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.
Author(s): Craig Buckley
Series: Mediamatters
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 328
City: Amsterdam
Cover
Table of Contents
Introduction
Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti
1. Primal Screens
Francesco Casetti
2. ‘Schutz und Schirm’: Screening in German During Early Modern Times
Rüdiger Campe
3. Face and Screen: Toward a Genealogy of the Media Façade
Craig Buckley
4. Sensing Screens: From Surface to Situation
Nanna Verhoeff
5. ‘Taking the Plunge’: The New Immersive Screens
Ariel Rogers
6. The Atmospheric Screen: Turner, Hazlitt, Ruskin
Antonio Somaini
7. The Fog Medium: Visualizing and Engineering the Atmosphere
Yuriko Furuhata
8. The Charge of a Light Barricade: Optics and Ballistics in the Ambiguous Being of Screens
John Durham Peters
9. Flat Bayreuth: A Genealogy of Opera as Screened
Gundula Kreuzer
10. Imaginary Screens: The Hypnotic Gesture and Early Film
Ruggero Eugeni
11. Material. Human. Divine. Notes on the Vertical Screen
Noam M. Elcott
Acknowledgments
Index
