“The Screen or the Window: A Critical Proposal for
Reading Computer Representations”
Michele
White
Wellesley College
mwhite@wellesley.edu
The structuring qualities of the computer screen play an important part in how we
understand the Internet and other computer-facilitated representations but they
are rarely addressed in the critical literature. In this presentation, I
consider how the screen and mediation remain largely invisible because the
Internet is described as a material setting that users inhabit. I provide a
brief study of popular and academic narratives and focus on renderings of the
computer and Internet as a window or entrance that appear in telepresence art
works, webcams, and advertisements for computer screens. Close visual and
textual analysis and critical considerations of photography’s referential
aspects are employed. These methodologies provide a way to highlight the
computer screen and encourage an alternative understanding of the computer and
Internet.
The tendency to engage with the computer and Internet as physical and animate has
significant ramifications. Our conceptualization of the medium determines the
questions that we can ask and whether the representational aspects of
stereotypes can be perceived and critiqued. Judith Mayne has argued that
feminist film theorists such as Laura Mulvey have attributed “the polarity of
gender, of masculinity versus femininity, to the very structures of pleasure and
identification in the classical cinema” (48). Computers and Internet settings
employ similar devices. However, the forms of identification produced by
computers and Internet settings have an even more consequential effect because
users spend significant amounts of time engaging with computers; computers and
networks also appear in film, television, and print advertising; dream or
trance-like experiences are often part of the engagement; the user’s
identification with characters and other representations can be intense; and
there is an idea that people are alive and their bodies are accessible through
the Internet.
Considering the screen rather than the delivered representations is difficult
because of the rhetoric about physical and populated Internet settings. For
instance, Esther Dyson makes it appear like people live on the Internet rather
than use it when she states that “the Net includes all the people, cultures, and
communities that live in it” (2). Eduardo Kac uses his telepresence artwork,
Teleporting an Unknown State (1994/96, 1998, and
2001), to render the “Internet as a life-supporting system” (Kac) and suggests
that there is “Birth, growth, and death on the Internet” (Kac a). Such
narratives about people inhabiting the setting and live interfaces are connected
to early descriptions of the computer and Internet. William Gibson suggests that
physical settings and screens will combine in the first sentence to Neuromancer when he states that “the sky above the port
was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (3). Gibson starts Neuromancer, which had a significant effect on computer
culture, with the screen but he displaces its constructed aspects with live
programs, cyber “space,” and populated interfaces.
Internet sites continue to provide “welcome” messages, invitations to enter, and
depictions of spatial progressions. For instance, the webcam operator Gwen
encourages the spectator to “enter the life of a college student” and Cindy
coaxes the spectator to “ENTER ... with an open mind.” A variety or
multi-purpose sites are referred to as “portals” and Gretchen Barbatsis, Michael
Fegan, and Kenneth Hansen indicate that spectators “engage the computer screen
as a gateway to another place.” Window-like effects are employed because they
seem to provide views “onto” other terrain, articulate an inside and outside,
and suggest that computers and the Internet deliver a continuous spatial
landscape. Thomas J. Campanella suggests that “Webcams, the Web’s windows on the
world, knit the Net to the physical spaces we inhabit. The accompanying
illustration by Jack Desrocher supports this conception by depicting the
computer monitor as a curtained window that is incorporated into the home
setting. Such renderings make representations seem to be part of the lived space
of the spectator.
The conception that the computer and Internet are a window or portal, which
provides an entrance into other places, is related to societal conceptions of
photography. Photographic images are often talked about as if they provided
direct access to the thing depicted—the referent—rather than being
representations. This cultural conception is conveyed by Susan Sontag when she
states that photography is “not only an image (as a painting is an image) an
interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off
the real” (154). Internet sites often use data, texts, and graphics instead of
digitized photos and digital imaging technologies to make representations seem
real. However, society’s usual conception of photography can still provide
another example of a technology and cultural form in which the framed aspects of
images are often ignored. Histories of photography and other referential
media-like film and television-indicate that the physical and animate aspects
attributed to the computer and Internet are not unique and that these renderings
should be associated with other produced forms. Such photography theorists as
Rosalind Krauss, Martha Rosler and John Tagg, also offer some significant
literature to employ in engaging with the produced and framed aspects of
computer and Internet renderings.
A re-employment of the photographic vocabulary of cropping and rectangular
formats can highlight the relationship between individual screen elements,
software windows, and monitors. Noting and articulating the repetitive aspects
of computer and Internet representations can also indicate that it is cultural
conventions rather than people that are conveyed. For instance, Tagg argues that
realism “works by the controlled and limited recall of a reservoir of similar
‘texts,’ by a constant repetition, a constant cross-echoing” (99). Such critical
considerations of photography may be more productive in highlighting the
produced aspects of computer and Internet settings than in helping society to
engage with photography differently. Computers and Internet settings rarely
employ traces of material objects in the ways this concept operates in
photography. The redeployment of photography theory can also begin to render a
new vocabulary for describing and conceptualizing these settings. We should
continue to consider other possibilities for speaking, writing, designing, and
visually rendering the Internet since these acts produce the setting.
REFERENCES
Gretchen Barbatsis Michael Fegan Kenneth Hansen. “The Performance of Cyberspace: An Exploration into
Computer-Mediated Reality.” Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. 1999. 5: .
Thomas J. Campanella. “Be There Now.” salon.com. 1997. : .
Cindy. Intro. : ,
Esther Dyson. Introduction. Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. New York: Broadway Books, 1997.
William Gibson. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.
Gwen. Gwencam. : ,
Eduardo Kac. Teleporting an Unknown State. : ,
Eduardo Kac. Teleporting an Unknown State. : ,
Judith Mayne. “Feminist Film Theory and Criticism.” Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 1994.
Susan Sontag. “The Image World.” On Photography. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
John Tagg. “A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in
the Law.” The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.