Emerging Spatialities of the Screen: Video Games and the Reconfiguration of Spatial Awareness

In this paper I develop a nonrepresentational spatiality of screened images, in which space does not refer to the way space is represented in images or the spaces in which images exist. Instead it focuses on the spaces that images themselves produce. Drawing upon the technology of the screen as a contemporary site at which images are experienced, I argue for a dual conception of the ‘space’ of screened images: an existential space constructed through the background context of a user's relation with an image; and an ecological space constructed through the expressive relationship between body and screen. I use video games as an exemplar of these spaces to show how screened images reconfigure the relationship between touch and vision and how this alters users' spatial awareness of the world.