As it’s the first week of classes, we’ve decided to delay the relatively depressing topic of Digital (Negative) and focus on some personal favorites to keep the positive spirit of the semester rolling. As Kris and Allain are both science fiction nerds, we discussed personal favorites and considered how screens have been used in (and changed by) the science fiction genre across film, television, and games.
http://embed.bambuser.com/broadcast/5249108
Through the distracting fog of political unrest here in Wisconsin, we managed to bring up a few films. First, Kris brought up one of his favorites, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Although the film’s been thoroughly pored over, Kris mentioned how the screen, while marginally featured in the film, does appear as a method of screening subjects to determine whether or not they are human.
This reminded Allain of Forbidden Planet and how we can consider science fiction to be a genre that has also changed the representational range of the screen (the expectations surrounding color, the integration of digital effects into narrative films). Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was brought up as an illustration of an expanding screen, particularly how the narrative framing around the Genesis sequence function as an expanding bridge between the filmed “reality” and the digital effect. Allain also proposed that screens were frequently used in science fiction as plot devices to visualize the data of a futuristic world and give characters reasons to explain their universe. Allain also briefly discussed Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, perhaps a science fiction film only at the extremes of the genre definition, but a film that nonetheless traces the bending and twisting of humanity in a Paris full of invisible machines and cameras.
As these discussion went on we realized that, while there’s a technical distinction between the definitions of
“monitor” and “screen,” these objects are often blurred. Materially speaking, the monitor is the device connected to your computer that acts as a transmitter of visual information used to access and manipulate the computer’s data (roughly speaking). Although it’s a part of the computer monitor, the screen is far more versatile especially when the monitor takes up little more desk space than the screen itself.
With echoes of Foucault, we lapsed into an interesting exploration of how monitor and screen both implicitly relate to surveillance. To be monitored is to be watched while within a watched space but to be screened is the interface between this monitored space and another unmonitored.
Tabling this for another time, we turned to games with the case study of Fallout 3 and its in-game devices, the “Pipboy” (featured in the background), and the V.A.T.S. interface. There was, at this point, some argument about the nature of the “Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System” which enables the player to target specific areas of the enemy. Kris took the position that VATS was a screen; Allain argued it was purely an interface. This signature feature of the Fallout franchise forces the player into a first-person perspective that is augmented by data that relays the status of the enemy’s overall health as well as its individual target areas. Successfully killing the enemy using VATS propels the player into a cinematic view from a third-person perspective.
With that, we left the show still chewing on the relationship between the monitor and the screen. But that’s for another time…
discussing screens 
