SHOWCASE
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Bi-annual contributions from our members on any aspect of visual effects. These can be opinion pieces, short debates, video essays, practitioner interviews, industry contributions, and more.
Image, Difference, Vanishing: Some Thoughts on VFX and The Post-Screen
Jenna Ng
I wrote my latest book, The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), on screens and screen boundaries. The book argues that contemporary screen media present increasingly imperceptible boundaries, whereby the image potentially becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s actual surroundings. This, then, is the post-screen: a state of critical attention to the delimitations of screen media and the ensuing problematization of relations between image and object; an intensifying evolution of the virtual and its role in defining media consumers and their realities; and an era of screen media marked by the disappearances of differentiation between subject and object. It is also a point in media history – as in not the history of media, but history and media. Or the correlation between media invention and significant cultural, social and political change, where media become “a discursive object – an object to think with.” (Lister et al 1992, 110) As with the camera obscura in the eighteenth century with respect to perspective; photography in the nineteenth century on the role of automation; or cinema in the twentieth century on the meaning of documentation, the post-screen thus points to how the erosion of screen boundaries exposes a different epistemological space of life, death, actuality, virtuality, truth.
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SCMS 2021 - VFX Scholar Thoughts
The 2021 annual Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference took place on Zoom this year over several days in late March, with several of our members presenting and attending. Lisa Purse was brilliant and sent out a short questionnaire. Although the time-zones were ghastly for those of us in the Southern hemisphere so we missed much of the conference, a few members in the North sent back their responses.
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Visual Effects have infiltrated the engine room of contemporary visuality. At their most spectacular they power our blockbuster movies, TV, and video games, constructing fantastical story-worlds, creatures, events, and character bodies, shaping style and viewer address. At their least visible they erase distracting elements of sets, costume and performance, change colour schemes and lighting, extend backgrounds and amplify crowd sizes. At their most quotidian they live in our pockets, allowing us to augment our smartphone selfies with rabbit ears or zombie masks, smooth our laugh lines and erase our pores, or insert our faces into music video clips. At their most troubling they are used to create deceptive illusions, challenging us to question what is “real” versus what is “fake” in our visual mediation of the world and each other. Although often framed as yet another manifestation of the digital turn, visual effects have long, deep, and multiple historical entanglements with older visual forms, technologies, entertainments, science, and industries.