Contemporary Screens
As stated, the screen also has ruptured stages where the preconditions discussed earlier do not apply.
The following texts will set a broader and general characteristic for screens by reclaiming their meaning as verbs, which elicited the process of screening to be information-driven. To further elaborate on such characteristics, this chapter will bring up the example of creating digital images on screens that are digital-based and multifaced, which is fundamentally different from drawing a picture on a canvas or panel. What is more essential is that this thesis will bring up the idea of the “cybernetic interface” that illustrates screens as objects that have become or are becoming a relational, operational, material, and technological assemblage that mediates between digital objects and humans.
Screens as Screening
As I was preparing this thesis, I found I was surrounded by screens, from a laptop screen played as a lid for my laptop, a desktop screen placed on my writing desk, mobile screens carried in my pocket and my wrist, to game screens docked in the stand – they are everywhere in my daily life. However, those screens are nouns that merely signify a flat surface where information is displayed. This section wants to make a counterpart – recalling the screen as a verb, which depicts a process and a movement eliciting the foundation of how contemporary screen is constructed.
You probably think that I am going to talk about the etymology of the screen, which I cannot deny is a helpful resource for articulating the neglected meaning of the screen. In this regard, Avezzù[35]’s article has done a valuable job. He traced the word screen back to the Latin verb “cernere”, and its usage in the work of Lucretius’s work in the first century to highlight the meaning of “to separate/distinguish” in the action of seeing from a detached position, and eventually challenged the common sense of embodiment of screen experiences. Correspondingly, this argument resonates with distances and reason produced by perspective and Cartesian epistemology. Besides his informative insight, this thesis spots another circumstance where the verb form of the screen is commonly seen and shows another aspect of the screen.
The aspect emerges when someone lies down on a medical image machine, especially the CT (computed tomography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) devices. According to the dictionary, the process is called “screening” that is “done on a lot of people to make sure that they do not have a particular disease”[36]. While this thesis has no ability to explain how these machines work in detail, the structure and outcomes of their work are metaphorically workable to magnify the verb form as “to organise information” and “to filter” from the inside through dedicated control and iteration.
First of all, let’s take a look at how those imaging machines achieve their designed function to help doctors diagnose what is inside a patient’s body. At the most general level, as parts of your body go through the CT and MRI devices, X-rays or magnetic fields do not instantly and independently generate images of your inside body that can be shown on the doctor’s screen. Instead, the screening devices themselves only transmit and receive signals within the machine and then send that signal information to computers for processing, which relies on a series of mathematical calculations to convert the raw signal into images and even three-dimensional models[37].
How the meaning of screen as a verb emerged straightforwardly in the process of imaging the body. For one thing, one of the original meanings of the screen as a noun – to separate something from another[38] – is reverted, where the result is not to prevent something from being seen but rather to filter something out that was hidden to be seen. For another, the screening depends on signal processing that ensures the result of the screening is clear, readable, and interpretable; in other words, such signal is only meaningful when there are screens to present, and more importantly, these signals are generated, transmitted, processed, and eventually diagnosed on screens digitally as information.
Making Through Screens
Previously, this thesis claimed that though Alberti’s window and Brunelleschi’s mirror are similar to today’s screen in terms of perspective, they are still distinguishable from the screen this thesis wants to address.
To recap, the perspective demonstrated by Alberti and Brunelleschi represented a sight-centred position to view the world, putting the viewer in a fixed and rational position and computer screens as monitors showcased this kind of characteristic of distancing, objectifying, and taking over some calculating work that was supposed to be done in the hand of the artist. In my view, this epistemology is still widely adopted in the usage of contemporary screens in the process of making screen-based practices nowadays, even though the artist did not intend to create perspectival or illusive images.
But the changes happened to breathe the screen. For example, when an artist uses a drawing application on their tablet, such as the widely used application “procreate”[39] on iPads, every element is digitalised: the flow of the brush, the transparency of the stoke, the colour they picks, and even the pressure they imposed on the stylus. No doubt, though the software is simulating the process of making an illustration on a smooth-glare glass surface, these are born-digital techniques since there is either no physical creation involved[ii], or all the brushes, styles, and colours are pre-given as objects within the software and referenced on screens. According to Manovich[40], these techniques in a digital device used “information” that is “disembodied, abstracted, and universal dimension of message separate from its content”. Though camera obscura also possesses these characteristics, as said by Crary, the contemporary screen “operates on the continuous electric signals or discrete numerical data” and thus allows additional operation like sorting, searching, and, in the drawing application’s case, filtering, redo, and undo.
What is more, the distinguishable change also happens on other forms of screen, on the screens’ side about how they would display information. As this thesis has mentioned before, applications that appear on computer screens are resizable according to the user’s needs – this will be another constitutional change when there are multiple application frames arranged within the same place(within the frame of the physical screen) and at the same time, where the perspective shifted from single to multiple, and the frames of these applications are, coincidentally, also called windows. I do not want to iterate the development history of personal computers in this thesis, from military labs at MIT, Xerox, Microsoft, Macintosh, and so on, but to consider multiple, stackable, and re-frameable windows as metaphors again. In the eyes of Friedberg, while Alberti’s window “implied direct, veridical, and unmediated vision, transparency of surface or aperture, and transmitted light”[41], the computer windows “coexist on the flat surface of a computer display”[42], enabling a pile of stacked windows which formed multiple untransparent layers that users are able to or have to navigate back and forth to manage multiple windows and manipulate information, in other words, multitasking, within the physical frame/window of the screen and under the same fixed and single position and eyesight from the user.
You might contradict the argument by saying the capability of “information” is subject to the software, and the coexistence of windows is possible thanks to the operating system – both of them are not enabled by screen devices themselves. My reply is that the screen at this stage should not be studied separately and should not be regarded by the limitations of their physical appearance. Instead, they can be understood as a kind of materialised cybernetic interface, which will be discussed in a later section.
The cybernetic interface
Two camera obscura examples mentioned before that appeared in the science compendium book are unmediated, unmodified, and optically authentic, making them convincing and de-corporealised devices. However, the contemporary screens, as the title shows, are cybernetic interfaces that these two terminologies cannot be understood separately. They describe an intersection where the screen is, for one thing, a self-enclosed machine with its own existence as the place for digital objects, and for another, a medium that assembles human-machine interaction other technical objects mediate through it, like mouse and keyboard as peripherals, frames/windows as symbologies, protocols as certifications, computational hardware as platforms, and networks as infrastructures.
This thesis has identified Dürer’s perspective machine and camera obscura as typical technical objects. For contemporary screens, they remain as technical objects but are digitalised, becoming the place for digital objects and thus contaminated by them. The terminology “digital objects” refers to the concept brought up by Yuk Hui, who stated that digital objects “exist both on the screen, where we can interact with them, and in the back end, or inside the computer program”[43], and such objects “constitute a new form of industrial object that pervades every aspect of our lives in this time of ubiquitous media – such as online videos, images, text files, Facebook profiles, and invitations.”[44]
Although examples of digital objects are relatively easy to observe, the ontologies of these digital objects are vital to this thesis. In his book, Hui revisited the concept of the “individuation” and “associated milieu” articulated by Simondon, which the latter is a series of external factors (milieux) that supports the individuation of a technical object, and the individuation of technical object has the ability to incorporate these external milieux into its associated milieu[45], and more importantly, the associated milieu has recurrent causality[46]. Extending Simondon’s concept, he argued that “databases, algorithms, and network protocols become the associated milieux of digital objects”[47], enabling the digital objects to “concretize interobjective relations and allow a system to be established”[48], and thus leading to a condition where our living is surrounded by digital milieu, which, that makes “nouns and brands become verbs, even forms of life”[49].
The purpose of summarising Hui’s idea of digital objects and the associated milieu is to articulate the implacable place of contemporary screens in the digital milieu. As the medical screening shows, digital objects need a portal for controlling and manipulating. The contemporary screens is a place where human intellect and machine abilities are augmented.
Conclusion: Screens as Cultural Techniques and the Possibilities of Media Arts
Bernard Siegert summarises his idea of cultural techniques as a method of understanding the materialities of media/objects and the relations between them and humans. He regards the cultural techniques as a kind of “operative chain” that is post-hermeneutic and focuses on the material processual and recursion of utilising such media, illustrating how these media mediate symbolics, generate distinctions, and reassign positions[50].
In this sense, I believe screens can be seen as a cultural technique that further elaborates the contemporary screen as a cybernetic interface that involves humans, digital objects and other technical objects surrounding screens. Also, since screens have apparently become the primary output and input of information nowadays, artists may interrogate the screen as a plane of infinite possibilities that not only operates on its physical plane but also extends to its behind (the digital) and its front (the space).