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Images elicit different requirements and uses in everyday life, yet most are
conveyed and viewed by the same means: as digital formats on screen-based
devices. Under these circumstances, the contemporary image has
increasingly served to reaffirm the screen that harbours its presence. A
fetishization of the frame manifests itself in the conspicuous marketing
emphasis on the aesthetics of the screen-object. The dual trend towards
reducing device thickness and increasing screen size (as percentage of
surface area) contributes to this material aesthetics. It occurs despite the
appearance of reducing the object while simultaneously maintaining the
images that the object bears. Phones, tablets, televisions and monitors may
now strike us as pure screens: unadorned, millimetres-thick, flush-edged,
devoid of buttons, lights or any other distractions from surface and shape.1
What were going to do, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs publicly
pledged when unveiling the iPhone in 2007, is get rid of all these buttons
and just make a giant screen. A giant screen.2
By privileging the screen, the object is reinforced while the image must
adapt. Filling the screen surface with the image has become a priority, even
when this risks alterations to the images original aspect ratio or internal,
formal relationships. The image becomes eminently convertible in
contemporary interfaces, there to be stretched, compressed and rotated to
conform to all manner of screen frames in a proliferation of formats and
dimensions developed for any number of devices and browsers. The image
can be adeptly pinched and pulled by fingertips on touchscreens, whether
handheld or desktop. As tablet users turn and tilt the screen in their hands,
the image will spin to match the objects new orientation, punctuating its
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deference to the frame as defining form. Larger desktop and wall displays
continue to rely on keyboard strokes and remote-control commands to
similarly reshape and resize the image to cover a portion or the entirety of the
screen, but out-of-the-box default settings on these displays may
automatically adjust the image signal to stretch visuals across the entire
screen like a mesh or membrane. The resulting image may appear strained
and shallow in its new aspect ratio, but the viewer may also perceive it as taut
as a drum-skin in a frame delivering on a promise of plenitude.
No image comes up short in this situation, regardless of the input data. By
filling the frame the image asserts screen shape and size as the dominant
properties of the visual experience. Whenever an image dragged across a
touchscreen rubber-bands upon release to fill the frame, or a television
cycles through display options that stretch, contract and crop the image as
the user scrolls through the menu with a remote, one is constantly reminded
of the frames continuous, guiding presence. This presence asserts itself
over modifiable images that decreasingly bear any relation to the physical
laws and formal properties of three-dimensional space, despite the advent of
high-definition and related image features designed to reinforce notions of
realism.
In Mobile Screens: the Visual Regime of Navigation, Nanna Verhoeff
argues that the advent of touchscreen interfaces has add[ed] to the dynamic
space of the screen in the viewerimage relationship. The screen, here,
becomes a thin, but essential and visible membrane, Verhoeff claims. Its
materiality has become quite literally the surface we need, the surface we
touch, trace and imprint.3 Touchscreen has had a profound effect on the
triangulated relationship of user, image and screen. As Verhoeffs evocation
of essence and need demonstrate, the visual experience of the image
becomes bound into tactile recognition of the screen, reciprocated by the
screens recognition of touch. In turn, the activated image recognizes the
screen and its frame by reacting to touch commands and displaying itself in
ways that maximize recognition of the frame (by turning ninety degrees,
perhaps, or zooming into or out of full-screen mode). Tactile interface
leads to the adjustment of the image, often signalled by a slight delay of
repositioning deliberately coded into the aesthetics of the interface that
visually suggests an initial separation of the image from the frame before
performing its reattachment. The display modes available with remotecommand screens may create a similar perception of the image conforming
to the frame, though this is often through visual cues differing from those
found in touchscreen interfaces.
That these cues span varying screen types, uses and experiences indicates
a fundamental change in the apprehension and function of the image in
contemporary society. With the frequent and indifferent modification of
digital images to fit screens, the screen itself may become the message. The
rhetoric of the images it harbours is modified in part to reinforce this
message by complying with surface and frame edge. With the frame as their
primary organizing reference, browser windows, apps, and images snap
into place (to use Microsofts term in describing this feature in recent
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Ibid.
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hand, is boxy. You will see black bars on the sides, the manual informs
owners, warning that picture quality may not be as sharp as with HD
sources. These descriptions misleadingly imply that the images ability to
fill the screen renders it crisp, clear, vivid, and that falling short of that will
result in decreased resolution. The opposite is just as likely to be true,
however, depending on signal quality and original aspect ratio. A further
note suggests that You can use the Wide Mode function of the TV to adjust
the 4:3 image to fit the entire screen, without explaining that the adjustment
will distort the image and alter formal relationships, as the manuals
accompanying illustration demonstrates (figure 1).15
An LG Electronics manual for that manufacturers series of LCD
televisions cautions viewers that anything other than the full-screen image
display mode may cause irreparable damage to the device. Its list of primary
features includes HD television, Dolby, Clear Voice, HDMI and ISF
technologies, but it closes with an advisory note on image burn. When a
fixed image is displayed on a TV for an extended period, it can become
permanently imprinted on the screen. This phenomenon is known as image
burn or burn-in [and] is not covered under the manufacturers warranty,
LG states. Image burn can also occur on the letterboxed areas of your TV if
you use the 4:3 aspect ratio setting for an extended period of time.16 In other
words, watching 4:3 images in their intended format risks ruining the
television.
Samsungs online customer support for its LED televisions explains that
basic options of zoom, wide fit, screen fit, smart view and image
aspect ratios of 16:9 and 4:3 produce differing effects depending on the ratio
of source images. The 16:9 option will also stretch a 4:3 aspect ratio to fit
your screen, while 4:3 will generate black bars on the left and right for 4:3
source images. The zoom will zoom in, or crop, a 4:3 image so it will fit
the 16:9 screen with no stretching, but the image will lose information on
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the top and bottom of the screen. Such [sic] as sports scores, tickers, station
logos, etc. Wide fit will stretch and zoom a 4:3 program to display it with
little distortion and little cut off, while only the last options listed screen
fit and smart view will either display the source image without scaling or
reduce a 16:9 image by twenty-five to fifty per cent.17 That the loss of visual
information is exemplified by disappearing sports scores and news tickers
reflects an understanding of the televised image as a flexible ground upon
which other information can be displayed, with a priority on text over image.
Zoom loses that data, but wide fit will retain it while stretching content,
implying that nearly nothing is lost in that mode.
The Gateway series of widescreen, flat-panel LCD monitors in 1.76:1
aspect ratio includes similar wide, zoom and letterbox options to match
source-image aspect ratios, but it supplements these with a panoramic
mode. While the wide and zoom options stretch or crop the image,
panoramic mode uses selective distortion to stretch a standard broadcast or
full-frame image to fill the entire screen. Unlike Wide mode, the Gateway
manual informs readers, Panoramic mode stretches only the left and right
sides of the image, and leaves the center of the image distortion-free
(figure 2).18
When Steve Jobs presented the iPhone at Macworld 2007, he
demonstrated its capacity for screening films by displaying an excerpt from
a Disney blockbuster in cropped, full-screen mode. Jobs double-tapped to
demonstrate widescreen, with its horizontal letterbox bars, before tapping
back out to full-screen. Now this is a widescreen movie, so I just double-tap
and I can see the whole thing here, or I can fill up the screen, whichever I
like, he explained. In a paradoxical exercise of alternative plenitudes, Jobs
suggests a choice of two absolutes with the iPhone: the whole image or the
full image, which may seem to bear the same semantic value but are
visually distinct. Full, as his performance of the device implies, may be
preferable to whole.
The issues raised by these multiple manufacturers descriptions reflect
those that commonly affect the display of images on most digital, imagebased devices today. The consumer can infer from these statements that any
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The history of the image, of course, is yoked to the frame. No image exists
large or small without a corresponding edge or limit. Images have always
been prone to recropping and other formal interventions to meet the
requirements of diverse media and contexts. Negative-based photographs
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Indeed, the studio provided illustrations for the press and exhibitors that
demonstrated the difference between the image on the film strip and the
theatre screen (figure 3). This marketing ploy allowed viewers to understand
the primordial importance of values in the exhibited image rather than the
source image, as the exhibited image at the moment of performance (and not
its material source) more faithfully represented the object relationships of
the profilmic event.
CinemaScope and other widescreen efforts aimed to diminish or, as was
the case with Cineramas three-projector display, abolish frame edges
from the viewers perception. As Erkki Huhtamo explains, Cineramas
aspect ratio of up to 2.77:1 meant that the expansion of the screen reached
a paradoxical conclusion: by covering the spectators total field of vision
the screen in a sense disappeared.25 By potentially losing the frame, the
viewer before these enlarged screens could become one with the depicted
scene as it became the only visual information at hand. Writing about the
much more common experience of CinemaScope, Charles Barr explained
in 1963 that
it is not only the horizontal line which is emphasized in CinemaScope
(this is implied by critics who concentrated on the shape of the frame qua
shape as though it were the frame of a painting ). The more open the
frame, the greater the impression of depth: the image is more vivid, and
involves us more directly.26
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29 Ibid., p. 45.
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<http://www.film-philosophy.
31 Ibid., p. 39.
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Vanderbeeks prototype for the experience machine was not the handheld
device that increasingly mediates contemporary networked image
experiences, but rather the collective viewing apparatus of the MovieDrome, a screen-domed cinema where multiple overlapping projections
spread images across the curved surface in quick succession to create a
rapid panoply collage. Movie-Dromes would be both interfaces and
networked databases, receiving, storing and sending vast amounts of image
data via satellite and other high-speed communications systems. This
material would be programmed for communal viewing as a feedback
presentation, with the possibility for simultaneous intra-communitronic
dialogue with other Movie-Dromes or additional live performance. Each
recorded image in these interconnected, networked presentations was to
lend itself to association with other, frequently changing, images. As in
widescreen cinema, once spectators lay on the floor under the dome the
frame of the device would be almost entirely absent, as almost the complete
field of view is taken up by the dome-screen. Under these circumstances the
view of the screen is always partial: the viewer must choose where to turn the
gaze. The audience takes what it can or wants from the presentation and
makes its own conclusions, Vanderbeek asserted. Each member of the
audience will build his own references and realizations from the imageflow. Compression, as Vanderbeek described it, is not a property of the
image or the frame-edge, but rather a product of the multiplication and rapid
succession of images within the experience machine. The field of the screen
is filled with images of different sizes, in varying placements, juxtaposed
with yet more images. No edge or frame is seen as inviolable or sovereign.
The image becomes both a fragment and part of a whole. It can remain
legible as discrete image, even as it enters into the patchwork fabric of
presentation. While the image is not stretched or deformed, the vast screen is
filled with images that would seem to push the frame to bursting.
The purpose and effect of such image flow is both to deal with logical
understanding and to penetrate to unconscious levels, Vanderbeek
proposed, suggesting nothing less than to reach for the emotional
denominator of all men, the non-verbal basis of human life, thought, and
understanding, and to inspire all men to goodwill and inter-and introrealization. The collage of images, where the individual is exposed to an
overwhelming information experience in the seemingly free flow of
images around and through each other, would access the unconscious and
free the mind.30
The culture-intercom embodied in Vanderbeeks Movie-Drome is
antithetical to todays frame dominance, in which images are adapted to the
needs of their frame and reinforce its determinant role. As Vanderbeek
argued, humanity needed to quickly find some way for the level of world
understanding to rise to a new human scale. This scale is the world.31 While
globalization would seem to hold the promise of such an eventuality, with
screen-based personal communication devices facilitating world-scale
understanding through the unimpeded circulation of images, the screencentric nature of these devices and how we use them undermines precisely
Parerga have a thickness, a surface which separates them not only (as
Kant would have it) from the integral inside, from the body proper of the
ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall on which the painting is
hung, from the space in which statue or column is erected, then, step by
step, from the whole field of historical, economic, political inscription in
which the drive to signature is produced.33
As Derrida points out, the parergon informs the ergon (the work) through its
own formal beauty. If it is not formally beautiful as in a decorated or gilded
frame it descends into distracting adornment.34 In certain circumstances
relating to the frameimage relationship enacted by todays screens, the
relationship has been reversed. Not only is the screen devices prevailing
austere modernist form far from adornment, but one could point to the image
it houses as fulfilling that role. The frame is more formally beautiful when
juxtaposed against the often deformed image it harbours. It is this
deformation, in fact, that can work to emphasize the formal beauty of the
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Friedberg explains that Like the window, the screen is at once a surface and
a frame a reflective plane onto which an image is cast and a frame that
limits its view.32 In exploring this definition, she cites Derridas
theorization of the parergon as a critical step. It is worth exploring the
concept of the parergon in some detail here, as it remains applicable to the
changing function of the screen frame and its edge. Working from
Immanuel Kants use of the term in his Critique of Judgement, Derrida
describes the parergon as that which is not internal or intrinsic, as an
integral part, to the total representation of the object but which belongs to it
only in an extrinsic way as a surplus, an addition, an adjunct, a supplement.
The frame serves that function and remains as important to the functioning
and understanding of the image-as-image as it does to the visual information
the image contains. The parergon inscribes something which comes as an
extra, exterior to the proper field, Derrida states, but whose transcendent
exteriority comes to play, abut onto, brush against, rub, press against the
limit itself and intervene in the inside only to the extent that the inside is
lacking. It is lacking in something and it is lacking from itself. He
elaborates:
35 Ibid., p. 57.
successive film frames are fit flush into the fixed screen frame [which]
results in a phenomenological frame that is indefinitely extendible and
contractible, limited in the smallness of the object it can grasp only by the
state of its technology, and in largeness only by the span of the world.36
The cinema screen has no frame, as Cavell argues, because it is frame. Frame
and image bear a one-to-one correspondence where one ends, so must the
other. In the cinema, for example, it makes no sense to speak of screen space
that is not image space. With a monitor, however, this is not only possible
but also points to a relatively common occurrence. Todays screen frames
are closer in form to the paintings frame than they are to the cinema screen,
yet they may act as moulds or loom frames, fitting (refitting, custom-fitting)
the image to their form. They therefore function outside these opposed
actions.
If the picture frame directs attention to the interior, and the cinema (and
traditional television) screen acts as a window on an expansive exterior
world, the new frameimage relationship directs attention to the frame as
delimiting edge and shaping container. In this regard it relates less to the
frame of figurative, illusionistic painting that Bazin had in mind than to the
framing edge of the painting as object. The painting on canvas is first of all
an object in itself, bounded by the fabric surfaces adherence to the
foundational structure of the stretcher frame underneath. In a way, then, the
deformations of the contemporary screen image despite the presence of a
figurative image relate strongly to the tenets of 1960s minimalism,
particularly hard-edge painting, and its exploration of the image field as
wholly determined by, and dependent upon, the shape of the object
supporting it.
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frame. If the contemporary image is a simulacrum that need not refer to any
existing or perceived original, as appears to be the case when it circulates
and recirculates through the vast sprawl of todays telecommunications
networks, then the image is available to (and should) be modified to
enhance the aesthetic value of the material object before us.
Significantly, Derridas analysis stems from Kants exploration of the
garment as a parergon on religious or mythological figures, as with sculpted
drapery on statues. Derrida playfully asks, Where does a parergon begin
and end. Would any garment be a parergon? What to do with transparent
veils[?]35 From this musing he launches into an image, citing the
transparent veil in Lucas Cranachs Lucretia of 1533. This invocation of the
textile unexpectedly intersects Derridas pursuit with Stanley Cavells
theory of the cinema screen. Cavell argues that the screen produces a frame
more closely related to the frame of a loom or a house than to a picture frame.
It acts as a mould or form for the image rather than a border. Because it is
the field of a photograph, the screen has no frame; that is to say, no border,
Cavell claims. Its limits are not so much the edges of a given shape as they
are the limitations, or capacity, of a container. The screen is a frame; the
frame is the whole field of the screen as a frame of film is the whole field of
a photograph. When projected onto this surface, Cavell explains,
As critic and artist Donald Judd claims of such painting in terms very
close to Cavells description of the cinema screen A rectangle is a shape
itself it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or
inside of it.37 Some hard-edge painters associated with minimalism, such
as Sam Francis and Jo Baer, emphasized shapes determining role by
painting only near or along the edges, where the plane of the canvas met its
end. Others, including Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, reflected the
overall shape of the canvas within the image area through painted bands
repeating the frames geometric form (figure 4). Robert Rosenblum
explains that
Stellas paintings seemed to iron out the pictorial space the picture was
no longer an illusion above or behind its surface but rather the flat surface
itself. The picture could no longer be reduced to major and minor
components but had to be accepted as a whole.38
Michael Fried explores the terms of this relationship in his essay Shape
as form. Calling the silhouette of the [paintings] support the literal
shape on the one hand, and the outlines of elements in a given picture the
depicted shape on the other, Fried explains that the flattened optical
illusionism found in mid-century abstract expressionist painting was
followed by an increasingly overt correspondence between literal and
depicted shape in works by Stella and Noland.39 Beginning with standard
rectangular canvases, before embarking on other shapes, the stripe-based
paintings of both artists demonstrated, according to Fried, that the burden
of acknowledging the shape of the support is borne by the depicted shape or,
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perhaps more accurately, by the relationship between it and the literal shape
a relation that declares the primacy of the latter. Like the lateral elongation
of screen images in widescreen modes, the framing edge appears to generate
the depicted shape within the image: It is as though depicted shape has
become less and less capable of venturing on its own, of pursuing its own
ends. It is, Fried continues,
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40 Ibid., p. 81.
42 Sobchack, Carnal
Thoughts, pp. 15859.
Sobchack asserts that the electronic experience of the image has neither a
point of view nor a visual situation, such as we experience, respectively,
with the photograph and the cinema. Presence of the image loses stable
bearings, as
electronic presence randomly disperses its being across a network, its
kinetic gestures describing and lighting on the surface of the screen rather
than inscribing it with bodily dimension. Images on television screens
and computer terminals seem neither projected nor deep.
Phenomenologically they seem, rather, somehow just there as we
(inter)face them.42
These conditions may help to explain the digital images constant deference
to the screen frame. As point of view and visual situation become relative
and unstable through the ineluctable adjustability of images in digital form,
the material device of the screen, whether grasped in the hand, propped on
the desk or bolted to the wall, becomes the stable presence upon which the
image can appear to detach and adhere before adjustments of device
orientation or viewing format require it to detach and adhere anew in a
revised relationship to the screen.
Understanding the edge as frame tends to flatten representational space
into a simple image surface while reinforcing the edge as that surfaces
definitive limit. The history of modernist painting is often understood as a
shift from the metaphor of the window to the material reality of the picture
frame and image surface. This trajectory culminates in works like Stellas,
which repeat the contours of the edge within the image area through patterns
that are not only informed by but also articulate the objects unifying shape.
The current possibilities for manipulating the image on contemporary
screens create situations that can reinforce either frame or edge. Stretching
the image to fill the screen surface reinforces the frame like the parergon of
drapery, for example. Increasing image size in tactile devices to then push
the image around its surface, like a weightless tissue floating just under the
frame, reinforces the edge as that of a viewfinder or window.
It was at the moment that painting was considered as an object with a
shape rather than strictly as an image, Cavell notes, that shapes became
forms, not in the sense of patterns, but in the sense of containers.
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it is only by habit that we still refer to what we see on the real-time screen
as images a static image is no longer the norm, but the exception
of a more general, new kind of representation for which we do not yet have
a term.41
As Judd bluntly states, The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a
rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. The historical avant garde
saw the edge of that plane as a boundary to which it would react rather than as
a presence to accentuate. In later, postwar American painting, according to
Judd, The parts are few and so subordinate to the unity as not to be parts in
an ordinary sense. A painting is nearly an entity, one thing, and not the
indefinable sum of a group of entities and references. The plane becomes
primary. Everything on or slightly in the plane of the painting must be
arranged laterally.44 The screen device has followed a similar path. Its
image can be stretched in ways to produce forms with greater lateral
orientation (for example when a circle becomes an oval, as in figure 2),
emphasizing the screens rectangle as the determining form over any regard
for original relationships between the components of the composition.
Under these circumstances, the relationships between these forms become
secondary to the affirmation of the expanse of the screen that contains them.
More and more, then, the frame and the need to fill its form dictate the terms
of viewing. The image, as Sobchack writes, becomes incidental, just there,
fortuitously present for the screen device that contains it. Even if the screen
image has always been susceptible to the specifications and conditions of
devices and networks changes in projection brilliance, television colour
settings, broadcast signal strength, and so on it has taken on a greater
plasticity as its compositional relationships become variable. In the trend
towards filling the screen, an enlarged or reformatted image appears
preferable to one occupying less screen space but displaying the original
aspect ratio and compositional relationships. It is implied that a larger image
of lower resolution is preferable to a smaller, sharper one.
In the range of screen settings and interface options, a tension develops at
the border of the image, on the ideological threshold between frame and
edge. The frame serves to mediate imageenvironment relationships, while
the edge marks the abrupt break between the two. As Carla Gottlieb notes,
an edge does not possess the same binding power as a frame or line; it is
merely a termination.45 Certain options or functions, such as recalculating
aspect ratio to cover the entire screen surface, would appear to privilege the
edge. Any deformations that are incurred in that case have been determined
by the edge. Those options that enlarge the image to match up to the
horizontal or vertical edge suggest framing or matting through inevitable
horizontal or vertical cropping.
In those instances where the user becomes aware of the images
modification or distortion to conform to the shape of the frame, the frame
rises to the surface, however momentarily, as the defining feature of the
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A form could then give its shape to what it contained. And content could
transfer its significance as painting to what contains it. The space
pervades, like gravity, or energy, or air. This is not, as far as we yet
know, a possibility of the film or screen frame which only repeats the
fact that a film is not a painting.43
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