Visualizing The Screen:

The ‘Mobilized Gaze,’ the ‘Production of Space,’ and the ‘Aesthetics of Disappearance’
in Everyday Interactions with the ‘Networked Screen’ in Contemporary Paris

Joe Lukawski
Visual Culture, Theory and Communication
Professor Monteiro
The American University of Paris
18.10.2013

Keywords: the screen, the city, visual culture, mobility, heterotopia, disappearance, the mobilized gaze,

Abstract: As more and more virtual windows appear – in shop windows and subway lines, in so many
pockets and handbags – our understanding of contemporary visual culture must account for new ways of
seeing in and experiencing spaces filled with screens. This renewed enquiry is an interesting site not only
for reflecting critically upon previous theorizations of the screen, on the filmic and the senses, and on the
specific spaces produced as a result of screen culture; but also for experimenting with more visual modes
of research. Visualizing the screen is not only a matter of making visible the networks of meaning to which
screens give viewers access or imagining the types of seeing the screen enables. It is most importantly an
exercise in “fixing the shadows” of our interactions with and deployments of the screen so that they may be
analyzed in the specific visual contexts where they appear and into which they disappear. Though my
research is ultimately grounded in the rather common idea that screens are increasingly visible in
contemporary urban space, this evolution, at the outer limits of its logics, suggests the partial
disappearance of screens as particularistic, limited interfaces with contemporary imagery. Through their
integration into the very architectures of late modernity and informational capitalism (Arvidsson, 2006)
and into the atomized visual field of the viewer in an extension of what Virilio (1884) terms “opto-electric
perception,” the boundaries of screen experience and the visual experience of real space seem to be
blurring.
 Lukawski 2

Introduction

“’New’ media imply the ever-obsolescence of the ‘old.’ As Antonio Gramsci put it: ‘the
old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid
symptoms appear.’ And yet, amid these morbid symptoms, the continued engagement
with a ‘virtual window’ seems somehow assured.”
- Anne Friedberg in The Virtual Window (2006; 239)

In the contemporary city – the glass citadel of windows real and “virtual,”

individual and common – what started as an almost “phantasmagoric” flickering

appearance projected from an oil lamp has evolved to defy the very moving images that

early cinematography brought to bear on human culture and visual life (Peters, 1990).

Moving images are no longer relegated to spaces of symbolic separation from mental life

in the metropolis, where city dwellers could temporarily escape the constant struggle to

assert their personality within the dimensions and strictures of modern city life, as

Simmel (1903) theorized it. Moving images are now everywhere. They not only occupy

visual space in the city as we experience it today from innumerable still and mobile

vantage points, but perhaps even structure visual experience and with it our experience of

time, space and sociality. The virtual window, as Friedberg (2006) calls the screen in her

critical enquiry into its development and evolution, is now the dominant interface

between phenomenological reality and the world of ideas and images bound up in and

constituting what some call the network society (Castells, 1996) and what I refer to more

simply as digital modernity. In this, the ways in which contemporary visuality – in

Mirzoeff’s (2007) sense, how “history is made visible to power” – play out in screen

space not only suggests a turn towards the new kinds of moving images and networked

screens we have encountered since Friedberg’s theorization of the virtual window, but

also a renewed enquiry into the phenomenon of seeing moving images as it occurs today,

the visual contexts in which we encounter screens, and the new dynamics of urban

experience more generally which these mobilize. As more and more virtual windows
 Lukawski 3

appear – in shop windows and subway lines, in so many pockets and handbags – our

understanding of contemporary visual culture must account for new ways of seeing in

and experiencing spaces filled with screens. This renewed enquiry is an interesting site

not only for reflecting critically upon previous theorizations of the screen, on the filmic

and the senses, and on the specific spaces produced as a result of screen culture; but also

for experimenting with more visual modes of enquiry.

Visualizing the screen is not only a matter of making visible the networks of

meaning to which screens give viewers access or imagining the types of gaze the screen

enables. It is most importantly an exercise in “fixing the shadows” of our interactions

with and deployments of the screen so that they may be analyzed in the specific visual

contexts where they appear and into which they disappear (Pauwels, 556). It allows us to

reflect upon the screen in the city as the embodied spectator does and in a way that, while

not necessarily oriented towards holistic theorization, may produce new lines of enquiry

to guide future research and critical media practice. In this paper I propose a visual

approach to investigating contemporary screen culture in order to reflect upon the

following:

RQ1: How do the visual contexts of contemporary screens affect our perception of
the succession of images they propose, and how do screens themselves “produce” the
spaces where we find them?
RQ2: What new possibilities for analyzing the reflexive processes involved in
reading screen images does this propose?
RQ3: What new intensities are offered to everyday visual experience by the mobile
screen?
RQ4: What forms of gaze and subject-space relationships do these new screens
propose?

I aim to build on the work of Friedberg (2006) and Wasson (2007) whose critical

histories of the screen situate the evolution and circulation of screen imagery within the

technical history of the screen from early cinema to Windows, from IMAX to

QuickTime. However, where they tend to focus on the cultural products resulting from
 Lukawski 4

screen technologies and their circulation; I will focus as Virilio (1984) does on the screen

as a particular technological interface from which we may be able to draw knowledge

about contemporary visual experience. As I have observed in Paris, these rapidly

evolving interfaces have taken on new forms, locations and uses that suggest a layered

approach to contemporary viewing, one that takes into account both the “mobilized gaze”

as Friedberg terms it and the visual dynamics of screen experience in social space

(Wasson, 75). Though my research is ultimately grounded in the rather common idea that

screens are increasingly visible in contemporary urban space, this evolution, at the outer

limits of its logics, suggests the partial disappearance of screens as particularistic,

limited interfaces with contemporary imagery. Through their integration into the very

architectures of late modernity and informational capitalism (Arvidsson, 2006) and into

the atomized visual field of the viewer in an extension of what Virilio (1884) terms

“opto-electric perception,” the boundaries of screen experience and the visual experience

of real space seem to be blurring.

In a chapter of The Virtual Window entitled “From Sequence to Multiplicity,”

Friedberg traces the development of the screen from early cinematographic projection to

the simultaneously fragmented and networked ‘windows’ of home computing. Her

analysis is one in which the contents of screen media are both shaped by and give rise to

new techniques of ‘showing’ and interacting with this content. For Friedberg, this

culminates in “auguries of convergence,” where “some media are seen as transitional,

while others seem destined to evolve into the next species” (239). Of these evolutionary

media, cinema is central in her analysis. She cites Erwin Panofsky’s reference to the

“unique and specific possibilities” of cinema in its “dynamization of space and the

spatialization of time” (235). The importance of her analysis is thus in tracing the various

ways in which space has been made dynamic and time spatialized by the various screens
 Lukawski 5

which all evolved from early cinema and which continue to evolve. However, as rooted

as this history is in cinema, it gains critical gravity in its reflections on computing, where

screens not only become interfaces to “enhanced” problem solving capabilities, but also

eventually to networks (223). From IMAX to QuickTime, Wasson discusses the

“networked screen” of contemporary cinema, where “alongside the ‘everywhere and

every when’ of current cinema, moving images also touch down at identifiable moments

and in particular places” (76). She suggests that the “networked screen” has played a

formative role “in transforming celluloid, electronic, and digital images into

differentiated social and material sites of cultural engagement” (76). Her approach,

focusing mainly on scale, thus seems to privilege the medium specific one of Benedict

Anderson, who found that “the content of any medium blinds us to the characteristics of

the medium” and argued for analyses of the effects of a given medium (in Friedberg,

236). By focusing on the effects of screen technologies on the creation and reception of

moving images, Friedberg and Wasson’s work also seems to relate particular ways of

looking to the types of interfaces through which we access the moving image.

Friedberg’s (1993) theorization of the “mobilized and virtual gaze” is interesting here not

only in accounting for multiple and plural forms of spectatorship, but in providing

alternatives to the panoptic gaze in the panorama and diorama. To carry this dynamic

into our visualization of the contemporary screen in some of the spaces created by and

for it in Paris, I will turn to Virilio’s reflections the screen and architectonics, not only

because of the way in which they consider the space-time effects of the screen beyond its

frame, but insofar as they may inform a more pointed visual analysis of the architecture

proposed by the contemporary screen.

In Lost Dimension, Virilio describes the screen as an “‘interface’ that relies on a

visibility ‘devoid of spatial dimension,’ a ‘visibility without any face-to-face encounter in

 Lukawski 6

which the vis-à-vis of the ancient street disappears and is erased’” (Friedberg, 186). His

work concerns itself mostly with technologies of transmission and transport, how they

give rise to new relationships between space and time, and postulates speed both as an

organizational logic for modernity and as a product of technologies – where technologies

produce speed, and speed necessitates new technologies essentially. For him, the screen

is both a site of “luminous emission” that results in the “instantaneity of ubiquity” and

one where architectonic space disappears into the virtual surface of the always-already

present (Friedberg, 185). This is interesting to think about in relation to his previous

theorization of visibility and distance in The Aesthetics of Disappearance because of the

way in which the screen both undermines the technologies of invisibility developed for

military, where sight at a distance is made impossible through camouflage and stealth,

and underpins modern action at distance as he later theorizes it in Desert Screen (1991)

(Virilio, 1980). However, most interesting here is Virilio’s reflection on the screen and

architectonics, where “the contour of daily living and the framing of viewpoint in an

architectonic constructed of doors and doorways, windows and mirrors are replaced by a

cathode framework” in the “architectural mutation of a wall-screen” or a “cathode

window” (Virilio, 1984 in Friedberg, 186). This theorization ultimately treats the screen

as a visual field in which architectural space disappears and distance is collapsed for the

viewer, whose perception becomes “opto-electric” as the cathode screen replaces the

transparency of glass. With Virilio’s work in mind, it will be important here to consider

how the contemporary screen and contemporary viewing practices situate the viewer

architectonically, and to what ends.

In order to produce a grounded analysis, however, it will be equally important to

approach the screen, its context, and the event of viewing phenomenologically. Peritore’s

(1977) application of Kaelin’s (1970) phenomenological approach to art criticism for the
 Lukawski 7

study of film reception may be helpful, though we are not specifically concerned with

film per se. Alongside our considerations about the nature of the screen as emblematic of

a certain orientation towards reality per Virilio’s theorization, as this work is concerned

with visualizing the screen as it appears and the moving images it presents are perceived,

perhaps an approach where “consciousness is ‘reduced’ to its essential character in

intending an object” and where “attending only to how the thing looks, sounds and feels”

will allow us to make connections between the formal systems underpinning the screen,

the images it proposes and the sensuous experience of seeing (Peritore, 4). In visualizing

the screen I do not intend to, nor could I begin to reflect upon the changing dynamics of

screen interaction in terms of cognition. However, it may be useful for those interested in

expanding the scope of this work to refer to the “state- and knowledge-centered

positions” Nadaner (1984) discusses whereby viewers are “captured in an illusion” or

“freely interact with [screen] presentation to construct a potentially useful way of seeing”

(128). This model of film cognition could perhaps dialogue interestingly with the

“mobilized gaze” as Friedberg has theorized it. In any case, as new types of screens and

screen images enter everyday spaces of seeing, the implications of mobile and second-

screen viewing on human cognition are interesting, and the possibilities for further

research therein are exciting.

Visualizing the Screen

The methodological basis of this exploration of screens and screen viewing is

rooted in contemporary practice in visual anthropology and sociology that holds the

creation of visuals as not only as a mimetic way of gathering data, but as a valuable

approach to communicating social and cultural phenomena. Writing on social sciences

approaches to visual culture, Richard Chalfen (2011) makes a critical distinction between
 Lukawski 8

two ways of “looking,” that inform sociological and anthropological approaches to visual

culture: “to look/see,” and “to look/appear” (26). He cites the connections Becker

(1974, 1981) makes between sociology and the work of documentary and fine art

photographers in their “overlapping ways of seeing and reporting appearances,” and

quotes him saying that art aimed at exploring society “might just as well be social

science information” (38). For David MacDougall, filmmaking and other visual

approaches are valuable for precisely for their involvement with “embodied analysis of

the world that reveals itself through objects, framings, movements and nuances of detail”

(1995; 90). Using participant observation and documentary photography according to

Pauwel’s (2010) Integrated Framework for visual research methods, my visualizing the

screen will make critical use of the distinction between seeing and appearing while

proposing an embodied analysis of screen phenomena.

Initially experimenting with video in fixed and mobile filming situations in order

to capture the dynamics of fixed and mobile vantage points from which we view screens

in the city, I found this technique technically limited because of the way in which using

professional video gear to generate data affected the behavior of people around me.

Furthermore, on an epistemological level, framing video while moving seemed to

produce perhaps non-representative, intentional motion effects. Even using a large DSLR

camera to produce still images produced similar responses. Thus, in order to best capture

naturally occurring behavior, I decided to use the small camera in my mobile phone and

to “shoot from the chest,” so to speak. Doing so, I was able to preserve the algorithmic

and thus indexical approach to the visual dynamics of the screen, its environment and its

viewers. What is important here is more the depicted than the depiction itself. However,

by manipulating the camera’s exposure settings to shoot HDR (High Dynamic Range)

photos, I was able in most cases to properly expose both the screen image and its
 Lukawski 9

surroundings. This manipulation, where screens were themselves visible, ultimately

produced visual data that was closer to natural sight (which has a higher dynamic range

than most film stocks or camera sensors). As my focus is a qualitative one, I used an

exploratory sampling method to locate and photograph only spaces where screens are

visible and functioning rather than trying to randomize my walks. The focal length and

distance varies in the photos according to the vantage points offered to people moving

through or occupying the spaces I photographed. Also, my framing varied between first-

person type shots where particular vantage points are reproduced and observational shots

where people’s movement across and line of sight on screens become apparent.

To select the photographs, I first eliminated exposures that didn't render the

screen or environment adequately visible. I then used Pauwels’ (2010) criteria to

determine which ones presented adequate data for a given type of screen and kept only

the technically superior photos (which weren’t always technically stunning, but which

contain the data nonetheless). After selection and descriptive captioning, the twelve

photographs presented here were coded and arranged according to my observations using

these domains and categories:

a) type of screen (i.e. fixed/mobile, interactive/non-interactive);

b) use of the screen (i.e. personal/public, commercial/non-commercial);
c) location (i.e. retail space, street, private space, indeterminate space, and
traditional viewing space)
d) forms of viewing mobilized in the photo (i.e. individual/collective,
intentional/incidental).

The resulting presentation of photographic data is not specifically analyzed according to

any one of these themes. Rather, I sought to analyze each photo according to the

interplay of these categories in order to ground theoretical discussion in the observable.

To this end, theorizations of the gaze from Lacan (1978) to Friedberg (1993), Virilio’s

(1980) conception of the screen, Lefevbre’s (1974) treatise on the production of space,
 Lukawski 10

and Baudrillard’s (1980) and Berger’s (1983) ideas around advertising provided useful

analytical directions.

1.1 – Le Majestic Passy: In front of the cinema’s window, three little screens are lit up on a high wall near
the ticket booth. One hardly notices them as one walks by. Colored city lights reflecting in the glass and a
bright light above them make them hard see, but ones attention is called from lit up movie posters to the
miniscule screens by the slightest movement in their image. The screens seem to show what is currently
playing on the cinema screen so that the cinema attendant may keep track of the projection. Old little
screens keeping tabs on an even older big screen, making the cinema visible to the world beyond its
soundproofed doors; they present an interface with the process of screening.
 Lukawski 11

1.2 – Closed Circuit: A quick glance down the metro tunnel reveals the closed-circuit surveillance screens
in which the metro conductor can watch passengers as they climb on and off the metro. In an obvious sense
we can see the panoptic visuality inherent in these screens, where safe from view the conductor is able to
inspect who gets on and off. However, for those standing at the end of the platform, a simultaneous view
down the tunnel into the dark gives this screen a new dimension. Perhaps it even is an assurance of
visibility, a spot of light from a metal box that populates the unknown space beyond with unknown bodies.

1.3 – Off-track betting: In the Parisian PMU, the screen is the focal point for customers and gamblers,
some sitting waiting for the results of their race, others running back and forth between the bar and the
screen. Usually tucked up into a corner, it motivates all of the action and movement in the bar regardless of
what may be happening on the other side of the bar window. The public street, passersby, and the
architectures beyond the window, familiar as they are, provide nothing more than resting place for the eyes
as they move between the television screen and the bet sheet or newspaper. Most of the spectators, it
seems, are watching alone, together.
 Lukawski 12

1.4 – “Métrovisuel,” Franklin Roosevelt Metro: On the platform of the line one at the Franklin
Roosevelt metro stop, large LCD screens are inset chest high into the wall opposite the tracks, framed like
ultra modern billboards, displaying advertisements as well as spectacular video art produced for the
Regional Public Transport Authority. Passengers walking by give them sidelong glances, while those
waiting in place for their train glance casually from the screen to the information board. A lack of lateral
movement in the screen images seems to compensate for that of trains passing through the station and
people rushing down the platform. Rather, it alternately opens a space beyond the walls of the station in
video installations, and brings advertising into the space. At times, until a dynamic shot comes on, we may
assume it is merely a lit-up poster.

1.5 – “Métrovisuel” 2: In the glass wall protecting passengers from oncoming trains, however, a slightly
lateral reflection gives one the illusory impression that the station itself is being shot through with light
from the screen, where one sees ones self backlit by the screen and where the movements of other
passengers’ silhouettes becomes part of the screen image. Given three dimensions, it is carried out into
space by the transparency of glass and reflected back as multiple layers of the same visual experience.
 Lukawski 13

1.6 – l’éffet Beaubourg: In the Centre Pompidou in Paris, large screens both propose cathode [bay]
windows that confuse inside and out, at once mimicking the entry of daylight into the dim space and at the
same time offering a view into a white cube of sorts. Like the architecture of the building itself, it breaks
down the distinction between interior and exterior architectures. Backlighting and aestheticizing the
encounter with the passer-by, the screen here makes the mutual gaze impossible. This particular screen’s
use for promotional material seems to spatialize the museum’s message, while using multiple screens (like
some video installations,) gives us simultaneous impressions of construction and fragmentation in the
image.

1.7 – Underground: A large screen filling a void in the reinforced concrete skeleton of Les Halles
interrupts the transparency of the elevated shop windows adjacent to it and below it with ad images that,
similarly to those in the metro station screens, seem to enter the space at the same time as they structure it.
Looking at this screen, it is unclear whether one is inside or outside, as the interior-exterior of the
underground shopping complex gives out onto the non-space of the screen. Brand logos the size of entire
stores appear to propose a sort of visual (and economic) continuity to the consumer space, while abstract
visualizations seem to momentarily situate this space in the expanses of digital modernity.
 Lukawski 14

1.8 –Forum des Images: In another space designated for looking, multiple LCD screens are set behind the
windows at alternating heights, emitting the same image, a sequence from a film showing at the Forum. As
viewers walk along the passage, the image seems to follow them from screen to screen, while those
standing further away can see the higher screen. While glancing at the interior of the Forum, which almost
stages the screens aesthetically, the image seems to interpolate one through repetition of the same
perspective. At the same time however, because the screens are floating in the glass windows through
which we can see the objects and aesthetics and volumes making up the Forum, the screen loses its depth,
its image flattened. Despite this, the series of screens mobilizes a fractured, yet multiple gaze.

1.9 – Screens on Screens: In this white-box-esque boutique, large, bizarrely sized vertical screens give the
impression that dynamic moving advertising images hold the weightless transparent space in separation
from the concrete and pierre de taille architecture of Paris’ 16th district. Facing each other, at a ninety-
degree angle from the street, the screens privilege perception in motion, and seem to reject the frontal gaze
of the flâneur who changed the streets and storefronts in Paris’s first glass era. That the screens often show
images of mobile screens seems to make them disappear into the stores architecture.
 Lukawski 15

1.10 – Tactile Space: A small kiosk in the middle of a passage in Les Halles calls attention to a large
touch-screen where visitors can navigate the complex and see small videos. It is at once a visualization of
the space around it and constitutive of a particular architectural form that houses it and draws attention to
it. Essentially a larger public version of the individual tactile screens many carry in their pockets, the touch
screen at once moves people through space virtually according to the input they experience as a tap or slide
of the hand across a smooth surface and allows them to master it. It creates a smooth plane out of a visually
and physically striated space.

1.11 – Waiting at Trocadero: Like so many of us, this woman passes the time waiting for her train with
her eyes fixed to her portable phone. It is impossible without prying to know exactly what she is looking at.
However, what is most important is where she is not looking. The ‘mobilized gaze’ of the mobile screen
viewer at once involves her in an already-multiple visual space, erases the gaze of the other, and as this
photo highlights, the gaze of metro advertising. It associates image to everyday architectures freely, an
anywhere window unto anything.
 Lukawski 16

1.12 – The Personal Landscape: The mobile screen here, now a camera for the moment, becomes a visual
interface whereby the viewer frames the external world as he sees it. Unlike the photographer looking
through a viewfinder, the mobile phone photographer senses the world he photographs immediately as a
screen image. The mobile phone is the screen whereby the external world becomes privatized, circulated
and engaged in endless architectonic contexts.

Analysis: Some old and new screens

“Architecture will ‘take place’ in the literal sense of the word, in both domains:
in real space (the materiality of architecture) and virtual space (the transmission of
electromagnetic signs).”
- Paul Virilio, “the Age of Its Virtual Disappearance” (1993; Friedberg, 174)

“‘Where are we?’ or ‘When are we when we watch film or television or sit at the
computer?’”
- Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window (2006; 178)

The photos resulting from this admittedly limited research could never account

completely for the interplay of screen and architecture as a cultural phenomenon, nor

concretely answer the questions Friedberg poses while discussing the meeting of material

and virtual space in the screen. However, like the screens themselves, they are visual

points of contact that allow us to analyze particular interactions with the screen that occur

in a certain place at a certain time. The photos in this sense “show seeing” in the here and

now of a particular screen, in a particular social space (Mitchell, 2002). This allows us to
 Lukawski 17

reflect upon and expand upon a series of theoretical issues as they arise at the margins of

“vernacular watching, a watching that is only part of what [one is] doing and where [one]

considers [oneself] to be” (Mirzoeff, 224).

In photos 1.1 and 1.2, we are able to see small, simple manifestations of they way

in which screens defy architectural space to constitute specific points of entry into closed

networks, as they fold multiple (impossible) perspectives into the visual field. On the one

hand, small monitors connected to the Majestic Passy’s projection system perform a kind

of interception that brings something of the image on the big screen into the lobby space,

where it is read (or not) as a technical detail, a part of the infrastructure of the spectacle

of cinema. This kind of logistical screen at once may contribute to the functioning of the

‘networked screen’ by monitoring the “[touching] down” of particular images, as Wasson

discusses, at the right place, but more importantly at the right time. It arouses our

curiosity in its defying walls to refer to the cinema screen further inside (76). Like the

metro surveillance camera, the space around it seems to suggest that ‘there’s nothing to

see here’ (Mirzoeff, 2009). However, we nonetheless experience these screens as

spectacularizations of space, if even the most minute. For, as Debord postulates, “the

spectacle” (of entertainment and surveillance alike) “is not a collection of images, but a

social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (12). This “tautological”

loop of closed circuit and point monitor screens exists for its “to-be-looked-at-ness,” and

in this sense the social relationships negotiated therein are produced by the gaze of the

controller, of the cinema concierge, for whom the image is destined (Debord, 15;

Mulvey, 750). In the surveillance screen, the passive observer is simultaneously faced

with a “flattening of the three dimensional space” they currently occupy that renders

them visible within panoptic electric surveillance, and a sort of live action diorama that
 Lukawski 18

allows them to look ahead into the tunnel and back over the station simultaneously

(Virilio, 1984; Foucault, 1975; Friedberg, 1993).

Though television figures into Friedberg’s work as a light-emanating extension of

the cinema despite its “inferiority,” it is now being slowly surpassed by the computer and

tablet screen in home applications. For this study, I purposefully avoided domestic

viewing because of the relative stability of viewing modes and spatial dynamics: it

seemed quite dated to discuss the arrangement and décor of television viewing spaces or

situations when the computer is effectively used like a television. Also, though “second-

screen” viewing at home depends on a kind of “mobilized gaze,” it similarly seemed to

fit too easily into pre-existing ideas around attention, and is perhaps more worthy of

audience-oriented studies. As the “second screen” is usually a mobile one, it is best

discussed here in motion. However, “second screens” aside for the moment, it is

interesting to look at the public television screen in this study as transitional moment in

collective viewing. In its dwindling public applications it seems to present a moment

between the “imagined communities” Benedict Anderson (1983) saw in collective

television viewing, and emergent, and increasingly commercial and atomized

deployments of the screen.

In the PMU in photo 1.3 the screen not only orients attention and movement, but

it also seems to reinforce the interiority of the space, where its placement beside a

window makes the architecture outside disappear from the visual field of the immobile

viewer as he fixes his glance on the money-driven spectacle of horse racing. Unlike the

increasingly rare situation where a television screen broadcasts the news in a public café,

the hustle and bustle of mobile viewers here points at the individual nature of this

‘collective viewing.’ Rather than enacting ‘imagined communities,’ where the

architecture of the café is opened onto the circulation of public discourse, the screen in
 Lukawski 19

the PMU positions the viewer as an individual loser or winner within the collective

viewing environment. The café becomes an indeterminate space where, despite this

collective activity, the viewer’s is “opto-electrically” invested in their individual

outcome. Like the masses of advertising images gleaned from screens in every major city

in the industrialized world, in the PMU screen and space fold together into the visual

field of the viewer, their “mobilized gaze” orienting them towards a possible future self

(Friedberg, 1993).

“If at a given moment, the commodity was its own publicity (there was no other)
today publicity has become its own commodity, It is confused with itself…”
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981; 90)

For Baudrillard, “absolute advertising” in urban imagery contributed to the

indeterminacy of place in the (post)modern city – where the “map precedes the territory”

(87,1). Even before Baudrillard, Jon Berger (1972) discussed how in a moment, “turning

a corner… or on a television screen while waiting for the commercial break to end…

[advertisements] stimulate the imagination by way of either memory or expectation” (1).

At present there seem to be virtual windows waiting around more and more corners, and

in these screens, the commercial break never ends. Since 2007, when I first arrived in

Paris, the number of screens installed in public streets, storefronts, museums and

otherwise has simply exploded. Several of the screens in this study, whether they display

advertisements or other kinds of images for advertising purposes, allow us to reflect on

how ad-oriented screens interact with public space, what kind of spectatorship this

mobilizes, and what kinds of visual experience these may lead to.

That the image on the screen in photo 1.4 is itself abstract merely alludes to the

ways in which the contemporary screens contributes to the production of what Lefebvre

calls “abstract space” in the Parisian underground (175). According to his theorization of

society’s shift from production in space to the production of space, a sort of “global space
 Lukawski 20

established itself in the abstract as a void waiting to be filled, as a medium waiting to be

colonized” (179). He cites Bauhaus architecture as emblematic of this. Today, screens

like those in the Franklin Roosevelt metro stop similarly, if not more intensely contribute

to this abstraction by opening space to a succession of images. Those waiting for the

metro or passing by to make a connection are confronted with visuals that oscillate

between opening the space onto the outside world and artistic renderings of it, and

colonizing the space of the metro with commercial messages. The screen image and the

visual affect it produces in space both move with the spectator and fix her or him in their

field. As the space and the screen image seem to mutually constitute the other’s

perception by the viewer, who may just as well be whizzing by in the metro, so are both

produced by the social interactions that take place in the metro station. This is to say that

the screen image and thus its relationship to space is determined by the movement of

passengers, though their activity is ultimately subject to the space and other forms of

visuality that exist there (Lefebvre, 183). Architecture here, at once shaping viewing, is

erased and reconstituted by the screen in the visual field (Friedberg, 186). However, in

the glass protecting passengers from oncoming trains, as seen in photo 1.5, the layers of

this visual experience of ‘abstract space’ seem to separate from one another. The viewer

sees his or her self in the reflection, backlit by the screen, and is faced with the

“heterotopia” of contemporary screen culture where multiple spaces can be inhabited

visually (Foucault, 1984).

A moment of self-recognition also occurs within this complex of seeing. Where

the screen’s multiple separations from the architecture of the station are made apparent

by glass – the material of modernity whose transparency the screen attempts to mimic

and subvert – the viewer also becomes aware of their bodily presence in a way that

recalls Lacan’s (1978) stade du mirroir. Their self becomes the object in the visual field
 Lukawski 21

co-habited by the screen. In the Centre Pompidou, as seen in photo 1.6, however, a large

fragmented screen along one of the building’s inner walls silhouettes the visitor passing

between the viewer and the screen. The screen here either envelops shadowy passers-by,

or renders invisible to their gaze those who are backlit by it, as Colomina (1992) remarks

of window placements in the domestic architecture of Adolf Loos. Not only can one not

recognize oneself or the other in looking at the screen, but they also become aware of the

screen’s construction, its spectacle. Here, the totality of the screen’s erasure of the

building’s already self-effacing, inside-out architecture is not only denied by the

fragmented screen, but is also denied by the directional confusion of the space itself,

where one both gets the impression of looking out and looking into a white-walled room

when faced with one of the museum’s ads. For the viewer, this translates into an aesthetic

encounter that is perhaps read into surrounding architecture. “The social relations of

production” of this space designated for aesthetic contemplation and looking thus have a

“spatial existence” because they “project themselves into the space” (Lefebvre, 181).

A similar inside-outside confusion occurs in the underground shopping complex

at Les Halles, where as we can see in photo 1.7 a large screen spans the space of an

elevated window. Here, however, the “mobilized gaze” of the spectator/consumer

circulating below is more completely drawn into a false distance that will be filled with

consumer imagery from within a dedicated network of such. The “confusion between the

reception of images from [an advertisement] and perception of architectonic forms” in

the window proposed by this screen temporarily spatializes that which is advertised, and

in doing so attests to advertising’s dominance over particular matrices of space and time

(Virilio, 1984 in Friedberg, 186). Berger’s claim that “because everywhere is imagined

as offering itself to us, everywhere is more or less the same” seems relevant here. As
 Lukawski 22

movement on the screen renders the spectator still for a moment, removes their attention

from the physicality of the space before them, Les Halles may as well be anywhere else.

The deployment of screens as windows that “produce space,” so to speak, or the

illusion of space as we have seen in large screens populating public ways and storefronts

implies a dual process of reading the moving image within the still frame proposed by

the screen fixed in the visual field. On one hand we could understand this reading in

terms of Barthes’ (1981) semiotics of photography, where the studium proposed in the

volumes, proportions, lighting and texture of a space is broken through by the punctum of

movement in and around the screen, across its moving image. At the same time,

however, within this moment of perception, the viewer also perceives the screen image

as it unravels in time. The “movement-image” fixed in space seems to lend its affect to

the immobile architecture around it at the same time as the fixed frame makes movement

on screen possible (Deleuze, 1989; Friedberg, 2006).

But what of the mobile viewer all of these new screens assume? From the

arrangements of screens in photos 1.8 and 1.9, we can perhaps draw some limited

conclusions on two ways in which screens have been adapted to perception in motion. In

both, rather than proposing liquid crystal windows themselves, plate glass windows allow

the screens inside to show through along with the rest of the interior architecture. Photo

1.8 shows a series of screens hanging in the windows of the Forum des Images that give

onto a passage, all of them showing the same film synchronously. While this mobilizes a

fractured multiple gaze on behalf of the immobile, for the moving viewer it allows the

screen to stand in synecdoche with the film itself. Each screen becomes a frame. Passing

from screen to screen, the plan – or relationship of proportions, directionalities, and

bodies in the film – unravels in the viewer’s movement through space as the film moves

from frame to frame (Deleuze, 1989). In this sense, in the multiple interface with the
 Lukawski 23

filmic presented in these screens, the ‘here’ of perception in this screen and the ‘there’ of

perception in that screen are indistinguishable. However, rather than relying on a

“picnoleptic ellipse,” as Virilio terms the disappearance between frames that “produces a

new register of appearance,” the multiple screen image is shot through with glimpses on

physical space (Friedberg, 185).

The mobile phone store in photo 1.9, however, has positioned its screens for the

mobile viewer quite differently. Long vertical screens facing each other in either side of

the entry are best viewed as one approaches the glass facade of the shop from either side.

The relatively still images it proposes seem more like dynamic posters than true moving

images; they pre-suppose the viewer’s motion. It is telling that the store sells smartphone

accessories. That most of the images themselves depict screens seems to suggest the

disappearance of the screen in its proposing another. This cultural trend can also be

observed in the proliferation in popular television shows today of the mis-en-abyme

whereby we are presented with images of screen images as characters interact using new

technology.

If the graphical interface of the computer screen has brought to bear a

“presentation of reality that is both accelerated and augmented” on “screens that display

the instantaneous superimposition of actual and virtual images,” the interactive, tactile,

mobile screens of today have perhaps buried this distinction altogether (Virilio 1998 in

Friedberg, 189). Not only do dedicated touch screens such as the one pictured in Les

Halles in photo 1.10 present the image itself as a site for interaction. In doing so, they

allow viewers to experience virtual motion. This particular screen gives viewers a birds-

eye visualization of the space and allows them to move through it as they wish to

discover the spaces Les Halles proposes. In this sense it creates a sort of tactile, “opto-

electric” feedback loop between the virtual space and the embodied feel and look of the
 Lukawski 24

physical space the screen refers to. The visual field here becomes the site of a heightened

awareness of space. However, in networked mobile screens like the mobile phone

pictured in photo 1.11, viewers are not necessarily engaged in a similar “opto-electric”

reading of the “multifarious and overlapping instructions” of the social space they

occupy that at the same time frame screen experience (Lefebvre, 183). More than a factor

in the localized production of space, the mobile screen links spaces and images, the

spaces in images, and the networked spaces in which they originate. If screen

installations such as those in the Franklin Roosevelt metro create heterotopic experiences

of space, the mobile screen explodes this possibility to include the anywhere and

anything of digital modernity, and this at the will of the viewer. The “mobilized gaze” of

the mobile screen user is mobile not only within a particular reading of space, but is able

to more completely defy the architecture in which viewing occurs through

communication, through a form of viewing that approximates “teleaction” (Friedberg,

189). Wasson’s warning to “avoid the vague assertion that images are everywhere and

thus everywhere the same” may still hold (91). Diverse networked screens still, as this

work proves, mobilize the gaze and interact with visual space differently. However, in

the mobile screen, and with increasingly invisible and instantaneous networks of

distribution, the distinctions between images, moving and still, seems to be fading as

viewers gain more and more control over where and when an image will arrive.

An anywhere window unto anything, the mobile screen draws the “mobilized

gaze” out of the present and in doing so creates a visual space that seems escape the

immediacy of the gaze. It is a site for the individualized flexible accumulation of visual

experience. Basing their hypothesis on theorizations of modernity proposed by Giddens

(1991) and Bauman (2000), Szerszynski and Urry argue that “in ’liquid modernity’ a way

of seeing has developed that is at once mobile and abstracted from the local and at the
 Lukawski 25

same time able to “dwell in locality” (Bauman, 2000 in Szerszynski and Urry, 127;

Szerszynski and Urry, 123). “Visual cosmopolitanism” as they term it, may be a relevant

way to think about viewing on the mobile, networked screen. Insofar as the mobile

screen is thoroughly integrated with other technologies, such as microphones and

cameras, it can simultaneously interface with the immediate and the global. Where space

and the social relations that produce it are always-already perceived as screen images in

the mobile phone camera, the ‘viewer’ such as the man pictured in photo 1.12 has also

become a ‘producer’ of sorts. Technologies like Instagram and others whereby users

control the style of the image allow the viewer, through the intermediary position of the

mobile screen, to “assert their personality in the dimensions… of urban life” by

customizing their experience of the visual field (Simmel, 1903). Insofar as “self-identity

in modernity is a reflexively organized endeavor… in the context of multiple choice as

filtered through abstract systems,” the screen has become the arbiter of visual self-hood if

not a form of technological prosthesis for those with access to technology (Giddens, 5).

Conclusion

If this study has accomplished anything towards rendering visible the “tensions

between the material and immaterial” in everyday interactions with the screen, it has

been in visualizing the screen as it appears in everyday life in a particular place so that it

may be understood both spatially and in its mobilizing various ways of seeing therein

(Friedberg, 178; Chalfen, 2011). However, this type of visualization is ultimately

circumscribed by the bodily involvement of the researcher in a given locality and the

temporality of the screen image. It is not a perfect science. From one moment to the next,

the image on screen may change, and with it the possible directions for analysis. I have

tried to overcome this barrier by guiding my analysis of the research-image with

 Lukawski 26

ethnographic observations. However, as using researcher-generated images is a new

practice for exploring mediated, image-oriented phenomena, its epistemological

consequences will need to be explored in greater detail across an array of similar studies.

An approach combining content analysis seems promising, if only as a means of

accounting more wholly for the types of images been shown at a particular place and

time. In any case, as we begin to understand more about how new screens have been

integrated into our architectures and propose new forms of seeing, it will be important to

reflect upon – as Wasson and Friedberg have in the proto-mobile screen era – the specific

kinds of images we encounter in screens, in what kinds of spaces and through what kinds

of networks.

The methodological challenge of this study, however, has also been its source of

analytical and theoretical depth. In the six years since Friedberg and Wasson’s accounts

of the screen its uses, locations, directions and dynamics have evolved drastically. If only

as an initial reflection, this study has sought to fix the shadows of some of these. The

screen today appears not only in the windowless theater where immobile viewers are

swept into the movement of its image but increasingly in a window, or as a window itself,

where viewing takes place in varied architectures, and from a series of perspectives, still

and moving. The here and now of the images arrival in the cinema now extends to the

anywhere and all-the-time of the smartphone. In these situations, increasingly present

and even pervasive screens not only offer moving images as “object[s] in the visual field”

that mobilize the gaze of the spectator (Lacan, 1972; Friedberg, 1993). Insofar as they

once presented more particularistic visual interfaces, screens are now beginning to

disappear into the contemporary production of space and the vernacular seeing of the

individual. In this, architecture and the visual experience of space coexist in increasingly

flexible relations that are underpinned by the speed of image transmission. Rather than
 Lukawski 27

increasing the distance between the “transparent horizon of the screen and the apparent

horizon,” between “virtual and actual realities,” as Virilio once predicted would happen

with the rise of “teleaction” technologies, these technologies are being more and more

integrated into physical life and the spaces we move about (Virilio in Friedberg, 189). No

invention embodies this trend more today than Google’s Glass, where the screen has

literally disappeared from plain sight and become a networked extension of embodied

vision. Also, it is worth mentioning that though the possibilities for new ways of seeing

here are interesting, the ‘networked screen’ also enables unprecedented forms of digital

surveillance. This suggests something quite panoptic about the even the most individual

and immersive new forms of contemporary viewing.

Visualizing a few old screens and a few new ones, this study has engaged the

“metaphoric register” of the screen, a “surface that overrides any specificities of its

media formation.” It has also sought to understand the dynamics of some new formations

as manifested in screens across Paris (Virilio in Friedberg, 183). So far as my

conclusions here resemble more a set of critical directions, they remain to be expanded

upon through further visual work and sustained engagement with these interfaces. This

work should be carried forward not only by analyzing screen images or the networks

which link screens, but also by continuing to look for new ways to engage the embodied

experience of viewing screens. To this end, the efforts both of theoreticians and critical

media practitioners will be vital. Writing well before the smartphone and tablet, Virilio

described the screen as a boundary (in Friedberg, 183). Today, we might consider

exploring new ways in which the boundaries between real space and virtual imagery are

being transgressed and reinforced.

 Lukawski 28

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