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Wide Angle 21.1 (1999) 63-75



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Body and Screen

Margaret Morse


The screen of cinema, video, and the computer is a threshold that divides the ordinary and the everyday from other realms that seem truer or larger than life. The interface between this world and the other world of imagination is a culturally produced and historically shifting construct that has taken many shapes and forms. Masking off part of the world permits images and symbols to invoke the other scene--not what is, but what could or might be or what was in some other time and place. Like a semi-permeable membrane, the screen filters out some things and not others, conjuring an auratic gleam from signs and symbols. Clearly, the alchemy of the screen is in the service of power as well as desire.

Since the advent of electronic media, image projections have been increasingly liberated from the need for a physical surface or support and are more and more free to haunt everyday life. The canvas screen familiar from the cinema has been stripped away, leaving an image plane that may still emanate from a monitor or liquid crystal display; however, it may also appear virtually as a projection or even volume of light, floating in space, or be wrapped like skin over a physical support in the built environment or around an object of body of any kind. By means of digital techniques, the image plane can sustain the impression of a three-dimensional world enveloping the visitor--it is as the visitor were able to step through the screen into the world on the other side. Computer technology and programming can invest the image plane or the wrap-around virtual [End Page 63] world with interactive properties, allowing it to respond to a spectator's position and direction of gaze in virtual space. Or, even more disconcertingly, the screen may uncouple from its interdependent position in relation to the viewer, setting notions of identity and selfhood and ultimately the sense of cultural control over artifice at risk.

In concert, the spectator, once chained like a prisoner in Plato's cave, has become a performer, free to make a path charged with meaning through space. The once quasi-omnipotent and unencumbered eye has become embodied, foregrounding engagement with the screen. The screen, in turn, now marks a cybernetic frontier between the physical and the conceptual, the body and the machine, bio-technology and communications. The interactive computer user/viewer corporeally or at least digitally influences the display of symbols on the computer screen in real time. The embodied relation of screen and user effects the interactor in turn: sensimotor experience calls up "deep metaphor," that is, primary cognitive metaphors like up and down, forward and backward, that engage with the body and its orientation in space. 1 Mobility and the tension between body and screen becomes an emotional and cognitive tool. The threshold is less an entrance than a site of fascination where fantasy is invited or displaced. This is ontological play, a stepping, turning, and clicking on and off of fiction itself.

The cinematic apparatus has now been largely subsumed into an electronic culture of video and computer-assisted imagery based on principles of envelopment and temporal simultaneity rather than distance and sequential unfolding. Television, video, and the computer have "live" screens that expose multiple "heres" and "nows" that overlap confusingly with our own physical reality. Yet all these apparatuses co-exist in contemporary life and themes that were developed in one technology find counterparts in the others. The following explores themes of the shifting relations between body and screen, first in terms of the mobile screen, then of the mobile body and, finally, of decentered and displaced identity. Rather than treat media technologies as genres or as entirely separate spheres, each theme draws promiscuously on the cinematic, the electronic, and the digital. [End Page 64]

Station Points and Projections of Light

The screen undergoing mutation in late twentieth century media and art is a legacy of the theater and the cinema. The theatrical tradition of the proscenium arch is itself...

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