4C Theories and Philosophies of Transcodification/3
Session 4 – July 2, 15:30 – 17:30
Recombining Screens: About the Plasticity of Space-Time Relationships & the Narrative
As the screen gained definitions these last decades with the expansion and mutation of digital media, we tend to forget that the page shares the same legacy. Constituted by the frame and its inherent blankness, the arbitrary cut out of the physical reality which represent the first mural drawings are equally responsible for the figural and the legible—the understanding of space and void as determination of screen being at the basis of the invention of writing [Anne-Marie Christin, 1995]. In this perspective, the screen is as much responsible for the instantaneity of image as for
the sequenciality of narrative.
However, and since the inaugural gesture of Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés, the «prismatical subdivision of the Idea» [Mallarmé, 1914] has opened up at the same time the space of the page as a surface,
the subject of the poem being the form of it, and as a depth, making it a frame for a potential reading of the work of art. The development of digital media in the late XXth century has exacerbated what Mallarmé had only sketched: with the capacity of computers to record, stock and show all media at the same time, the diversity of time qualities on screen, whether you are a
reader, a spectator, or a user, seem endless. Regarding this, and in the lineage of the notion of archi-screen [Carbone, 2016], we would like to open the term of screen, in order to consider it as
a potential of temporal depth, and therefore, a form of duration [Bergson, 1968], paradoxically depending on intermedia fragmentation—getting us back to an old interrogation about space-time relationships. Through a few examples of contemporary art (Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, Grégory Chatonsky, Read Only Memories), the goal is to reconsider the screen more as a splitting apparatus than an aggregative one.
Bio
Gabriele Čepulytė is a graphic designer and PhD fellow in Aesthetics. Researcher at the National Atelier for Typographic Research and researcher associated with the Memory Institute for
Contemporary Publishing from 2016 to 2018, she designed and developed a virtual exhibition prototype staging the archives of the play Electra, as set by Antoine Vitez. She taught Culture of
Arts and Design at the Duperré School of Applied Arts in Paris (2018-2019) and is currently in charge of history and theory of graphic design courses at ESAD Amiens. Her doctoral research
inat Paris-Nanterre University focuses on the influence of the screen on the temporalities of archive.