Dear Kriss, Simon et al Given the growth of mobile and pervasive media forms, all dependent to some degree on screens, this changed condition really forms a new paradigm, variously described by researchers who now tend to regard the screen as a window into an extended “Hertzian” space, ‘hybrid space’, ‘augmented reality’, ‘mixed reality’, ‘pervasive space’; or from the user behaviour end as forming ‘trajectories’ (Benford) , and even as ‘sculpture’ ( Calderwood) .
The primary role of the screen, as Simon points out, is now one that mediates or remediates the world in a growing number of ways (although the internet of things and NFS promise to make direct -and screenless-interaction more prevalent) not as another space like cinema , where fantasy is experienced through a locked and dreamlike suspension, but as a dynamic and changing condition of experience, where the user is interactive or pro-active in creating their own personalised experience. I am interested in the next week in examining this changing condition of reception as the key to the phenomenon, and I am worried that we could become distracted by past understandings of screen theory or get totally lost in placing "the screen at the center of a larger discourse on self-consciousness, the sensorium, representation, communication, interaction, and programming" as Brian suggests. I am happy to be more forensic in trying to understand the new uses of screens from the user/audience perspective and working outwards from that place. I am certainly not arguing against understanding the social/ commercial imperatives for the huge expansion of mobile and urban screens and their concomitant social problematics or the new semiotics of this communication mode. Hope we can start to look at examples and specific ideas martin On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 1:24 PM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com>wrote: > Dear Simon, Kriss, everyone - > > Thanks for the openers, I'm really curious what will come of this > discussion. It seems initially to be framed in a modernist way: it's about > the screen as such, the medium hunted back to its essential > characteristics. When one considers the bewildering quantity of referents > for the word screen, that sounds like a good way to start! But the question > is how to get something concrete, beyond the nice wrap-up of film and video > theory. > > Kriss wrote: > > Our mobile >> screens do not offer us anonymity, they relay and record our movements >> (via GPS); they can capture and convey our images as much as they can >> record images. Or they can create another type of image (data, or >> information about us). >> > > It seems to me that the passage reveals the need for some more circumspect > way of conceiving these things. After all, screens _as such_ neither track > us, nor relay information about us, nor even capture our images. Networked > and programmed interactive devices do that, usually in combination with > databases and operators. Kriss, you get at that further on: "These > interactive screens / machines respond to our voices, our touch, our > gestures, but they are at the same time programmed." > > Maybe we would need to place the screen at the center of a larger > discourse on self-consciousness, the sensorium, representation, > communication, interaction, and programming. A discourse on contemporary > social relations, in short. With six terms involved, it's considerably > more than a triangulation - but could anything less speak in a precise way > about the most proteiform medium of our time, the screen? > > Looking forward to the rest, > > Brian > ______________________________**_________________ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre > -- Martin Rieser Professor of Digital Creativity De Montfort University IOCT: Faculty of Art Design and Humanities The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH 44 +116 250 6578 http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk http://www.mobileaudience.blogspot.com http://www.martinrieser.com
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