Screen=Body ( Valid until 30 June 2010 – Day 83- Day 73)
The screen is an extremely ambivalent material object, functioning simultaneously as a material surface and as an immaterial or conceptual threshold to imagery or other information. Kate Mondloch uses the term ‘screen-reliant’ in opposition to the term ‘screen-based’ to signal that the screen is a performative category. According to Murdoch almost anything- glass, architecture, three-dimensional objects and so on-can function as screen and thus as a connective interface to another(virtual) space. This links with the Deleuze observation that ‘everything’ can be a screen. I want to propose that also, due to the nature of the pervasive, mobile digital media, the body becomes a screen, and we have an erasure of the border between the screen and the body, the viewer and the screen. So the viewer-screen interface, that Murdoch considers to be the neglected circuit between the bodies and the screens, becomes blended with the viewer’s body.
The body can be dismissed, disseminated and reassembled on the/ as a screen. Body=screen.
What does it mean to blend the body with the screen?
What does it mean to be denied entry into the illusionist screen space?
It is March 24, 1999. Sitting in the leaving room of my friend, five-six of us. Watching CNN, drinking cheap red wine with Coke, so called “bambus”. It is early evening, already drunk, my friend offers me weed, CNN and Faith no More in the background, we start laughing. It gets dark in the room, the screen is gazing, I walk to the window, it’s early spring and it smells of blossoms. I can hear voices in the air.
It started.
Are you serious?
No, look, the plains just departed.
I can hear the noise, the plains, the sound of engines in the air. I feel bitterness, fear, and anxiety. The air smells like fire. The sound of the engines is repetitive and annoying.
They burned the USA Embassy, look, look…
Is that going to change anything?
Those stupid idealist.
We see the planes on the screen, data and numbers circling bellow. The glow fills the room. We hear them in the air. I think of my aunty, I hope she is safe.
Another go?
The smell of weed makes me sick. I vomit in the toilet, while the engines fill the bathroom with a shattering noise. I need to sleep.
