Description
Book SynopsisScreens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the image becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s surroundings, this unsettling prompts re.examination of how screen boundaries demarcate. Through readings of three media forms – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – this book develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed. Interrogating contemporary contestations of reality against illusion, it argues that the disappearance of difference reflects shifted conditions of actuality and virtuality in understanding the human condition. These shifts further connect to the current state of politics by way of their distorted truth values, corrupted terms of information, and internalizations of difference. The Post.Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections thus thinks anew the image’s borders and delineations, evoking the screen boundary as an instrumentation of today’s intense virtualizations which do not tell the truth. In the process, a new imagination for images emerges for a gluttony of the virtual; for new conceptualizations of object and representation, materiality and energies, media and histories, real and unreal; for new understandings of appearances, dis-appearances, replacement and re.placement – the post-screen.
Trade ReviewThe Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections received an Honourable Mention in the category Best First Monograph at the BAFTSS Publication Awards 2023
"Jenna Ng's book is an exciting read. The goals are ambitious: to uncover the emerging culture of 'post-screens' that bleed into our lives and environments; to understand their position within the tradition of screen media from early modernity onwards; and to reflect on how they shape our experience and understanding today. Reassessing the concepts of virtuality, illusion, and death, this powerful book constructs its argument with skill, care, and insight, and succeeds to disclose something essential about the contemporary 'human condition.'"
- Pasi Väliaho, University of Oslo
"Jenna Ng presents us with a convincing argument: while traditional frames of the pictorial are vanishing, the screen becomes internalised onto the body of the spectator. The book looks at the future of post-screen media with the best approach I can think of: a strong sense of history and an insightful philosophical toolkit. Warmly recommended for and beyond media and film studies students and scholars."
- Jussi Parikka, FAMU (Prague) and University of Southampton (UK)
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
Post-Screen Media: Meshing the Chain Mail
Eroding Boundaries in the Contemporary Mediascape
Why Boundaries Matter
Chapter Outlines
The Post-what?
1 Screen Boundaries as Movement
Re-placing the Screen: Play and Display, Appearance and Dis-Appearance
Screen Boundaries: Physical and Virtual, and of the Movement Betwixt
Metaphors for the Screen
Crossing Screen Boundaries: Love, Pleasure, Information, Transformation
Interactivity and the Moveable Window
Screen Boundaries Across Dimensions
2 Leaking at the Edges
Protections and Partitions
Rupturing Screen Boundaries
Interplay between Fictional and Factual Threat
Leaking at the Edges: The Merging of the Amalgamated Real
Virtual Co-location in Real-time… and in the Era of Covid-19
The Screen Boundary Against the Algorithm
Screen Boundaries in Flux
3 Virtual Reality: Confinement and Engulfment; Replacement and Re-placement
"Multitudes of Amys"
On Immersion (Briefly)
The Affective Surround: The Two Vectors of Immersion
The Post-Screen Through VR (1): Confinement and Engulfment
The Post-Screen Through VR (2): Replacement and Re-placement
The Danger Paradox
VR as Immersion: Travel, Escape, Fulfilment
VR as Inversion: Witness, Empathy, Subjectivity
Defeated by the Ghosts
4 Holograms/Holographic Projections : Ghosts Amongst the Living; Ghosts of the Living
How We See Ghosts, or, In Love with the Post-Screen
Ghosts in the Media: Re-inventing the Afterlife
The Post-Screen Through Holograms/Holographic Projections
Holographic Projections (1): Ghosts Amongst the Living – Limbo Between Deadness and Aliveness
Holographic Projections (2): Ghosts of the Living – Vivification of the Virtual Real
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Substitution
4A (Remix) True Holograms: A Different Kind of Screen; A Different Kind of Ghost
Screens and Ghosts, or, the Window and the Guy in the Basement
True Holograms
A Different Kind of Screen: Brains, Nerves, Thought
A Different Kind of Ghost: "A Memory, A Daydream, A Secret," or, Digital Apparitions
5 Light Projections: On the Matter of Light and the Lightness of Matter
The City Rises
The Light Rises, or, Light as the Matter of Light
Cities of Screens
Light Projections (1): Light that Dissolves and Constructs… and of Latency
Light Projections (2): Walls that Fall Apart… and Re-Form
Light Projections (3): Particles that Gain a Body… and Transform
Projection Mapping (1): The Image that Devours Structure; the Voracity that is a Media History
Projection Mapping (2): The Exterior that Reveals; the Permanence that Fades
The Ground Beneath Our Feet
Conclusion/Coda
Postscripts to the Post-Screen: The Holiday and the Global Pandemic
Twin Obsessions (1): Difference
Twin Obsessions (2): The Gluttony
The Post-Screen in the Time of Covid-19
Index
