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I was in Glasgow for the Screen Studies Conference 2009 and its 50th anniversary. Had a blast of a time and of course met old friends and made new ones. (http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/screen/conference2009/)

I chaired a really good session with two young academics; their names are Roya Rastegar who presented “New Frontiers off the Screen: Physical Cinema at the Sundance Film Festival” and Ariel Rogers with a paper titled “From Immersion to Connection: Digital Cinematic Experience in Light of Widescreen.”

The session titled AFTER CINEMA: Digital Screens was chaired by Aylish Wood. The panel was very well matched and my thanks go to Aylish Wood, Suzanne Buchan with “Theorizing Animation as the Manipulated Moving Image,” and Dale Hudson with “Mobile Screens, Global Networks, Digital Structures and Politicizing ‘Film’”. 

The title of my own paper and the abstract are below.

UBIQUITOUS DIGITAL SCREENS: IMAGES ACROSS MEDIA FROM MOBILE PHONES TO GIANT SCREENS

The paper will address issues of image reproducibility in new media and the de-evaluation of content re-presented across multiple screens. Is the continuous process of image reproducibility in new media and the de-evaluation of content re-presented across multiple screens producing more than a ‘witness/documentary’ society? Is the ubiquity of the image the cause underpinning a process of homogenization and commodification of content increasingly devoid of meaning, as Jean Baudrillard describes it? Are multiple screens altering forms of behavioral interactions, creating a metastructure able to enforce social homogenized behavioral responses?

The desire to engage with multiple screens at any time and in any space does not necessarily reflect a deeper engagement either with content or with its mediated re-presentation across media. Remediation and transmediation, across multiple screens, provide the opportunity for a deeper participatory engagement although, as Paul Virilio states, these engagements can be characterized by instantaneity and ephemerality. Screens as multiple representations become nothing more than a tool to simulate an interactive experience that is void of meaning. The question raised by both Baudrillard and Virilio is if there is a value in contemporary images represented across multiple screens that provide the impression of an egalitarian democracy of participation.

The paper will conclude by analyzing the opportunities and challenges that multiple screens offer for behavioral interactions when representing images that reduce social interactions to simulated reproductions of void.