Screen Bodies

We live accompanied, on the one hand, by the recurring announcement of the imminent end of screens and, on the other hand, by continuous anticipations of the amazing and therefore alarming feats of artificial intelligence, which suggest the opening of a disembodied future. How well-founded are these predictions that seem to erase, thanks to a supposed immediacy, the mediating function (Grusin 2015) of both screens and bodies? Does all this really distance us from a condition that is instead summarized in the title Screen Bodies?

This article is a contribution to screenology or media archaeology of the screen. It focuses on mobile screens, discussing their ontological, material, and discursively contextualized aspects. Arguably, screens in motion have become the dominant form, what the author calls “mobile practice” rules. The mobile phone screen has many roles. Besides its default role as a communication interface at a distance, it can be used as a selfie mirror, video display, game board, drawing tablet, writing slate, video chat window, et cetera. Bilocation—or rather, plurilocation—is the phone user's normal ontological state of being. Presence has ceased to be a constant; it is fluid and continually negotiated. The article discusses some of the ways in which this condition has come into being. A key theoretical issue is the dispositif and its manifestations and materializations in contexts of mobile media use. Most screens have historically been kept in the same place. Compared with this, the smartphone user faces a very different set of factors, variables, possibilities, and restrictions. The dispositif is more difficult to identity, but it is not absent. The issue has a broader context, which concerns objects that are carried around attached to the body and used en route. Although a concerted desire or need for portable media does not seem to have been felt until the late nineteenth century, media archaeology of the screen has to be able to tackle this extended perspective, which goes back to eras and cultures where what we call mobile media screens did not exist.

Different from image anthropology and interface phenomenology with its focus on the screen in its visual impact on human sensation, and different from an archaeology of human vision itself, the notion of “screen bodies” may be understood in an inverse sense as well. Radical media archaeology, with its focus on technical implementations rather than embodiment, attends to the media-active screen in its materialization as machinery and circuitry itself. Its operative imaging ranges from the cathode ray tube to crystal displays in communication devices and beyond. The asymmetric back side of human screen sentience is its technical embedding. Contextualizing the screen's inner-technical existence is a knowledge value in itself. By contrasting the prevailing anthropocentrism of screen studies with the technical analysis of interfaces for epistemic (rather than visual) insight, a media-scientific approach defends the disembodied autonomy of the screen as such.

Against the current enthusiasm for immersive experiences and their promise to bring us closer to the world, this contribution claims that media always imply some kind of distance. Indeed, the act of mediating the world, the others, and ourselves implies a distinction and a separation of and from the entities with which we intend to reconnect. Media are not prostheses that abolish distances; if anything, they are tools that split allegedly uniform realities. By providing some sort of shield, protective media, and protective screens in particular, exemplify this radical situation.

This article investigates how contemporary touch screens transform the conditions of perception, affect, and subjectivity by operating as haptic, relational interfaces. Drawing on phenomenology, media archaeology, and cognitive neuroscience, it advances the concept of the skin-screen to designate the tactile and operational integration of image and body characteristic of portable digital media. The article contends that images function today as computational and sensorial processes and that screens constitute ontological thresholds through which embodied mediation is enacted. By tracing a genealogy from corporeal surfaces to the touchscreen, it elucidates how portable vision reorganizes attention, presence, and selfhood within algorithmically structured environments. Screens thus appear as ambivalent dispositifs: instruments of abstraction and modulation, yet also potential sites for reactivating embodied relationality and reconfiguring the parameters of contemporary being-in-the-world.

This article challenges the recurrent claim that screens are disappearing by showing instead how they become ever more embodied and thus increasingly conceal the mediations they perform. It argues that the ideology of transparency—sustained by seamless design and the erasure of bodily opacity—produces both technological stagnation and a contraction of human agency. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon's notion of metastability and on media-phenomenological accounts of embodiment, the article examines Tom Gerhardt's Mud Tub as a tangible interface that restores friction and makes mediation experientially present. Finally, it connects these insights to contemporary artificial intelligence, suggesting that resisting the myth of transparency and recovering thick, bodily mediation is essential for navigating AI systems critically and for cultivating awareness of how interfaces shape perception and action.

This article first discusses key contributions to the analysis of the modern, postmodern, and globalized “economy of visibility” developed by Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, and Han, with particular attention to the panoptic model's shifts, arguing that such approaches overlook the role of screen-based experiences. The article then explores the link between those shifts and the contemporary erosion of the “reality principle” or, more broadly, of a shared horizon for mediating reality. The authors argue that the political–media concept of transparency, originally rooted in Enlightenment thought, has evolved into an “ideology of Transparency 2.0” equating transparency with total disintermediation enabled by digital media. According to the authors, Trumpism represents the most advanced expression of this ideology, marking the full realization of Baudrillard's “era of simulation.”

This article examines the contemporary demand for transparency and immediacy in media culture, with a focus on the promise of empathy through immersive virtual reality. Drawing on media theory, screen studies, and phenomenology, it argues that claims of unrestricted access—particularly in immersive technologies—do not abolish mediation but instead intensify it through concealed operations of stitching and suture. Through a critical analysis of humanitarian film projects such as Carne y Arena by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the article shows how the promise of unframed, empathetic access through screens relies on technical and narrative procedures that erase their own traces. Against ideologies of transparency and disintermediation, it proposes the concept of “trans(ap)parency” to describe the paradoxical condition in which any form of produced visibility still bears the watermark of its technologies of visualization.

By becoming a culture in its own right, surveillance has developed within the digital humanities as a central concern in media representations and practices. More specifically, this article argues that the culture of surveillance is grounded in the transition from the “political economy of visibility” (Michel Foucault) to a pragmatics of visibility that is entirely defined by new screen performances. While the body and the screen are supposed to disappear under the impact of generalized transparency, this article shows, on the contrary, that “la pensée de l’écran” (Anne-Marie Christin) is increasingly linked to individuals’ bodies insofar as they are both identified and recognized in public space but also calculated and tracked in digital space. Far from disappearing into data, the body of surveillance continues to rematerialize in the evolving repertoire of screen gestures.

This article investigates the screen as a central dispositif of contemporary spectatorship and political affect. Starting from a minor event—the Italian mobilizations surrounding the Global Sumud Flotilla—it asks how screen-based mediation reshapes the relation between spectator and spectacle and whether this transformation can still sustain political enthusiasm rather than disappointment. Drawing on Kant, Lyotard, and Deleuze, as well as on the works of Godard and Farocki, the article traces a genealogy of the screen as a site of negative presentation and reversibility. Through case studies ranging from September 11 to the Romanian Revolution and contemporary images of Palestine, it argues that the screen's capacity to turn spectators into spectacle can operate as a retournement, opening fragile but meaningful possibilities for collective political action.

Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua, Toward an Anthropology of Screens: Showing and Hiding, Exposing and Protecting. Translated by Sarah De Sanctis. Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. $129

Reviewed by Andrew J. Ball