WHAT IS A SCREEN TODAY?

In our everyday, we are dealing with an increasing number of screens. The most familiar media from computer to smart phone, from tablet to media facade are all screen-media. Such a flood changes the very nature of the screen. It is no longer the surface on which reality is represented with renewed strength and clarity (including the reality of dreams), as it was for film it is no longer the site of "epiphany," to take up a term used by the early film theorists. New devices have a screen that functions rather like a display, which is to say that it has become a place on which free-floating images stop for a moment, make themselves available to users, allow themselves to be manipulated, and then take off again along new routes. It is not by chance that the traditional metaphors intended to describe the screen window, mirror, frame are now replaced by other metaphors monitor, blackboard, wall that underline this processes of stop-and-go. Moving to these new devices, cinema too has ended up following the logic of the display: its images appear more precarious, less limited by narration, and open to different meanings. The increasing success of films using images that come or purport to come from some preexisting archive symptomizes how filmic images too now seem to be part of a tornado of images that occasionally subsides and leaves a few behind. However, the point at which images "land" is never arrived at by chance. An image may make itself available to a crowd or to an individual, in a public space or in private, close in time to the events it represents or distant from them: in each of these cases, an image acquires different valences, both experiential and political. For a long time, cinema has been acting as a perfect public sphere, and in this way has displayed the relevance of sharing images and sounds. Now, in a regime of intense and endless circulation, it is valuable to be reminded that images and sounds must be shared, even in the context of increasingly precarious audiences and situations.