Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s The Screenic Image: Between Verticality and Horizontality, Viewing and Touching, Displaying and Playing Wanda Strauven Prologue Am In February 2014, Coca-Cola released an advertisement for a fake product, the socalled Social Media Guard. Satirizing and pretending to cure today’s social media addiction, which has led to “checking your phone every eight seconds,”1 the softdrink company launched the idea of a huge dog collar, in red, with the recognizable white wave of the brand, that “forces” you to look up and to look your reallife interlocutor (friend, fiancée, child) in the eye. The Coca-Cola commercial became a hit thanks to the social media, as so often happens with these types of videos that are criticizing the social media. Similarly, over the last couple of years, many cartoons ridiculing the new anti-social trend of phone-snubbing or phubbing made their appearance online.2 A beautiful example is Twitter (2009), a magazine cover illustration by Kyle T. Webster, depicting a young couple in love on a bench in a park, the boy incessantly tweeting from his mobile phone, while the girl looks up to a “real” bird tweeting in a tree.3 Or, more ludicrously, Dan Piraro’s satirical depiction of the afterlife shows future heaven dwellers who, to the astonishment of the old angelic generation, “just stare at their hands in despair.”4 Quite remarkable, in this context of media-critical media productions, is the black-humored animated short by Xie Chenglin, in which very simple, handdrawn characters walk bent through life, looking down at their mobile devices, causing absurd encounters and fatal accidents. In May 2015, after winning the Annual Award of China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, the video went viral in the Western World under various titles, such as Life in the Bow, Phubbing Life, and Smartphone Life.5 The original Chinese title is 低头人生 (Dītóu rénshēng), which literally translates as “A Low Head Life.” Dītóu refers to the act of lowering one’s head, usually denoting modesty or humbleness, but also suffering or being depressed.6 143 Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s Am Fig. 1: The arrival of smartphone users in heaven. Reprinted with permission of Dan Piraro. While this essay will not focus so much on the asocial behavior of social media users or so-called phubbers, it will discuss, in depth, the act of looking down that accompanies the screen touching practice.7 My analysis will not be limited to smartphone interactions and/or applications; instead, I intend to trace the first contours of a genealogy of the vertical viewing mode by looking at a (historically mixed) selection of what I call “table installations,” which are horizontal dispositifs inviting the user (or spectator, or museumgoer) to look down. By confronting these types of installations with vertically organized viewing dispositifs, I aim at reconsidering the relation between the tactile and the visual, more particularly between the act of screenic touching and the act of screenic seeing. Ultimately, I would like to rethink the image in the era of the post-image, to rethink what remains of (or is added to) the image, especially when it appears to us on a screen. What happens to the screenic image when it is not only looked at but 144 wanda strauven Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s also touched upon? Is it still (merely) an image? Or has it become something else, something that goes beyond the image-as-image? Such questions clearly interlink artistic and technological issues, as the selected table installations also do. They all belong to an alternative history of user interface, not necessarily restricted to the world of computers and engineers. Nevertheless, my discussion will take off in the research labs of Xerox PARC, where, in the early 1990s, attempts were made to bring about the shift from frontal viewing to vertical viewing by means of the so-called digital desk. Yet it somehow failed… Four Table Installations Am Developed in 1991 by Xerox EuroPARC, the European branch of the Xerox PARC research center, the digital desk was a user interface projected on the real desk. It was supposed to replace the desktop metaphor, which Xerox PARC introduced in 1970. As explained by its inventor Pierre Wellner, the digital desk aimed to overthrow the electronic desk and its typical frontal viewing mode by turning the physical horizontal desk into a workstation, into a surface to be touched or physically worked upon.8 Hence, Wellner got rid of the computer screen and relied on the cinematic principle of projection. The computer-driven projector is mounted above the physical desk, directed downwards. This setting makes for the merging of electronic objects and real-life objects, such as paper documents and the hand of the user, on one and the same (horizontal) plane. The Xerox PARC researchers also envisioned some future tactile applications, including a selection mode that might be defined as the earliest instance of the “pinching” gesture that we now know so well from our iPhones and iPads. If, from today’s perspective, the digital desk might seem to be a winning principle because of its invention of multi-touch gestures and its looking down attitude, in the early 1990s it was doomed to be a dead end in the development of the touchscreen technology. The Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, for instance, explored more successful strategies of turning the monitor into a high-precision touchscreen, sticking to the principle of frontal viewing typical of the desktop computer. They thought of the touchscreen not so much in terms of a workstation, but rather as an “input device,” a “selection device,” or a “pointing device” that was supposed to entirely replace the mouse.9 It is important to keep in mind that the early touchscreens were mostly to be found in the public sphere, for instance, as sales kiosks, public information services, as well as in museums. The phenomenon of the “museum kiosk,” which allows the museum visitor to obtain further explanation about the exhibits, is such an (early) application. As one of the researchers at the University of Maryland puts it: “mice were unpractical in public settings, so touchscreens were the natural choice!”10 the screenic image 145 Am Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s Also in the early 1990s, Canadian artist Janet Cardiff conceived a sound installation, entitled To Touch (1993). Consisting of an old carpenter’s table, surrounded by small audio speakers mounted on the walls of a darkened gallery space, the installation, as implied by its title, was supposed to be touched. By running their hands over the rough wooden surface of the table, visitors would activate photocells that, in turn, triggered specific sound bites – ranging from human voices, whispers and dialogues, to music and environmental sounds. Visitors could actually orchestrate the sound collage or create various acoustic layers by the simple motion of their hands. As the Southern Alberta Art Gallery puts is: “Thus, the spectator’s movements generate the table’s eerie voice, which speaks in layered, partial and provisional stories and sounds. To Touch foregrounds touching, listening, and imagining over looking.”11 In her seminal article “Video Haptics and Erotics,” published in 1998 in the British film journal Screen, Laura Marks refers to Cardiff’s installation. She mentions it in a footnote, in its 1995 exhibition at The Power Plant in Toronto, to illustrate her point that “in recent years, artists in many mediums have taken renewed interest in the tactile and other sensory possibilities of their work, often to the diminution of visual appeal.”12 For the moment, I want to retain this idea of diminishing the visual appeal. It should be stressed, however, that Marks’s article is very much about the visual qualities of video art, for which she introduced the term “haptic visuality.” As opposed to optical visuality, haptic visuality “draws from other forms of sense experience, primarily touch and kinaesthetics.”13 Yet, it does not involve direct touch. Like in Alois Riegl’s art theory, haptic refers to the sensation of touch or, even better, to the activated memory of the sensation of touch. In short, haptic visuality is a form of embodied spectatorship, a form of seeing in which the body is addressed as a whole, without involving literal screen or surface touching. It corresponds to the visual regime of closeness, fragmentation, and flatness. And maybe in this sense it is indeed a prelude to the decomposition of the image, to the diminishing of the visual appeal, to the era of the post-image or the post-visual. Important for my argument is that Marks locates her discussion in the larger context of “cultural dissatisfaction with the limits of visuality”;14 that is, the dissatisfaction with the visual as the most dominant mode of the 20th century. The following example of table installation brings us to the 21st century. It is an interactive art installation that I saw at the Open Studio of the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre in Shek Kip Mei, Hong Kong, in September 2008. It consisted of a huge touchscreen installed on four feet like a table. With my help, my four-month old daughter “visited” the piece. She used both her hands and her feet to interact with the artwork, standing on the table and making appear colorful concentric circles around the touched areas. I believe the piece was entitled In Table, but I have no name of the artist and no further details about the technology involved. 146 wanda strauven Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s Am Fig. 2: Touchscreen-based table installation at Open Studio, JCCAC, Hong Kong, September 2008. Source: personal archive. Time-wise, we are in between the launches of the iPhone (2007) and the iPad (2010). Although the sizes do not match, it comes close to the Microsoft Surface 1.0 platform (nowadays called Microsoft PixelSense) that was released in 2008 and that allowed for multi-touching by one or more people and with real-world objects, like a glass or a cup. In those years, the Microsoft platform indeed made its appearance as a very fancy bar table. The Hong Kong artist provided the table installation with a white glass, which functioned quite well as a cue for action. Without any implicit invitation, visitors would pick up the glass and intuitively discover how to interact with the artwork, how to make it come “alive.” When the table remained untouched, it was just a blank dark screen. It is not unlikely that its touchscreen technology was vision based, precisely as in the case of the Microsoft platform, which was provided with a rear-projection display and nearinfrared cameras underneath its surface. The last example is again connected to an anecdote from my personal life. In May 2012, my family and I visited the Torre Tavira in Cadiz, Spain. This old watchtower, built in 1778, now hosts one of the city’s main tourist attractions: a camera obscura that projects a real-time image of the city on a white concave horizontal screen, like on a table. I had visited camerae obscurae before, but the guide of the Torre Tavira did a very good job in showing the potentially interacthe screenic image 147 Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s tive dimension of this centuries-old dispositif. Not only was she pointing with a stick to the main buildings of the city, but she also used a little piece of paper to “play” with the people on the street, making them jump or dance in the air, as it were. Whereas the Cadiz camera obscura is a modern-day installation, inaugurated in 1994, the invention of the horizontal viewing table can be traced back to at least the early 19th century given its illustration in Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia: Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (Plates, vol. IV, 1820). The camera obscura itself dates back to at least the 10th century. Especially since the Renaissance discovery of its potential as a drawing aid, the camera obscura’s projection surface became a true “media screen” or “display screen” within reach, for the images were projected on a canvas or a sheet of tracing paper to be literally touched and drawn upon. In other words, the screen was already tangible (and touchable, and touched) centuries ago, long before the invention of the touchscreen. Tactile Interaction and Image+ Am One could argue that we need to make a distinction between the “touchable screen” and the “touchscreen.” The touchable screen would be a screen that can be touched, whereas a touchscreen is a screen that must be touched. For instance, Nanna Verhoeff insists on this point when she writes: “The aspect that most clearly distinguishes the touchscreen from other screen devices such as the cinematic screen, or the television screen for that matter, is the fact that spatial proximity of the screen not only can involve the user’s body, the screen must be touched in order to navigate within the screen interface.”15 Such a definition, however, should not be restricted to the technological touchscreen of today. For the horizontal screen of the Torre Tavira may, or rather must, be moved up and down to focus different distances and, thus, to better navigate through the cityscape. Also in the case of Cardiff’s installation the distinction between touchable screen and touchscreen does not really hold. It is definitely not a touchscreen, but I would say it is more than a touchable surface; it is a surface that must be touched. More generally, it seems that because of its horizontal disposition a table installation invites to engage in a tactile interaction, if not automatically at least in a much easier way than a vertically mounted screen would do. This might have to do with the fact that our hands are at the table height, that we tend to support our hands on a table when we are standing close to or around it, or even more simply that we are accustomed to use a table as a touchable surface (for working, dining, drawing, etc.). Another implication is that while touching the table installation our eyes are (almost) automatically directed downwards. The frontal viewing mode, typical for a museum visit, is interrupted or converted to this 148 wanda strauven Am Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s seemingly more engaging way of looking, which we could define as “hands-on looking.” In terms of vertical viewing, Cardiff’s installation seems to be an exception. Or rather, its sound feedback might make the visitors look around. Yet, there is nothing to see. Of the four table installations, To Touch is the one that is less about vision. But like the other tables, its technology is still vision based, or at least light sensitive. The hand motions are registered by electronic photocells that subsequently trigger the sound bites. Also in the other table installations, the key element, or key actor, is light – whether it is the invisible infrared light, the electric light bulb of a projector, or sunlight. But what about the screenic image? What about its aesthetic value or artistic properties? The two computer-based tables, the Hong Kong artwork and the digital desk, are good illustrations of the subjection of the image to the rules of the non-visual (or post-visual) regime of the present day, at least if we follow the line of argumentation proposed by Jonathan Crary in his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013): “To be preoccupied with the aesthetic properties of digital imagery, as are many theorists and critics, is to evade the subordination of the image to a broad field of non-visual operations and requirements.”16 Crary is concerned with the circulation of images in terms of time-management, or rather self-management and self-regulation. He observes that “more images, of many kinds, are looked at, are seen, than ever before, but it is within a [Foucauldian] ‘network of permanent observation,’”17 because, very simply, our acts of vision are converted into data information. While I share Crary’s view regarding the inappropriateness of reducing the digital image to its aesthetics (or visual?) qualities, I have some problems with the notion of “subordination” in the above quote. The idea that today’s image (the so-called post-image) is subordinated to other mechanisms seems to imply that it is hierarchically lower than the old image (the “real,” visual image). Or at least it seems to say that the old image was better in not being subordinated to external factors (which is, of course, not true). Instead of thinking of the new image as “post-image,” which connotes not only a (non-reversal) chronology but also a devaluation of its original qualities (such as its “visual appeal,” to use Marks’s phrasing), I prefer the notion of “image+,” which is a term that I have picked up from graphic software programs. Such a notion may help us to think of the screenic image as enrichment, as something in addition to the visual. In other words, today’s image would no longer be just an image. Instead, it has become something that goes beyond its visual appeal, that is no longer there to be merely looked at. This is where the act of screenic touching can reinforce the act of screenic seeing. By touching the images, the images become literally (or physically) something more than a visual representation. Such an operation is clearly at stake in all of the above discussed table installations. Even the real-life, real-time images projected the screenic image 149 Am Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s on the horizontal viewing table of the camera obscura exhibit image+ properties insofar as they are played with and transformed by the touching hand (or stick, or little piece of paper). To some extent, this new type of image, which is not really new as the experience of the camera obscura viewing table reminds us, can be related to Harun Farocki’s operational image: a functional or instrumental image that is not meant to be looked at, but that serves as part of a process, a process of executing an operation. As Pasi Väliaho puts it: “[Operational images] contribute to the execution of a technical, industrial, military, or some other kind of operation, for instance, calculating and predicting the average paths of consumers, or pattern recognition in machine vision used in assembly lines or in so-called smart bombs.”18 Thomas Elsaesser has defined Farocki’s operational images as “images on the cusp of seeing and acting,” pointing out how they are “sets of instructions” or “visual cues for action.”19 However, the typical operational image, such as the military image or the surveillance image, is already part of the action itself. It might rather need a translation from action back into vision, for the layman, to be understandable (or readable). Furthermore, the operational image does not necessarily exist only on a screen, it is not per se a screenic image.20 I would like to claim that any type of image, not just the technical or functional image, becomes an image+ when displayed on a screen within reach, a screen that can be touched and that is touched, for further action. So, the new image is indeed a “cue for action,” maybe more, or more directly, than Farocki’s operational image. I will come back to Elsaesser’s redefinition of the image as a “cue for action” when addressing the dimension of play, which is another point of divergence with respect to the original meaning of the operational image. When drawing the attention to children’s interaction with screens, I will discuss how the image is turned into a non-functional image, an image that does not operate at all. Insisting on the fact that the image+ is a screenic image, I consider today’s screens as surfaces of and for action. As Francesco Casetti argues, screens have become “transit points”; that is, places where “free-floating images stop for a moment, make themselves available to users, allow themselves to be manipulated, and then take off again along new routes.”21 Like Crary, Casetti is not telling us that we live in a world without images, on the contrary, the image production (and especially the self- image production) is increasing like never before. But instead of really looking at the images on our mobile screenic devices, we are more concerned with manipulating data and transferring information (to social network sites, for instance) and this is precisely the connection with the operational image. One could put it, simply, as follows: the new screenic image is an invisible image, since it only truly exists as data, or as code. By clicking icons on the screen we might have the illusion of making the invisible image visible again; at the same time, it also tells us that the image (as image+) is just a gate to something else, away from that particular image (as image). 150 wanda strauven Vertical (Desktop) Dispositifs Am Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s Paradoxically, the image+ is turned back into an image-as-image, an image to be merely looked at, by some contemporary artists who consciously rely on the frontal viewing mode. This leads to a rather complex problematization of the image. A good example is the video installation Touching Reality (2012) by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. In a five-minute long video we watch an index finger scroll through images on a touchscreen device. The images are horrifying photos of mutilated, blood-covered bodies, on which the index finger, with the help of the thumb, zooms in performing the very recognizable pinching gesture. Despite the title Touching Reality, the index finger does not touch anything; that is, it does not touch any thing, any mutilated body of the brutal reality of war and murder. It merely glides over the material surface of a smartphone or an electronic tablet; it touches a touchscreen without touching what is on display. Touching Reality points to the contradiction inherent to many contemporary touchscreen-based devices that, despite their hands-on operability, create more detachment. Or, in the artist’s own words, the new touchscreen gesture is a “gesture that seems to be a gesture of sensitivity but at the same time is a gesture of enormous distancing.”22 Hirschhorn reinforces the distance by deliberately opting for a non-interactive installation that excludes the spectator from engaging directly, tangibly, with the artwork. The touchscreen footage is displayed on a non-touchable projection surface. As a consequence, the typical vertical viewing mode of the smartphone or tablet is reversed to frontal viewing, putting quite literally the spectator in a contemplative, non-engaging position. And the image becomes again an imageas-image, an image to be looked at. Yet, this image-as-image is a problematization of the image; that is, a visual representation of the image as non-visual (or postvisual) image. To put it differently, Touching Reality is less about the images displayed on the touchscreen device than about the gesture swiping through those images by which their status as “pure” image is changed, transformed. A connection can be made with the recent phenomenon of desktop cinema, as explored for instance by Camille Henrot in her 2013 award-winning video work Grosse fatigue, which shows the hands-on searching for mythical images on the internet and in the prestigious collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Henrot calls her performance an “intuitive unfolding of knowledge,” which results in a 13-minute video meant for frontal viewing, precisely like in the case of Hirschhorn’s installation. The term “desktop cinema” or “desktop documentary” has been coined by film critic Kevin B. Lee, who picked up the idea from Henrot in order to apply it to his own video essays. Lee defines the “desktop documentary” as a technique that “acknowledges the internet’s role not only as a boundless repository of information but as a primary experience of reality.”23 In other words, these kinds of documentaries are no the screenic image 151 Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s longer about the representation of reality, but about creating reality itself – through real-time data and/or image searching. The outcome, however, is a visual display to be looked at, to be absorbed by a non-interactive spectator. The term “desktop cinema” does not refer to the physical desktop, as in the case of the digital desk, but to the desktop computer. The documentaries (or video essays) capture the actions taking place on the monitor of the desktop computer, which is standing vertically (and therefore is looked at frontally). A special screen-capture app is used that allows to capture not only a still image of the desktop, but also the movements unfolding on it, such as searching and clicking, multiple windows opening and closing, zooming in and out, etc. In other words, it is a simple recording of the screen, of what happens on the screen. Since we see the researcher searching, it is like having a secretive look into his or her creative (or intellectual) process. As spectators we somehow become part of that process, because we need to take in all the operations. But we keep a safe, contemplative distance. Moreover, unlike Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality, we do not see the touching hand in action, since there is no physical screen touching taking place, only a distanced touching by means of a mouse. In fact, the screen is not a touchscreen. The Screen as Playground Am The question remains whether or not a touchscreen-based display/dispositif enhances the image+ properties of the screenic image. Here, I would like to return to Elsaesser’s redefinition of the image as a “cue for action,” which was – interestingly enough – suggested to him by a seven-year old young girl. In his article on “The Return of 3-D” (2013), Elsaesser narrates the following anecdote: I was sharing with friends some photos of us all many years ago that I had digitized and put on my laptop. One of their daughters was standing next to me, keen to be part of the scene. But instead of looking at the picture and asking who, when, or where, she took the mouse, pointing the cursor at the picture. When nothing happened, she lost interest even though it happened to be a photo of her parents when they were young – that is, before she was born. In other words, for her generation, pictures on a computer screen are not something to look at but to click at – in the expectation of some action or movement taking place, of being taken to another place or to another picture space.24 And Elsaesser adds: “The idea of a digital photo as a window to a view (to contemplate or be a witness to) had for her been replaced by the notion of an image as a passage or a portal, an interface or part of a sequential process – in short, as a cue for action.”25 This anecdote connects the image+ properties to the 152 wanda strauven Am Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s indirect touch of the cursor. In other words, the tendency of touching images for further action started well before the launch of the iPhone and the iPad, or more generally before the pervasion of the touchscreen. Paradoxically, however, the direct touching of the screenic image seems to enhance the awareness that we are not touching the image itself, but something else; that is, not the image-asimage, but the image as gate, that will lead, by touching it, to something else. Today’s children are growing up in a world where the touchscreen has become the default technology for the screen. Given their very early familiarization with touchscreen-based devices, such as smartphones and tablets, one of the main challenges seems to have become to find out the difference between a touchscreen and a non-touchscreen, between a clickable icon and non-clickable icon. Here, I would like to recall another anecdote from my personal life. In September 2014, I was at the Water Design event in Bologna with my six-year old daughter and her new school friend. In one of the exhibition rooms, an ordinary computer screen stood hidden in a corner. Its display was clearly no artwork, but a rather boring non-interactive presentation about a research project. It nevertheless attracted the attention of the two girls who immediately started to touch the screen. I believe that they were not trying to find out whether it was a touchscreen or not, they just took that for granted (mistakenly). They were touching the screen, because they were expecting that this would take them elsewhere, from one clickable icon to the next. Like the girl in Elsaesser’s anecdote, they were not interested in the image (or the information) displayed on the screen, but only in the action that might happen by their act of touching. On the other hand, children are not only action-driven in their practices of screen touching. I would like to suggest that for today’s children the screen is like a playground – a playground where touching becomes a creative, imaginative act, to be understood as a strategy of the pretend game. I am not so much thinking here of kids playing games on iPads and other electronic devices, but instead of children’s playful interaction with bigger and smaller projection screens/surfaces in public spaces. Their playfulness is most manifest when they interact (or pretend to interact) with non-interactive installations. At the abovementioned Water Design event, the two girls together with a younger sister engaged with a shower installation, entitled Get Closer! Designed by Diego Grandi for Zucchetti, this installation included a non-interactive animation video that was projected on a huge wall and shown in a loop. The repetition, without any variation, did not stop the girls from touching the projected images. Their interaction somehow increased after each repetition, when they started to understand the little narrative and tried to choreograph their actions on time, so that they could, for instance, take a “real” shower (by standing, at the right moment, under the image of the water splash). the screenic image 153 Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s Am Fig. 3: Children interacting with a non-interactive installation at Water Design, Bologna, September 2014. Source: personal archive. Why are these girls (and other kids) touching the projected image? Is it only because they expect that their touch will make something happen, like on a “real” touchscreen? Perhaps initially, yes, but when they realize that the installation is not interactive (and, surely, they realize it quite soon), why do they continue touching it? This is the same question I ask myself when watching, over and over again, Jean-Luc Godard’s homage to the early rube films in his 1963 film Les carabiniers. It is the scene where one of the riflemen, MichelAnge, goes to the movies, climbs on stage and tears down the screen. This scene continues to haunt me, mostly because of Michel-Ange’s persistence in touching the screen, right before he tears it down.26 On screen a society lady is taking a bath. After climbing on stage, Michel-Ange jumps a couple of times to look over the edge of the bathtub and starts caressing the lady, first her face, then her naked legs and arms. What is so striking is that he does not interrupt his own act of touching. He goes on touching the projected image of the society lady’s leg, as if he were not feeling that he is not touching a human body (but just the screen). I would argue that, like the children, he is pretending he is feeling a real, solid body. And he does not need to be familiarized with the touchscreen to be able to do this. One could also say that this Godard scene is no longer about the image as visual image, but rather about the image as imagination. 154 wanda strauven Am Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s The meta-filmic image of Les carabiniers is an image+ insofar as it is a gate to something else, to something that is not physically there to be touched, but that we can pretend to be there to be touched. As in the case of the children’s interaction with non-interactive installations, it is a non-functional image, an image that does not fully operate, but it becomes operational thanks to the act of imagination. Imagination should be understood here in the original sense of the word, as a concrete practice of image making, of putting into an image (as in the Dutch ver-beeld-ing).27 Children’s imagination is not just a fantasy or mental fabrication; their imagination is always put into practice; that is, in their play the imagined is (already, immediately) realized. In the above-described situations, the child’s (and Michel-Ange’s) act of imagination turns the image into an image+. Fig. 4: Smartphone user looking down while texting on a text-walking lane in Antwerp, June 2015. Courtesy of Irina Schulzki. Postscript One could wonder if this is still a screenic matter. Maybe we need to think rather in terms of “surface,” following Giuliana Bruno’s quest into media’s materiality. In her latest book Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (2014), she introduces the notion of the surface as a “place of connection,” a “meeting place.” Quite different from Casetti’s notion of the screen as “transit point,” which stresses the fleetingness of life, Bruno wants to draw the attention to the very material (and durable?) contacts we make in and through our media interaction. She writes: “The reciprocal contact between us and objects or environments the screenic image 155 Am Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s […] occurs on the surface. It is by way of such tangible, ‘superficial’ contact that we apprehend the art object and the space of art, turning contact into the communicative interface of a public intimacy.”28 The idea of “public intimacy,” awkwardly, brings to mind the phubbers of my introduction. Is it possible to think of their despicable contact with smartphones in more positive or constructive terms? Maybe by means of a material “place of connection”? In the city of Antwerp, Belgium, they found a funny, playful way to “connect” smartphone-addicts via special “text walking lanes” that run through the historic center (on sidewalks, in pedestrian areas, and across a shopping center). Supposedly this track, delineated by white lines, would help to avoid collisions on the street, among people or with any kind of obstacle. It turned out to be a gimmick, a marketing stunt, by a local mobile phone chain store called Mlab, which got into trouble for breaking the Belgian law.29 One year earlier, in the summer of 2014, special lanes for cellphone-users were already created in Washington, D.C. as part of a social behavior experiment.30 What remains of both projects are pictures taken by cellphone-users, pictures that were posted online and that went viral. In other words, from the “superficial” contact with the urban environment (feet on the street) we are back to the screenic image, an image+, taken by phubbers while looking down. 156 wanda strauven Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s nities, see Alise Tifentale and Lev Manovich, “Selfiecity: Exploring Photography and Self-Fashioning in Social Media,” in Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, eds. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 109-122. 22. Erkki Huhtamo, “Messages on the Wall: An Archaeology of Public Media Displays,” in Urban Screens Reader. INC Reader #5, eds. Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), 15-28; Uta Caspari, “Digital Media as Ornament in Contemporary Architecture Facades: Its Historical Dimension,” in Urban Screens Reader, 65-74. Both texts are available online: http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/US_layout_01022010.pdf. The Screenic Image: Between Verticality and Horizontality, Viewing and Touching, Displaying and Playing Tim Nudd, “Coke Finds a Way to Cure Your Social-Media Addiction and-or Stop You Licking Your Stiches,” AdWeek, February 19, 2014, http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/ coke-finds-way-cure-your-social-media-addiction-andor-stop-you-licking-yourstitches-155818. The Coca-Cola ad can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_u3BRY2RF5I. 2. On the creation of the new word “phubbing,” see: “Phubbing: A Word Is Born,” YouTube video, 2:27, October 7, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSOfuUYCV_0. 3. See: http://www.kyletwebster.com. 4. Published online on April 1, 2015: http://bizarro.com/comics/april-1-2015/. For more cartoons thematizing the “death of conversation,” see the Bored Panda overview, from which the two discussed examples were selected: Julija Nėjė, “Death Of Conversation: 22+ Images Of How Smartphones Take Over Our Lives,” BoredPanda, 2015, http://www.boredpanda.com/cartoon-smartphone-cellphone-addiction/. 5. See, for instance: Xie Chenglin, “Phubbing - Life in the Bow - 2015,” YouTube video, 3:03, May 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snV2rZYfLX8&feature=youtu. be. 6. I would like to thank Chow Yiu Fai for helping me with the Chinese interpretation. 7. An earlier version of this text was presented at the Touching the Screen conference, organized by Susanne Ø. Sæther and Victoria Fu at the University of Oslo in April 2015. I would like to thank the organizers and participants of this event for their precious feedback. 8. See the demo video made in 1991: Pierre Wellner, “Tactile Manipulation on a Digital Desk,” YouTube video, 9:59, December 16, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=laApNiNpnvI. 9. See, for instance, Andrew Sears and Ben Shneiderman, “High Precision Touchscreens: Design Strategies and Comparisons with a Mouse,” International Journal ManMachine Studies 34 (1991): 593-613. 10. Catherine Plaisant, “High-Precision Touchscreens 1988-1991 HCIL Research. Explorations for Museum Kiosks, Device Control, Finger Painting and Touchscreen Am 1. notes 297 11. Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s 12. 13. 14. 15. Keyboards,” Human-Computer Interaction Lab. University of Maryland, last modified July 2013, http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/touchscreens/. See: “Exhibitions. Janet Cardiff: To Touch,” SAAG, 1994, http://www.saag.ca/art/exhibitions/0602-to-touch. Laura Marks, “Video Haptics and Erotics,” Screen 39, no. 4 (1998): 334. Ibid., 332. Ibid., 334. Nanna Verhoeff, Mobile Screens. The Visual Regime of Navigation (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 24. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2013), 47. Ibid. Pasi Väliaho, “Marey’s Gun: Apparatuses of Capture and the Operational Image,” in Technē/Technology, ed. Annie van den Oever (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 175. Thomas Elsaesser, “The ‘Return’ of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century,” Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 244, 243. Operational images “include the use of stereometric photography in nineteenthcentury architecture and land-surveying, photoreconnaissance flights over Auschwitz by the US Air Force in 1944, surveillance footage from security prisons and supermarkets, time and motion studies in factories, as well as the 2008 football World Cup final in Berlin, as tracked by sensors and vision machines.” Elsaesser, “The ‘Return,’” 244. Francesco Casetti, “Che cosa è uno schermo, oggi?,” Rivista di Estetica 55, no. 1 (2014): 103. Thomas Hirschhorn, “Insoutenables destructions du corps. Entretien avec Hugo Vitrani,” 2012, Dailymotion video, 11:26, July 29, 2012, http://www.dailymotion.com/ video/xshfl0_thomas-hirschhorn- insoutenables-destructions-du-corps_creation. See: Kevin B. Lee, “Transformers: The Premake,” Vimeo video, 25:03, https://vimeo. com/94101046. Elsaesser, “The ‘Return,’” 240-241. Ibid, 241. I have written on this scene in various occasions. See Wanda Strauven, “The Archaeology of the Touch Screen,” Maske und Kothurn 58, no. 4 (2012): 69-79; “Redisciplining the Audience: Godard’s Rube-Carabinier,” in Cinephilia. Movies, Love and Memory, eds. Malte Hagener and Marijke de Valck (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 125-133; and “Touch, Don’t Look,” in I cinque sensi del cinema/The Five Senses of Cinema, eds. Alice Autelitano, Veronica Innocenti, and Valentina Re (Udine: Forum, 2005), 283-291. I follow here Johan Huizinga’s analysis of the pretend game in his 1938 study Homo Ludens. See Johan Huizinga, “Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon,” in The Game Design Reader, eds. Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Eric Zimmerman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 108. Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 3. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Am 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 298 notes Un ste iv rd e a Pr rs m es ity s 29. See: Gabriel Fisher, “STAY IN LANE: Those ‘Text-Walking Lanes’ in Antwerp Were a Marketing Stunt That Broke Belgian Law,” Quartz, June 16, 2015, http://qz.com/ 428286/texting-while-walking-lanes-appear-in-antwerp/. I would like to thank Irina Schulzki for drawing my attention to this Antwerp street project. 30. See: Sonali Kohli, “Will City-Dwellers Actually Use a No-Cellphones Lane on the Sidewalk?,” Quartz, July 18, 2014, http://qz.com/237063/will-city-dwellers-actuallyuse-a-no-cellphones-lane-on-the-sidewalk/. From Screen-Scape to Screen-Sphere: A Meditation in Medias Res 1. 2. 3. Am 4. This essay is a significant elaboration of an earlier version, published under a slightly different title. See Vivian Sobchack, “Comprehending Screens: A Meditation in Medias Res,” Rivista di estetica [Special issue: “Schermi/Screens,” ed. Mauro Carbone] 55, no. 1 (2014): 87-101. Christiane Voss, “Film Experience and the Formation of Illusion: The Spectator as ‘Surrogate Body’ for the Cinema,” trans. Inga Pollmann, Introd. Vinzenz Hediger, Cinema Journal 50, no. 4 (Summer 2011): 139. A term in physics and mathematics, “n-dimensions” refers to an unspecified number of dimensions beyond our familiar three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. There are theoretical models that posit dimensions into the double digits. Thus, the number of dimensions, when unknown or unspecified, is generalized as of “n-dimensions.” Legitimate medical studies confirm not only the increase in diagnoses of ADHD among children (a 53% rise over the last decade), but also among adults. One large statistical study conducted between 2002-2007 reports that while “the] claims database used included employed insured persons and dependents only,” the “results highlight the rising prevalence of diagnosed ADHD in a US population.” The increase “was more than three-fold” during the study period, “with the largest increase in the 18-24 years age group.” The study concludes that their results “may underestimate the true prevalence of diagnosed ADHD in the US population.” L. Montjano et al., “Adult ADHD: Prevalence of Diagnosis in a US Population with Employer Health Insurance,” Current Medical Research and Opinion 27, Suppl. 2:5-11 (2011) accessed September 3, 2015, http://www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov/pubmed/21973227. This increase has been interpreted as merely an increase in diagnoses rather than in the disorder itself – this, in part, prompted by the expansion of the criteria for ADHD in the 2013 fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which now requires that symptoms appear before age 12 instead of before age 7; as well as, by the commercial interests and medical promotions of the US pharmaceutical industry. E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Millennial ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 2. The most efficient way to view these cartoons is through the New Yorker Archive (newyorker.com), which allows browsing issues by date. (The publisher, Condé Nast, also has a website devoted to cartoons for sale (condenast.com), but the collection is selective, unwieldy, and does not allow specific issue searches. 5. 6. notes 299