The screen might seem self-evident, but it is not. Video practitioners and critics in the 1960s and 1970s stressed very different terms, for instance. Terms such as feedback, topology, narcissism, and broadcasting, to name only a few of the most common, were more important than screen. More than the screen, it was the ability to watch a moving image recorded, played back, manipulated, or delayed in ‘real time’ that were sources of interest.

The concern for the screen is not an essential or self-evident quality of video, it belongs to the cultural and political questions we bring to these technologies today. Whatever we understand the screen to be, it is only one element of video, film, gaming, computer monitors, or mobile phones. Each of those technologies may be perceived through a screen, but how that screen relates to the other technological, spatial, formal, and interactive elements, and how users relate to it, can differ quite significantly.

In this sense, one reason why the screen may rise up as a term for thinking video today is that it is a feature allowing us think very different kinds of media in relationship to one another. In that sense, screens are symptomatic of what media theorists have called convergence, the conversion of previously distinct media forms—print, video, film, computer graphics—into code that can be accessed through the same graphical user interface. It also speaks to the rapid proliferation and transformation of screens in our daily life world, from movie and television screens, to phones, tablets, monitors, GPS devices, billboards, facades, kiosks, and more. For that very reason, it seems important to find ways of thinking carefully about screens, in ways that do not simply mix them all up. One of the ways in which that might be done is to examine more carefully the screen as a spatial, architectural, and environmental technology, rather than a strictly optical one, which is often how we think of it. There is no screen without a space and an architecture, and conversely, an attention to the spatial and architectural relationships required by screens, or configured by screens, can be an important means of distinguishing different operations of screening, together with the deeper histories to which they belong.

The spatial and environmental emphasis has been central to a project that we have been working on at Yale University. Entitled “Screen Genealogies,” it has been running, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, over the past two years. The collaborators, Craig Buckley, (History of Art), Rüdiger Campe (in German Languages and Literatures), and Francesco Casetti (Film and Media Studies Program) have hosted a series of the seminars bringing together scholars from different disciplines and institutions to explore spatial and environment approaches to the screen.

To emphasize the screen’s spatial functions, also means thinking about this entity in very different historical terms. As we have sought to argue, the common notion of the screen as a surface that displays impermanent images and which disappears under these images—an understanding epitomized by movie and television screens—is a recent one. It is only in the early nineteenth century, in connection with new period spectacles like the phantasmagoria, that the word screen was firmly linked to optical experiences. Before the 19^th century, screens meant things like “fire screens,” which warded off the heat and sparks from fires. It meant a “partition of wood or stone, pierced by one or more doors, dividing a room or building in two parts, or “a wall thrown out in front of a building and masking the façade.” It also meant devices useful for concealing objects or people from view. In military contexts, it described a group of soldiers detached from their units in order to cover the movement of an army. It also described apparatuses used in the sifting and filtering, whether of grain, coal, or air, etc. […] For most of its history, a screen was a filter, a divide, a shelter, or a form of camouflage. Only the advent of cinema, and later of television and video, made the screen acquire its most common identity as a surface supporting a changing representation.