Description
This paper proposes a new theoretical framework of “The Post-Screen” for contemporary screen media. I argue that the natures of screen media today diminish the boundaries between image and object. For example, the aim of virtual reality (VR) is to render its screen boundaries as imperceptible as possible, or to “disappear” altogether. Contemporary screen media thus erode, if not erase, viewers’ perceptual differentiations between their actual reality and the virtual reality of the image they experience. This growing liminality, then, is the post-screen.My argument is two-fold. Firstly, I focus on how media technologies of the post-screen are cross-pollinating across realities: they change the nature, visibility and perceptibility of boundaries between the actual and the virtual, shifting screens from being spaces of difference to spaces of indifference. Secondly, the changing nature of virtuality out of disappearing screens also points to re-combinations of affect and subjectivity. As media objects of the post-screen are consumed, so are their consuming subjects reconfigured and affected.
The concern of the post-screen as cross-pollination is thus critical attention to understanding ourselves as beings in increasingly intertwined actual and representational realities. What the post-screen engenders is really the ultimate integration of “no more media”: we may now think of everything as cinema, as image, as virtuality. The terms of reality and illusion no longer have their old semantic values. In the post-screen, reality and illusion are not counters or opposites to each other. Instead, we have to grapple with another regime of truth values.
| Period | 22 Apr 2022 |
|---|---|
| Held at | British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies , United Kingdom |
| Degree of Recognition | International |