Rivista di Estetica | http://labont.it/rivista-di-estetica
July 2014: Screens
Advisory editors: Mauro Carbone and Anna Caterina Dalmasso (mail to: annacate.dalmasso@gmail.com and rivista.estetica@gmail.com)
Deadline for submission: April, 30, 2013
Description:
Nowadays screens have become, more or less consciously, our reference optical apparatus. Therefore, understanding our present experience of screens shall help us understand our present experience of seeing.
On one hand, there are many reasons to state that our present experience of screens derives from that which cinema has taught us, in spite of the multiple differences separating, by now, the two. Indeed, despite such differences, it shall be reminded that cinema was precisely what taught us to consider the screen as a surface whose opacity, instead of concealing, allows us to see. Thus is precisely what today makes the word “screen” – in the meaning that concerns us here – draw close to the term “display”, as Francesco Casetti (forthcoming) points out: a term that univocally signifies “exhibition, exposition, ostentation”.
On the other hand, Vivian Sobchack (Carnal Thoughts, 2004) remind us that our present experience of screens is no longer simply that of cinema. It has been modified, first of all, by the television, whose screen has made us feel no longer, as it happened with the silver screen, like dwarfs in front of images of huge gods, but rather as giants in front of Lilliputian images (E. Huhtamo, Elements of Screenology, 2001). It is then legitimate to wonder which mutated effects may have been produced by that reversal of dimensions. In other words, how this reversal of dimensions between images and us has worked on our system of values, myths and desires.
After the television, computers and mobile phones have come to inaugurate a multiplication of the screens that seems to be unrestrainable. Our experience of the screens has then definitely turned in the plural, but it has also been enriched by other novelties. Among these novelties, I shall only mention the touch-screen, which seems to crucially modify our relationship with the screen, by introducing new modalities of the touch in the circle of the relationship that links the seeing and the being seen. How does my way of seeing, thinking and desiring change then, since I can enlarge or decrease an image just touching it on the screen?
It is this kind of questions that I propose to approach in this issue.
Tiziana Andina
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy and Sciences of Education, University of Turin
Via S. Ottavio, 20 – 10124 Turin, Italy
email: tiziana.andina@unito.it
Office: +39.011.670.8209
homepage: www.labont.it/andina