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6. The ABCs of Viewing: Material Poetics and the Literary Screen
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126 My software did this to me. Christopher T. Funkhouser, 2009 To date, relatively few analyses of the screen as an aesthetic form in its own right have been produced. Critiques of web design and interface usability maintain strong historical attachments to print and typographic disciplines, conceiving electronic communication as page- and document-based. The very term “screen” continues to prioritize the cinematic arts, often implying, whether intended or not, that the methods and ideas of film criticism are equally applicable to current programmable writing practices on the computer. However, as an increasing number of visual culture historians and film theorists realize, the screen as art object invites an increasingly wide array of cultural analyses, corresponding to the medium’s growing significance as both a mode of social interface and knowledge construction. Such developments, cinema theorist Haidee Wassan points out, tend to be addressed within film studies through critical explorations of malleability and multiplicity–metaphors, in other words, “wherein screens are reconceptualised as windows that shrink and expand on cue” (74). As a formative attribute influencing how the screen work is to be engaged , perhaps even interpreted, physical dimension, for Wassan, contributes to an effective materialist schema, according to which various The ABCs of Viewing: Material Poetics and the Literary Screen Philip A. Klobucar 6 The ABCs of Viewing · 127 traditional approaches to film-based media can be interrogated over a greater number of cultural contexts. As video emerges in newly consumable formats via devices and environments as divergent as Jumbotrons perched high above freeways and cell phones and iPads clutched in crowded subway cars, no single mode of usage seems dominant. How is it possible, Wassan asks, for traditional methods of film criticism to account accurately for this radical shift in the medium itself? Against claims to the contrary, cinema scholars must do even more to integrate into their critical frameworks the multimediated environment that is clearly forcing a new definition of cinema. We can no longer retain film’s monopoly on our understanding of cinema in particular or moving image culture more generally. Neither celluloid, movie theatres , nor modernist ideas about art adequately account for the dynamic shifts ushered in by media culture in the last two decades. (75) These new signifying forms continue to elude common genrebased approaches in arts criticism, upending the very concept of the film arts as exclusive practices to include creative work in broadcasting, software production, and cellular data networks, not to mention critical studies in information economics, globalization, and science and technology theory. The screen, we find, carries its own unique array of visual, aural, and verbal constraints, constituting a distinct objectivity –or at least one decidedly divergent from the page. Of course, the revisionary influence of these technologies works both ways, since it also invokes a clear mandate to introduce methods and devices from film criticism to both interpret and evaluate works composed for an increasingly wide variety of different screens. Cinema as both a discipline and a practice helps new media viewers accommodate language on-screen by providing a familiar critical context for its visual animation. Perspective, composition, and narrative subgenres emerge handily as chief attributes guiding our interpretation of even the most complex screen poetic constructions, while content itself becomes free to acquire the forms and gestures of a basic mise-en-scène. Beyond the cinematic field, social media technologies have refashioned the screen as both a new interface for mediated communication and a portal for interpersonal networking, establishing at least two more fundamental models for the interpretation and assessment of the screen work. 128 · Philip A. Klobucar These three frameworks of cultural production for the screen help to establish the medium’s uniquely multilayered approach to artifice and aesthetic meaning in general. To engage the screen as a mode of communication automatically invites an array of media-specific questions , not to mention the various uncertainties intrinsic to the technology at hand. The dispersed, decentered, explicitly fragmented nature of presentation format is certainly not as easily disregarded compared to works in print. Where the printed page renders an effective symbolic continuity (at times, even linearity) in its arrangement of content, the screen openly asks viewers to discount all notions of conclusion or end point. Note here that even mainstream cinema cannot escape the structural (and economic) demand for endless sequels or serialization. Concepts of time and process remain essential to interpretation, as all content appears automatically in view of some kind of update, either projected or preceding. Not...