2.0.
Post-Screen Condition
VICTOR FLORES
The idea of a post-screen era seems to suggest a historic moment when
images begin to detach themselves from screens and migrate to other
surfaces. Today, this idea still represents a challenge to civilisation: not
so much because those ‘other surfaces’ do not exist or are not being
tested out, but because screens have incorporated our spaces, our
imaginations and many of our social practices. Doing without them
could easily be seen as a kind of threat, especially since screens are
synonymous with the everyday, with access to information, to work
and leisure, to the point where we count on them to touch and interact
in the world. And so it has been, gradually, from shadow theatres and
magic lantern shows, from cinema and television, right up to multiple
and mobile screens of varying formats that make up our current media
culture.
1. It is not therefore to an overcoming of screens that the expression
‘post-screen’ alludes. Similarly, as Geoffrey Batchen has clarified, the
‘post-photographic’, a very omnipresent concept at the digital turn
of the 1990s, was not so much a moment beyond photography, as a
moment after photography1. ‘Post-screen’, ‘post-photographic’, just
like ‘post-cinema’, are, in fact, periodicizing concepts that highlight
a second new culture originating from the digital convergence of
these media. It is a culture that follows on from the cultural industries
of the 20th century and the screens that have been its trademark,
those of television and the cinema. In this new culture the main
screens are on computer monitors, tablets and smartphones. They
are governed by a new model of ‘producer-consumer’ made popular
by the so-called Web 2.0 that brought us YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter and other social networks. What is specific to
these ‘cultural technologies’, as they have come to be known, is that
they have promoted an unprecedented ‘participatory’ turn, allowing
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the uploading, viewing and sharing of user-generated content. The
dissemination capacity of this type of content, such as YouTube video
clips, surpasses all expectations because they can be embedded in any
medium (website, email, message, blog, Facebook page), and are not
limited to the platform on which they were originally published. On the
other hand, each clip can be commented on, classified, arranged on
the most appropriate channel, as well as searched and rated by users.
The contribution and the protagonism of users, their ‘activism’, is the
main raison-d’être of the network.
The best summary of Web 2.0 logic must surely be the YouTube slogan:
‘Broadcast yourself’. Selfies, home videos and all the visual vernacular
imaginable have been uploaded onto these servers and video
aggregators to feed the new mashup spirit of social interaction, its
exhibitionism and voyeurism. Television itself has been incorporating
this logic. In the UK, Channel 4’s reality show Gogglebox is one of
the best caricatures of the prominence (and fetishism) of the homo
spectator. Winner of a BAFTA and a National Television Award, the
programme is different in that it presents the viewer ‘in action’,
that is, families and groups of people watching TV, commenting
on it, crying and laughing. ‘Watching other people’, ‘watching other
people watching’, and ‘watching others watching us’ are some of the
circularities that go into current screen practices. This ‘script’ of the
English television show reminds us what studies on zapping revealed
in the 1990s: that ultimately what viewers are looking for when they
change channel compulsively is their own image. The post-screen era
seems to have made this psychoanalysis a reality.
The installation SELF ( ) by Gary Hill (2015) reflects this scopic drive
about the ‘Self’ that has so influenced visual practices in recent times.
The placing in a line on a wall of five geometric objects entitled SELF
A, SELF B, SELF C, SELF D and SELF F, equipped with one or two
eyepieces to peep through, promises to satisfy the narcissistic desire
of the viewer and offer him the fantasy of observing himself. But these
‘peep media’ are designed to deny us this pleasure. This slight is all too
predictable due to the fact that SELF E (‘selfie’) is missing. And after all,
what every peek lets the visitors see is either part of the top of their
head, neck or torso, which they will identify with difficulty as theirs,
and will not be able to relate to satisfactorily. The eyes, mouth and other
significant parts of the face are excluded, frustrating identification and
any pleasure sought. With SELF ( ) Gary Hill displays one of the greatest
fears inherent in the new screens: not seeing, not being seen, not being
recognised by others. The face disappears and Web 2.0. is threatened.
Profiles quickly becomes suspect and accounts risk being closed...
The face on social networks is the main theme of another installation
in Unspoken Dialogues. In Empire Front (2015), Atif Akin composes a
mosaic of the faces of American soldiers sent on missions abroad.
The photographs were collected from their accounts on various social
networks. The official military and corporate image of these soldiers
is blurred here with the ingenuity of the posts, with the casualness of
the comments, with their worldly condition. Akin demonstrates the
vulnerability of the ‘empire front’, by the way the daily lives of soldiers are
exposed to global monitoring and unexpected ‘flanking manoeuvres’.
Voyeuristic interest and the desire to monitor the other on social
networks are also behaviours that the duo TeYosh have documented
with their multimedia project entitled Dictionary of Online Behaviour
(2013). #ex-Ray (Scrolling through ex partner’s profile) describes one
of those imperceptible and panoptic behaviours that networks make
possible, denouncing another side of social networking that deserves
to emerge in the vocabulary, such as occurred with the word ‘cyber-
bullying’.
2. ‘Post-screen’, ‘post-photography’, ‘post-cinema’ and even ‘post-
digital’ are more or less recent manifestations of what in 1999 Rosalind
Krauss described as the ‘post-medium condition’ of some modernist
artistic practices2. What characterized these practices (such as the
work ‘The Voyage on the North Sea’ by Marcel Broodthaers that
suggested this concept to her) are their intermedia character; in other
words, their ability to combine, cross and converge different media.
These post-medium artistic practices did not reduce the works to the
physical specificity of their media, to a kind of mono ontology of each
medium. Intermedia was, therefore, an alternative line to the formalist
agenda of Clement Greenberg, the influential critic of American art
who argued that:
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Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the
limitations of the medium of the specific art (...) It is by virtue of
its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself. To restore the
identity of an art, the opacity of its medium must be emphasized.3
A significant proportion of the work of avant-gardists and neo-avant-
gardists is opposed to this austerity and reductionism. In fact, to the
very idea of ‘specificity’. One of the clearest examples of this is the
enthusiastic way they have approached the reproduction of images and
series of objects, or how they have used installation and temporality
in their works. On the other hand, this is the context that has chosen
the television screen as the new medium for artistic practice, precisely
because the screen symbolizes the ontological ambivalence that
is recognized in each medium, and functions as the instrument par
excellence of convergence.
It is important to remember that convergence was the subject of
media studies carried out at that time by Marshall McLuhan. In 1964,
McLuhan dedicated the fifth chapter of his book Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man to the theme of ‘Hybrid energy’ and examined
the result of the new forces created with the meeting or hybridizing of
media. Recent technological convergence made possible by the digital
turn has reclaimed some of McLuhan’s important lessons (for example,
Bolter and Grusin’s theories about remediation and hypermediacy in
2000), whose significance is demonstrated in the concept of post-
medium. With the publication of ‘Post-media Aesthetics’ (2001) by Lev
Manovich and ‘The Post-Media Condition’ (2004) by Peter Weibel, the
idea of a post-media condition in digital culture has acquired resonance.
According to Weibel, new technology has not only led to a new branch
of artistic genres, it has also had an impact on earlier technical media
(painting, sculpture, photography, etc.), modifying them and making
them accessible in other ways:
With the experiences of the new media we can afford to take a look
at the old media. With the practices of the new technological media
we can also embark on a fresh evaluation of the practices of the old
non-technological media. In fact we might even go so far as to say
that the intrinsic success of the new media resides less in the fact
that they have developed new forms and possibilities of art, but that
they have enabled us to establish new approaches to the old media
of art and above all have kept the latter alive... 4
The current production and distribution chain for a film exemplifies
this post-medium condition. Films today continue to be shot, edited
and screened both in celluloid and digital versions. Revenues are
dependent not only on box office returns but also on DVD sales,
television screenings, distribution over digital streaming platforms such
as Netflix and cable video clubs. Cinema has reinvented itself and is
one of the best examples of a medium taking advantage of the digital.
Another paradigmatic case of survival is television and the way it has
migrated to the internet, offering its online content through searchable
video packages. Even television sets themselves, in the opposite
direction, have acquired the ability to access the internet and a variety
of video platforms. As Bolter and Grusin explained, remediation has
two directions: new media takes older media to define itself and older
media gets refashioned by new media.
In fact, the old and the new live healthily side by side in files and
servers that feed into all of these new networks. As William Uricchio
recognised, platforms like YouTube work as a ‘cross-media outlet’, a
place where ‘content familiar from other media forms is repackaged’5,
providing archival experience to anyone who wants to see old
advertising, vintage music video clips or television programmes from
the category ‘Memories’. As Uricchio explains:
The digital turn...has informed our understanding of media history,
shaping our historical agenda and the questions we put to the past.6
The concept of the ‘post-digital’ is probably the best expression of this
technological overview of the past. Just as the ‘post-photographic’
has exposed a forgotten agenda in photography —the simulation—
reminding us that the ontology of photography is not restricted to
capturing or to representation, so the concept of the ‘post-digital’
emerges as a shift in the futuristic orientation of digital technologies,
mesmerised by the rhetoric of the new, valuing old, forgotten and
seemingly obsolete media agendas. But this is not a contemplative
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attitude to the past. At stake is not just a ‘retro’ gaze, a nostalgia for
times and early technical experiments with computer game cassettes
or turntables, with VCRs or even telephones. It is true that this nostalgia
exists and has even received a boost in recent years when the digital
seemed to dematerialise all media and reduce them to files which were
difficult to search and preserve. The remarkable growth of public and
private media collections are a symptom of this.
The gaze that the Digital Humanities and their multiple research
laboratories cast over the old media is a gaze that acknowledges
the recursiveness of programmes as a central media feature. This
recursiveness makes us aware of the fact that old techniques and
programmes have again imposed themselves by matching our needs.
And here, in fact, the obsolete deserves to be rethought as a concept.
As Jussi Parikka wonders: when do media become obsolete? 7 For
example, when the 19th century stereoscopic photography, forgotten
and misunderstood by museums, can be presented to the public
through Smart TV screens in 3D, there is a portal that opens up to the
historical research of visual culture, but there is also an opportunity to
detect interference from the past in the present media culture. And it is
amazing to realize how the ‘obsolete’ is so new. On the other hand, this
post-digital paradigm often relies on the idea that there are unfulfilled
agendas in the past that could be consummated now. In this respect,
Tom Gunning referred to the media ‘forgotten futures’. In fact, past
and future promise to bend time, approaching and overlapping, and
it’s a pure fact that we still have the intuition that all this only becomes
consistent and viable within the limits of a screen.

1
Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea. Writing. Photography. History,
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002.
2
Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”. Art in the Age of the Post-
Medium Condition. 1999. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
3
Clement Greenberg. “Towards a Newer Laocoon”, in Charles Harrison &

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Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas,
Oxford and Cambridge. 1940. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1992, p.
558.
4
Peter Weibel, “La condición postmedial”, in Revista Austral de Ciencias
Sociales, vol.10, 2006, p.137.
5
William Uricchio, “The Future of a Medium once Known as Television”,
in Pelle Snickars/ Patrick Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader, Sweden:
National Library of Sweden, 2009, p.28.
6
Ibidem, p.25.
7
Jussi Parikka, “Situated Practices of Media Interference2, in Post-Screen.
Intermittence + Interference, Lisboa: Edições Universitárias Lusófonas,
Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa/ Centro de Investigação e
Estudos em Belas-Artes, 2016, p.43.