I am a receptor of discrete parcels of information; olfactory, visual, auditory, tactile, temporal. I am
standing in a room. There’s nothing here. I can see the space, I can hear and produce sound, I can smell the paint on the walls, I can touch them and they touch me back. I can move about the room freely, and all of this happens in real-time. I do something, and I get a response. I am unmediated.
But now I turn around and see a gridded lattice, like one that is used in a confessional or a bank. It’s dividing the room in two, and I am on one side of it. It’s a perforated physical surface, composed materially of repetitions of solid and void; it’s permeable, but I can’t get through it. Now, it has a few small apertures and I can see someone there by their movement. I can’t make out their face, but I can hear them. It’s cool on the other side of the room, there’s a soft breeze coming through from there, it smells like the sea. Now the lattice has many large apertures, and I can see the person clearly. I wave at the person and they smile. I poke my fingers through the holes, but can’t touch anything, just the lattice.
I wonder why that person is there when I am here.
Am I trapped? Are they trapped? Which of us is on the inside?
Now I see one of those apertures growing, the rest shrinking, a plate of glass appears. The room is now divided by a wall, and in the wall, a window. I can see straight through the window, of course, but it’s a little brighter here than there and I see the ghost of my own reflection. My image is between me and the other person. I can’t hear them well, either, though they seem to be talking in muffled words. It’s a bit stuffy in here, so I open the window between us so I can feel that breeze again, and so we can talk freely. I guess I could climb through, now, but there doesn’t seem much point – I’m more or less already there.
Separation: the barrier
Earlier in this chapter, I discussed the screen as barrier in terms of a subjective transgression, a potential for ‘crossing’ as an expression of agency. I’d like to explore this relation further now, focusing on the embodied perception of space in the nature of the barrier, rather than the subject’s agency. Considering the spatial in terms of its embodied perception allows the screen
to be examined in terms of its action in spatial filtering, particularly of the types and qualities of
sensorial information allowed to pass through it. This supports a view of the screen as creating a perceptual distance.
As Giuliana Bruno notes in Surface: Matters of aesthetics, materiality and media, the term
‘screen’ came into usage in English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to describe a
furniture piece, a sheet of cloth or paper caught within a frame and used to divide space.68 As
a translucent divider of space, the screen is readily seen as a semi-permeable barrier. It is not solid and impenetrable like the wall, but offers sensorial permeability – the shadows of things
behind, the sounds of others speaking, the smells of cooking. The screen here acts to filter the
sensorial information available to the occupant from one side of the screen to the other, thus affecting their perception of space. This inherently spatial role of the screen can be used to explore media screens as well. James Ash, for example, in his examination of the computer screen as
used in gaming, argues that screen-forms can alter the phenomenological field through their
manipulation of spatial relations; including those of awareness and sensorial capacities. Dant
likewise maintains that the perception of televisual space uses the “same perceptual apparatus with which the flow of the life-world is grasped.”69
68. Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
69. James Ash, “Emerging spatialities of the screen: video games and the reconfiguration of spatial awareness,” Environment and Planning A 41 (2009): 2105-2124; Dant, Television and the Moral Imaginary, 101.
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As I shut the window it changes again. The glass in the frame is replaced with LEDs, and between them they’re showing the same scene that was in the window. There’s my friend, and now I can hear them clearly, though some instrumental music is floating on top of their voice as if to match its emotional content. I ask a question, but it’s a few minutes before I get an answer. Maybe they’re talking to someone else? I try to focus on their face, but I can’t bring it
any closer – they remain at the same distance and all
I see is pixels. I move back and stay still, trying to line up what I’m seeing with what is being shown to me. As I do so, the image changes, I can see close-ups of their pores, their hair follicles, the fall of their shirt. I feel like I’m touching them, but they don’t look like they’re being touched.
I turn around and see the same screen, and now I’m not sure if the other side of the room is in front of me or behind me. I walk over and take the screen off the wall, holding it in my hands as I sit on the floor. I notice that the room is just one room again, though
now this thing is in it as well as me. It looks like my
friend has done the same thing as me, I can see them and hear them sitting on their floor with their device. The lag must have gone. I type as I talk, each finger hitting the screen on a letter icon, forming a message. I feel like I could pick that person up with a pinch of my fingers, a tiny force to lift a whole person. They seem so far away. Are we separated or connected?
Following Friedberg’s definition, a ‘virtual’ space needs to fulfil two requirements: it must
possess a power of acting, and it must be immaterial. However, the ability of the screen—object
to mediate and recombine sensorial information affects the fidelity and quality of the space to
the other side of the screen, inasmuch as it appears to a person on this side of the screen. In each of these cases, the screen’s material effects these spatial changes, and so the screen-as-relatum must belong to the ‘real’.
A material object filters sensorial information, resulting in a virtual space. Virtuality, then, is
a sensorially ‘reduced’ space. Rather than look at the real and virtual as irretrievably divided,
they could be seen instead as an issue of sensorial equivalency in the spaces across the screen. A perceptual distance is introduced by a lack of sensorial equivalency. As Black demonstrates in his discussion of peri-personal space, space is “perceived differently” if it cannot be “understood in terms of the possible movements and interactions that might take place within it.” In Heideggerian terms, the reduced space would disallow “attending to what is near.”70
This distance is enacted differently in different types of screen. The lattice still maintains a sense of the spatial possibilities of the other side. If a person could just step through the screen, they could enact movements similarly to their activities on their side of the screen. This set of possibilities, however, is not discovered through embodiment, rather it is overlayed on an
understanding of spatial equivalence. The body that would interact on the other side of the
screen is a projection. In this sense, the space behind the lattice is already virtual, because its
distance requires a person’s possibilities for action to be projected in possibility rather than
discovered in the material.
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When I touch you, this is an event of separation and differentiation: tactility is the material event of such a dehiscence – of, precisely, the ethical differentiation of the I/Other.
Dave Boothroyd71 I need some sort of gap to recognise a difference in space. Touchbuzzer might just buzz all the time, how would I know? I can only feel it reciprocating my touch when I touch it. Our spaces are reciprocal, contiguous. What space is of Touchbuzzer and what is of me?
Camera obscura and other mechanical visual aids
split the body off from a corporeal basis of sight
while also claiming an undisputed truth value for what is seen through the apparatus itself.
Massey72 Is Touchbuzzer a screen? No. There is a distance between me and it, but I can only find this distance when I’m not using it. The second I touch it, the gap
disappears.
Is Pitchmatcher a screen? Is Mover a screen? No. Each does something to my understanding of space and my abilities within it, but they seem to return on me rather than creating distance.
Is Colourmapper a screen? Perhaps.
I could say, at least, that Colourmapper has a
screen. It produces spatial information and displays it visually, as a colour space. Would Colourmapper be so screenic if it displayed distance as a pitch, or a series of movements? Space may be acoustic and tactile and olfactory, but the virtual is almost certainly visual73. Perhaps screening is a visual
medium because it is a spatial medium. Or perhaps, as Massey suggests, the screen made space a visual medium because it needed to open distance.
To counter this distance, and thus to make a projection of the possibility for effect more accurate, more and more spatial information is shifted to distance senses – primarily to vision. For example, windows allow multiple lines of sight, but no longer allow touch. The sense of touch is cut off at the window so that tactile information must be read through visual information. This visual sense of tactility is used well in cinema and television – graininess, moving focus,
textural close-ups and the contrast of surface and depth are some filmic techniques used to
trigger embodied responses similar to those triggered by touch, without the act of touch itself.74
Distance is introduced between affect and effect, between that space and this one.
71. Dave Boothroyd, “Touch, Time and Technics: Levinas and the Ethics of Haptic Communications,” Theory Culture Society 26 (2009): 342.
72. Lyle Massey, Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies, (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University press, 2007), 71.
73. Introna and Ilharco state that “the screen is first and primordially involved in seeing, watching, perceiving with the eyes,” and connect this seeing to the “ontological primacy of seeing” as a way of spatialising the world. Introna and Ilharco, “On the Meaning of Screens,” 68-9.
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‘The skin’ can no longer be presumed to have as its
primary reference the biological-physical epidermis
... rather, it should be rethought as the inter(sur)face of sensibility; of touching itself ... the term ‘skin’, I am suggesting, should be allowed to continue to stand
as the name of the site wherein the event of contact takes place.
Dave Boothroyd75
Touchbuzzer touches me as I touch it. I can be extended into the space beyond my skin, but only until I find a surface which belongs to another. This new surface might be my skin and the other’s skin at the same time – this is our boundary, one on either
side. It happens at the edges of my space.
The razorblade scene in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien
Andalou touches me too, so violently that I cringe. But I don’t touch it, because it’s too distant from me. Can it be in my body but not in my space?