Screen Genealogies from optical device to environmental medium / edited by Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti

Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE

Includes bibliographical references and index

Primal screens / Francesco Casetti -- 'Schutz und Schirm' : screening in German during early modern times / Rudiger Campe -- Face and screen : toward a genealogy of the media façade / Craig Buckley -- Sensing screens : from surface to situation / Nanna Verhoeff -- 'Taking the plunge' : the new immersive screens / Ariel Rogers -- The atmospheric screen : Turner, Hazlitt, Ruskin / Antonio Somaini -- The fog medium : visualizing and engineering the atmosphere / Yuriko Furuhata -- The charge of a light barricade : optics and ballistics in the ambiguous being of screens / John Durham Peters -- Flat Bayreuth : a genealogy of opera as screened / Gundula Kreuzer -- Imaginary screens : the hyppnotic gesture and early film / Ruggero Eugeni -- Material. Human. Divine. Notes on the vertical screen / Noam M. Elcott

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