties” (p. 276). Such a containment of the image, in turn, contributes to the flattened performance of pixellation, in which “the image is animated, even if visibly still, within the flux of the system as data are continually received, sent and processed by the screen device and network to produce and sustain this visual performance” (p. 281).
The final section, “Environments and Interactions,” looks into the material relations between screens and their user-environments. In Chapter 26, for example, Rae Cooley employs the criterion of fit to evaluate the relationship between a hand and a mobile screenic device (MSD). In differentiating fit from the distance between a viewer and the television/cinema screen, Rae Cooley argues that fit must be considered together with the interface, or the “threshold at which users and their surroundings meet and interact” (p. 321).
The concluding chapter by Verhoeff explores the ways screens function as an intermediary between software and physical space. Screen objects like the iPhone possess a hybrid interface, as users can navigate both within the machine and around its physical space. This experience, Verhoeff explains, is also a form of performative cartography, insofar as “movement through space and interaction with on-screen layers of digital information to off-screen geographical and material presence unfolds in time” (p. 446).
In summary, the volume’s multidisciplinary approach provides a comprehensive range of insights into the screen’s social, historical, and cultural significance. While they do not explicitly undermine the actual devices that support it, the essays curated are arguably concerned with the screen’s pervasive transparency, as it becomes more embedded and indispensable in our everyday lives.