Wet screen

People sometimes talk about the screen as though it is a paradigmatically postmodern technology that provokes a paradigmatically postmodern crisis—whereby representations of the world come to supplant because they seem, if not more real, then at least more ‘engaging’ than the world itself. The insistently presentist character of the discourse surrounding this ‘screen crisis’ has provoked some media theorists to ask what we can say about the history of the screen, where we should locate its origin, and what that origin might tell us about the screens of today. In what follows, I am going to try to address that inquiry in a different way than media theorists usually do. I will be rooting the history of the screen in water, a natural medium, rather than in human technics. What I am aiming to show is, first, that the surface of water as Roman writers describe it really does function like a screen, and second, that this functionality brings about a different kind of ‘screen crisis’—this one arising from the difficulty of distinguishing screen from non-screen—that invites us to reconsider our own relationship with screens.