'Haptic Screens' and Our 'Corporeal Eye'*

Abstract

This essay is about what happens to 'us' when 'seeing' or 'watching* 'real, Active or virtual worlds' on or through screens. A significant number of scholars, for example McLuhan, has already paid attention to this topic and tried to sketch the nature of the interaction between these 'shining' and 'enlightening' and human subjects. Usually screens are immediately associated with the eyes, with vision, with the supremacy of the visual. This, however, is a culturally biased, superficial and confined association, as not only McLuhan, but also a series of other scholars, film theorists and artists have attempted to demonstrate. The main goal of this article is to show that there is a lot more involved than sheer vision when watching screens or that is not only our eyes which are touched by what we seen on film, TV and PC screens, but our whole body. Our world has become a world of screens. For decades their predominant place was in film theatres, but since the invention of the TV and the PC they spread like wildfire. Today screens form part and parcel of the interiors of offices, hospitals and homes almost everywhere in the world. We are surrounded by and live with screens. We use them to remain informed about what is going on in the global village, to enter cyberspace and to express our ideas, for example when writing an essay or an article. Our relation with TV and PC screens has become almost as important as with fellow human beings, so it appears. Small wonder therefore that screens have become the object of study of many a scholar. The number of books and articles in which screens, especially film and video screens are dealt with from a variety of angles has become so vast, that it is impossible for one person to read and digest them all during a lifetime. And this, of course, enhances the possibility that what I try to bring forward in this piece already has been touched upon by others and possibly in a better and more convincing way. However, this disquieting sense is not strong enough to keep me from presenting a few observations, reflections and speculations regarding our relation with film, TV and PC screens and what they mean for and 'do' with us.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.