Beneath the ‘Surface’
These days, observed Giuliana Bruno, we are surrounded by screens: TV screens, computer screens, tablet screens, screens as big as the facade of a building and as small as the one on your smartphone. If the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, the screen as medium has become so pervasive in the modern environment that one can lose sight of where the virtual ends and the real begins, noted Bruno, a professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES). Bruno is also the author of “Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media” (University of Chicago Press). Available in May, “Surface” will offer an “archaeology of the screen” as a medium. Bruno said her aim is to view cultural phenomena using an object that originated as a device for filtering light as a prism. To understand the book’s true scope, Bruno promises to expand on the subject during the...