The Vanishing Screen

The screen today is more open in its logic, more demystified than ever before. Broken off into pieces, it is Cubism run amok. Like the individual letters of a Scrabble game--dutifully lined up and waiting to be tinkered with--today's screens are compliant, offering themselves through interfaces that mask the underlying code. As icons, screens stand-in for themselves,and for larger narrative units, whether in DVDs or the most basic home editing tools:

Really, it is a sort of revenge. Having wrested control of the screen away from "the studios" we are confronted with a contagion of screens, a stupefying excess of choice. The practical implementation of deconstruction--once confined to the halls of academe--means, today, that we must all be theorists. When Emerson proclaimed in "Experience" in 1844 that "I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me," and "We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them," how could he have known that one day this surface-condition would penetrate all manner of experience?

The new IPod video screen--only 2.5 inches!--takes us even closer to our dream of dominating the screen, of reducing it to something that you might as well carry on your key chain. But more than that: at the same time that we have taken control of the screen, we have taken control of the very building blocks of narrative itself.

(A recent feature from Mad Magazine speaks for itself.)

If we find today an ever-greater desire for mediums and technologies that allows us to rearrange--and perhaps even change--the narratives around us, perhaps this is because those traditional narrative forms have lost their aura, their mystique. Soon, we are told, screens will no longer be external--something to be looked at--but rather internal. They will be a part of us, inside of our bodies. Nanoscreens.

If this is indeed the case, then the miniaturization of the screen and the disintegration of narrative into smaller and smaller re-arrangeable units will not be seen as a retreat, but as the first steps toward the disappearance of the screen altogether.

Comments

[Will Luers]

miniaturization as disappearence...

really interesting post. i had never thought of it that way. i have always looked at the small portable screen as akin to what happened to the fresco after the printing press. the secularization and democratitization of thought and expression.

i will always look to the frame as the container of thought, the remnants of cinema and all pictorial traditions.

of course, the big change for us now is that the frame has the possiblitiy to be open to the network (as adrian miles reminds us). what is the meaning of that?

[Matt]

I tend to see miniaturisation and fragmentation as the end result of liberal individualism. Individualism denotes that, over time, the communitarian screen--the movies theatre of the 1930s and 1940s--will give way to a smaller, more individual screen--the television--and down and down we go through the video iPod. The miniaturisation of the screen is an attempt to control it on an individual level, but it also leads, I would argue, to a very alienated populace. The network is a kind of agitational response to this. I control my screen, you control yours, but by forcing them onto the network together we're avoiding complete alienation (such as is represented by the idea of the nanoscreen, a thesis I have issues with, though that's for another time) and restating a desire for that ideal of community, only now also infused with autonomy as well. The thing is, we want both--individual control of the screen and a communitarian screen. The network seems to me to be a kind of answer to this paradox (and the video iPod a kind of kick in the face to the network).