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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2010 Into the Screenscape: Screens, Bodies, and the Biopolitics of the Population Katheryn Wright

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

INTO THE SCREENSCAPE:

SCREENS, BODIES, AND THE BIOPOLITICS OF THE POPULATION

By

KATHERYN WRIGHT

A Dissertation submitted to the Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2010

Copyright © 2010 Katheryn Wright All Rights Reserved The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Katheryn Wright defended on March 26, 2010.

______Amit Rai Professor Directing Dissertation

______Andy Opel University Representative

______Leigh Edwards Committee Member

______Kathleen Yancey Committee Member

Approved:

______John Kelsay, Director, Interdisciplinary Humanities

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members.

ii

For my sponsors: Clinton Bryant James and Barbara Wright

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have helped me in the completion of this dissertation. First and foremost I want to thank my major professor and good friend, Amit Rai. He encouraged me to be daring and creative in my work, and to think big in the hope that something exciting might happen. Amit gave me confidence when I needed it, and for that I owe him my gratitude. I want to thank the members of my committee for their encouragement and generosity over the past three years: Andy Opel, Leigh Edwards, and Kathleen Yancey. I first wrote about the urban screen for a research paper in Greg Elmerʼs “Media and Cultural Studies” course. This work became the starting point from which my dissertation eventually developed. Also, I have presented portions of my research at the UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium, the Popular Culture Association, and the National Communication Association. The participants in these panels provided invaluable feedback that helped me clarify my arguments. Also, the students in my “New Media in Theory and Practice” and “Television and Culture” courses talked through ideas and concepts related to this project, offering their unique insights into the role screens play in their lives. A major portion of this dissertation involved attending the 2008 US Open in New York. While I was there, I stayed at the home of my cousins, Andy Whitley and Sally Freedman. Even though they were in Spain, Andy and Sally welcomed my husband and I, as did my uncle and aunt, Thurmon and Wilma Whitley. I thank them for all for their hospitality and generosity, and for helping me complete research that I wouldnʼt have been able to do otherwise. Many friends and colleagues from Interdisciplinary Humanities have stood by me throughout the dissertation writing process, and I thank each of you. Erika Johnson-Lewis has been my writing companion for a nearly two years, and without her I definitely would be wandering around Tallahassee trying to find a decent bagel. Erin DiCesare, my partner in crime, is an incredibly caring friend

iv with an insane work ethic that will hopefully rub off in the near future. Also, Valerie Danesh has stuck by me for more than two decades. She amazes me with all sheʼs accomplished in her life, including her two beautiful girls. Most importantly, my family has been a constant source of love and support. My parents have always been there for me in everything I do. My mother, Barbara Wright, is inspiring in her dedication to others and my father, James Wright, is the most humble person I have ever met. Saying “thank you” doesnʼt seem like enough, so know that Iʼm honored to be your daughter and will always try to make you proud. My husband, Clinton Bryant, has been there for me through every step of this dissertation. He fostered my interest in popular music, watched tennis with me, edited my entire manuscript free of charge, listened to endless discussions, and provided assurance when I needed it. Clinton is my partner in every way. He helps me stay true to myself, and gives me strength when I have none. Without you I would not be me.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... vii Abstract ...... viii

INTRODUCTION: A TALE OF TWO CEREMONIES...... 1

1. SCREEN AS CULTURAL FORM...... 8

2. BODIES IN POPULATIONS ...... 40

3. BLANK SLATES AND SCREENSCAPES ...... 60

4. STEALTH SCREENS AND MOBILE PHONES ...... 93

5. VIDEO BOARDS AND HANDHELD TELEVISIONS...... 122

CONCLUSION: NEXT TIME ON ...... 166

APPENDICES...... 173

A IRB APPROVAL MEMORANDUM ...... 173 B SAMPLE PARENTAL PERMISSION FORM...... 175 C SAMPLE CONSENT FORM...... 176 D SAMPLE ASSENT FORM FOR MINORS ...... 178

REFERENCES ...... 179

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 197

vi LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. “Vows”. Screen capture from opening credit sequence...... 64

Figure 2. “Belonging”. Screen capture of transparent LCD...... 78

Figure 3. “The Attic”. Screen capture of the layout in the attic...... 89

Figure 4. “99”. Fan image taken by Choltrop at the concert in Jacksonville and posted to NIN.com...... 98

Figure 5. “Opps”. Fan image taken by innerg07 at the concert in Jacksonville and posted to NIN.com...... 108

Figure 6. View of spectators watching the video board outside of Arthur Ashe Stadium, picture by author...... 128

Figure 7. Video board in Arthur Ashe Stadium, picture by author...... 130

Figure 8. US Open Live at Madison Square Park, picture by author...... 141

Figure 9. A fan watching live tennis on a handheld television, picture by author...... 150

Figure 10. Spectator enjoying tennis on her handheld television, picture by author...... 151

Figure 11. Surfing the web at the Polo store, picture by author...... 154

vii ABSTRACT

This dissertation explores the formation and significance of the screenscape in popular culture. A screenscape encompasses the mixture of screens and bodies that enter into and transform the aesthetic quality of social space. After reviewing types of screens that might comprise a given screenscape, I approach the screen not only as a technology but a cultural form that influences the way audiences perceive the relationship between media and their environments. As such, I expand Brian Massumiʼs reading of the production of fear through the television after 9/11 and argue that the screen is a space of and for the collective modulation of affect. My argument hinges on three interlocking concepts: the screen as threshold, the affective body, and the biopolitical population. While new media theorists Lev Manovich and Anne Friedberg position the screen as a frame for onscreen content, the first chapter concludes by outlining how the screen also functions as a threshold, a critical point or site of transition. The second chapter defines the affective body and biopolitical population, linking the two through the collective modulation of affect. Each of the final three chapters focuses on a specific example, weaving together the concepts of the screen as threshold, affective body, and biopolitical population through the construction of the screenscape. I analyze the television series Dollhouse as a metaphor of the screen as a threshold. The narrative positions the primary character, Echo (Eliza Dushku), as a screen – a site for display rather than an object on display. She simultaneously represents both the affective body and the biopolitical population. Next I turn to Nine Inch Nailʼs Lights in the Sky tour. Trent Reznor, the visionary behind Nine Inch Nails, stands for the fantasy of the artist who surrenders his body to the onstage screenscape he finances and designs. Reznorʼs playful interactions with the three “stealth” screens enable his body to be controlled and secured by the logic of the screenscape as it expands beyond his control. My final discussion takes an

viii ethnographic approach to the study of the screen at the 2008 US Open in New York. This sporting attraction and entertainment spectacle brings together a variety of screens ranging from video boards to handheld televisions. Here, the enormity of the event is expressed through the personal, affective relationships people have with their screen technologies. At the same time, the arrangement of screens across the venue help to manage crowds, control access, and corporately brand an event in its becoming. These readings hinge on a paradox embedded in the screen as a cultural form: to enter into the screenscape means to affect and be affected by the biopolitical population as it weaves into and informs the logic of cultural production and consumption.

ix INTRODUCTION

A TALE OF TWO CEREMONIES

This research project has spanned the course of two years beginning with the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China and concluding with the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. These two events are fitting bookends to my first inquiry into the cultural significance of the screen. I remember watching gymnast Li Ning fly around the 500-meter circumference of the Beijing National Stadium as a collage of moving images unfolded behind him on the projection screen along its rim. This magical unfolding in the sky provided the dramatic preamble to the lighting of the Olympic torch by Li. Even though the opening ceremonies in Vancouver were far less expensive and extravagant than those in Beijing, the primary setting for the cultural portion of the event was a skin of screens covering the venue. Three nested circles of screens were raised and lowered from the central roof of the indoor stadium, banner-like screens were raised vertically from the floor, the entire ground was a large screen, including the audience who wore white ponchos so that their bodies could be projected onto during the performance. Each segment of the show introduced a unique arrangement of these layers of screens. These onscreen projections transformed the stadium into a forest, an ocean, and a field. Sarah McLachlan sang her song “One Dream” while ballet dancers performed within the redwood forest where the hanging circles became leaves and branches, the banners the trunks, and the floor the ground specked with flickering light as if filtered through the leaves of the trees. The projection on the floor of whales in the ocean came alive when actual mist appeared to spout out from the whaleʼs blowhole in a blending of two- dimensional and three-dimensional space. Joni Mitchellʼs performance of “Both Sides Now” accompanied a young man running through projected prairies and then taking flight, flying out into the stands as the field expanded to include the

1 audience dressed in their ponchos. As with the lighting of the torch in Beijing, the blending together of moving bodies with moving images created something magical and transformative. I experienced these sensations through yet another screen of my television set. These opening ceremonies taking place on opposite ends of the worlds two years apart from each other make critically relevant my fascination with what I am calling the screenscape. I define the screenscape as a dynamic intersection of moving images, screen technologies or image planes (the surface of the screen apart from any specific technology), aesthetics, geographies, and histories that create the type of bodily experience of space and time that the examples from the 2008 and 2010 Olympic opening ceremonies illustrate. In the early and intermediate stages of this project, I tried to use other concepts to describe the screenscape, notably “media environment” and “media convergence”. In part derived from the scholarship of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Walter Ong and more recently Neil Postman, media ecology is the interdisciplinary study of the varied interactions between communication systems, technologies, and behaviors as a media environment.1 While the screenscape is an environment that mediates, I found the term “media environment” both increasingly broad and surprisingly narrow for my purposes. While every town, city or metropolis is in some way or another a media environment in that they are spaces built of and for communication, screenscape refers to a specific aesthetic and spatio-temporal relation even as the screen is becoming more ubiquitous as a cultural form. At the same time, the term marginalizes things media and technology do other than mediate. On the other hand, media convergence as defined by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide simultaneously refers to the concentration of media ownership, the increasing cultural significance of user-created content, and unfolding of narratives across multiple media platforms (3 – 23). While convergence in the

1 See Nystrom, summarized at .

2 way that Jenkins describes it both supports and is supported by the screenscape, it isnʼt one. The concept of the screenscape implies a transformation of ordinary space into screen space, as the stadium during the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Vancouver transforms (albeit temporarily) from a seascape into a variety of landscapes filled with dancers, the flying boy, and other performers. The speaking voice of Donald Sutherland marks these transitions from one onscreen world to the next. Of course, the screenscape doesnʼt stop at the edge of the screened floor or the rim of the stadium. It includes any number of people recording video on their mobile devices or taking pictures with their digital cameras. It includes people watching live on television at home, or accessing a video recording of the event on YouTube a month later. The screenscape resides in our pockets, our homes, our classrooms, and our cities. Quite fittingly, my prerequisite googling of “screenscape” led me to a company who sold personalized digital displays to advertise businesses on screen technologies ranging from digital picture frames to large digital billboards, a multimedia production studio, and a directory for the rental of a variety of screen technologies, projectors, and speakers. These business endeavors begin to capture the scope of my use of the term, from the creation of content for the screen to the technological substrate that defines the terms of engagements between bodies and the variety of interfaces. One of the central components of the screenscape is, of course, the screen. My first chapter defines the parameters of the screen as a cultural form. The screen as a technology and as a field of vision has played and continues to play a significant role in media theory. I compare the metaphor of the screen as a frame to that of the threshold. Instead of positioning the screen as a kind of container that frames the moving image, television broadcast, or graphic user interface (GUI), I position the screen as a threshold or space of becoming that is simultaneously a critical point and site of possibility – the liminality of nonlinear change. The screen as frame separates virtual space from a more ordinary

3 reality. As a threshold, the screen enters and feeds back into an evolving ecology or assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 3 – 4). One of the methodological advantages of positioning the screen as a threshold is that it makes necessary the simultaneous consideration of the screenʼs content, technology, and geographical placement in relation to other screens and the bodies that watch, hold, and use them. Working through these technological, cultural, and political relations is one of the primary challenges of this dissertation. Why is it important to think of the screen as a threshold? While there are any number of answers dependent on the mixture of contexts and contents, I argue that the constitution of the screenscape is implicated in the biopolitics of the population at the scale of the affective body. Biopower attempts to extract value from “life” at the scale of the biological species or a population, and part of life is the bodily capacity to affect and be affected. Rather than disciplining bodies, biopower ask bodies to do more – expand, evolve, and change through the matrixes of security and control.2 Biopower easily seeps through the screenscape because it, similarly, expands, evolves, and changes. My second chapter is a literature review that provides detailed discussions of the concepts of affect and the population and their relationships to biopower. The screen is a site of collective affect modulation, with affects filtering through bodies resonating within the screenscape. This chapter concludes by introducing Brian Massumiʼs argument about affective modulation and the event in contemporary American culture in “Fear (The Spectrum Said)”. He argues that television, and I extend his argument to include a variety of screen technologies, is a site of collective affect modulation that led to the production of fear and rupture in the historical context of 9/11. It is important to note from the outset, however, that the modulation of affect does not happen exclusively at the level of technology.3 I emphasize the

2 See Deleuze for his reading of Foucault and “societies of control”. 3 Marshall McLuhan famously argues in Understanding Media that media technologies like the screen rather than onscreen content affect how we see the world. Because a cathode ray tube of the television set is a “light through” technology, it draws viewers in with a type of religious intensity (272). 4 interrelationships between technology and content, space and time, geography and history that modulate affective bodily capacities in both an instant and over the course of an extended serialized narrative. These modulations in concert with the multidimensionality of media practices (here specifically related to the screen) carry biopolitical consequences. The primary affect I attempt to locate is the sense of connection or lived expression of continuity to a “whole” as it enfolds into and is extended by the screenscape. This wholeness is a cultural fingerprint of the biopolitical population as it forms through the screen as threshold. The last three chapters each focus on one exemplary event where the screen as a cultural form weaves into the biopolitics of the population through the production of affective bodily capacities. The third chapter is an interpretative textual analysis of the onscreen screenscape of the recently cancelled television series Dollhouse, while the fourth chapter offers a critical reading (a blend between textual analysis and auto-ethnographic approach) of a live performance from the rock band Nine Inch Nails (NIN) during their 2008 Lights in the Sky tour from my own personal perspective as a fan. The final chapter is a more formalized ethnographic study of the screenscape at the 2008 US Open. I worked with a broad range of examples – a television series, a rock concert, and sporting attraction – because this variety speaks to the synthetic quality of the screen as a cultural form. Each chapter outlines the different types of screen technologies for the specific example and considers their spatial relations to each other in the context of the screenscape. I discuss the ways bodies interact (or donʼt interact) with the screen as a material object, a carrier of content, and as an idea. Concurrently, I explore how the screenscape interacts with bodies as a site of collective affect modulation. Finally, I consider the formation of the biopolitical population in the context of affective bodily capacities. I came to these specific sites of analysis, at least initially, organically. I watched Dollhouse because Iʼm a fan of Joss Whedon, and as the narrative progressed I saw the ideas that I was thinking about in relation to my ethnographic study of the US Open appear onscreen and through the body of the

5 protagonist, Echo (Eliza Dushku). Echo not only physically interacts with screens; she is a screen in that her individuated body affectively resonates with the population of collective memories imprinted in her mind. While the third chapter analyzes the body as a screen, the fourth evaluates the aesthetic qualities of the interactions between body and screen. I have been a casual fan of NIN since I was an undergraduate at Stetson University, well before my appreciation of Whedonʼs Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I sadly discovered only after the fact on DVD. My fandom for NIN intensified when I attended the concert from their Live: With Teeth tour from 2005. I was affectively drawn to the multimedia aspect of the show and the integration of a projection screen into the stage spectacle; the mixture of images and music made it so much more than a rock concert. When I saw them again during the Lights in the Sky tour, the single projection screen multiplied by three. My experience from this second concert became one of the critical touchstones that initiated my interest in the charismatic dance between the screen and body. The final chapter on the US Open expands from the onstage screenscape of the NIN performance and looks at an entire event in formation from the perspective of a participant observer. My interest in tennis goes back to my childhood. Without cable or a computer (remember the eighties and nineties?), I recall searching through the schedule in the local newspaper to find televised matches. I hoped to encounter the brash yet colorful Andre Agassi or even the annoyingly consistent Martina Navratilova. Over the years, the US Open tennis tournament as I experienced it through the screen of my familyʼs television set transformed into the multimedia entertainment spectacle that it is today. Included in this transformation is the integration of a variety of screens into the collective experience of the event both onscreen and onsite. My ethnographic study of the 2008 US Open traces the dynamic interactions that occurred by and through the screen. As a participant observer, I experienced first hand the biopolitical underpinnings of a screenscape in formation. The combination of tennis and technology surrounded me, took me in and made me feel like I belonged to the

6 history of the game in an intimate and personal way. I was somehow connected to those watching with me, to the players, the rituals of silence and applause. This sense of connection, although I didnʼt really perceive it in that way while I was actually there, was powerful and palpable. And I still feel it. While this dissertation briefly “captures” the screenscape in these three examples from American popular culture, I continue to discover moments where the screen as a cultural form is playing an increasingly significant role in the aesthetic, political, and social dimensions of American, and in the case of the two Olympic ceremonies, global culture. This dissertation offers a critical theoretical foundation from which the screenscape can be explored.

7 CHAPTER 1

SCREEN AS CULTURAL FORM

The screen as a cultural form defines the spatio-temporal relations of both “old” and “new” media. In The Television Will Be Revolutionized (2007), Amanda Lotz asserts: The convergence of digital technologies uncertainly connected other than by their digital language raises ambiguity about whether something like YouTube is best categorized as “television,” “video,” “computer,” or perhaps even just as a “screen” technology. (Lotz 80) YouTube crosses boundaries between media because it combines the cultural practices associated with the viewing of television, the amateur recording of video, and the possibilities of the computer interface into one hybridized, digitized application. For Lotz, the only material object or technology that represents this dynamic intersection of media forms, contents, and experiences is the screen. While I, along with Lotz, am extremely hesitant to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater by dismissing the institutional and phenomenal distinctions between media enough to declare any one media dead as a result of the digital revolution or media convergence, including a discussion of the screen as a cultural form in media studies opens up a variety of paths for critical inquiry unexplored at any level of depth in the majority of research trajectories focusing exclusively on the inherent complexities of a single medium. Lotz asks about this potential shift towards these technologies of the screen as a conclusion; I want to take her inquiry as a starting point. So what, exactly, is a screen? Media forms like cinema, television, the Internet, and mobile communications have unique histories, consumption practices, and aesthetic expectations connected to both the content they deliver and the associated technologies that represent each particular medium. The

8 adaptability of content to a variety of screen types (making a movie for 3D, IMAX, a conventional cinema screen, adding additional features to the DVD release, featuring outtakes online, etc) made without the explicit intention of extending the internal world of the narrative4 coupled with growing number of businesses focused on installing video boards, televisions, etc. in public spaces (now used primarily for advertising or sporting attractions like the Olympics) points to the potential emergence of a new “screen” industry built specifically around the production, distribution, and consumption of the screenscape. These kinds of speculations, however, downplay the historical importance the screen has already played in the cultural histories of other media forms. The screen not only provides the technical means through which content can be visibly accessible, the type of screen each of these media forms use often stands in for the media themselves. Take the “silver screen” of Hollywood cinema, the “boob tube” of television, or the increasingly popular “magical touch screens” of mobile devices like the iPhone which are readily available to consumers willing to pay for them as examples of the representational significance the screen already holds in American culture. These types of discourses about the screen continue, even if the screen is no longer silver and cathode ray tube television sets have become less popular among American consumers. While a critical material and symbolic component of media, the screen is also more than a technology. Delivery technologies like records, tapes, super-8, CDs and DVDs displace each other once another type of storage more suitable to the needs of consumers becomes available (Jenkins 13 -14), but changes in technologies of the screen (like the mass production of flat panel televisions or liquid crystal displays that replace cathodes) never completely replace cultural assumptions and expectations about what a screen is, what it does, or what possibilities it represents. This chapter explores these assumptions and expectations through the lens of media theory

4 A key feature of “convergence culture” as detailed by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) is transmedia entertainment, where the “world” of a narrative is built across several entertainment platforms. He uses the world of the Matrix as his primary example. 9 and from an American perspective, arguing that the screen as a cultural form determines the limits of the embodied perception of virtual space.

Defining of the Screen This section presents the etymology of the word “screen” alongside a brief overview of the range of screen technologies like cinematic projection, the television set, radar, laptops, and even video boards. This collection of technologies are made possible by the combination of technological inventiveness and consumer demand that expands the limits of what a screen could do and display. Because the cultural significance of the screen has historically been tied to the individuated histories of a variety of media forms, I begin by piecing together a short list detailing its technological history in order to begin considering how the screen is implicated in but also separate from other media; including the cinema, television, computer, and mobile communications. Each type of screen marks an attempt to make the technology more compact, portable, efficient, adaptable, and touchable all the while improving both image and sound quality. The definition of screen derives from several linguistic sources, one being the French écran meaning protective barrier or filter and the second, the Germanic Schirm meaning a shield used for fighting or umbrella (Kress 202 – 204). Three common definitions emerge from these two etymological roots: the screen as a means of defense or protection, as a shelter, or as a partition between two spaces. The third definition of the screen as a partition between two spaces is what Plato actually refers to in his allegory of the cave from The Republic (380 BCE). In the allegory, Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine a wall behind the prisoners like a screen that would hide marionette players where men would work and converse. Shadows of these men would be cast by firelight on the opposing wall and the illusion of the shadows would be mistaken as real by the prisoners. Ironically, this parable has been used to illustrate the logic of cinematic representation before the actual invention of projection technology in

10 the early 20th century. This particular reading of the screen can only hope to connect the modern invention of the cinema to the classical Greek roots of Western civilization in order to legitimate this popular media form as art. The definition of screen can also be etymologically linked to two Sanskrit words, carman or skin and kränti defined as he who injures (Introna and Illharco 226), dating back to approximately 1000 BCE. I particularly like these possible linguistic roots because they directly connect the screen with the materiality of the body. What is a screen if not the skin of media, and what is skin if not a space for the projection of culture. Interestingly, “screening” can imply moving beyond the surface or skin, as in the screening process of airport security. It can also suggest the process of filtering, as with the screening of an applicant pool to find the suitable job candidates. Projection screen. The use of a screen to indicate a site for the display of moving images was first realized at a press demonstration of the Panoptikon projector on April 21, 1895 by brothers Gray and Otway Lantham, former employees of Thomas Edison. The Lantham family formed the Lambda Company with the expressed goal of developing life-sized motion pictures projected onto a screen. The Panoptikon projector was a modification of the kinetoscope, the protocinematic technology invented by Thomas Edison and WKL Dicksonʼs kinetoscope in the late 19th century. This projector worked by running a developed celluloid strip over a light source so that a single spectator to view the moving image through a peephole. (Herbert par. 1 – 2). The Lantham brothers shifted the light source allowing the strip would be projected onto a screen. The result was far less successful than the Auguste and Louis Lumiéreʼs first commercial public screening utilizing public projection device and screen on December 28, 1895 in the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris (Walters par. 8 – 9). While, technologically speaking, the projector was the show piece in both the Lantham and Lumiére brothers early experiments with public projection, the introduction of the screen as a screen in an exhibition space molded future assumptions about the aesthetic qualities of film. Rather than a barrier separating

11 out two qualitatively distinct spaces as in the allegory of the cave, these early screens worked by blocking and reflecting light back into the darkened theater. The Lantham brothersʼ goal was to make cinema life-sized, while the Lumiére brothers aimed to make film collectively accessible to large groups of people and increase the profit margin for a single screening. The shape and size of these first projection screens were determined by the technological constraints of movie cameras and projection machines. The aspect ratio of the standard Eastman frame of perforated celluloid was a 1.33:1, meaning that the width is 1.33 times longer than the height of the image. The 1.33.1 aspect ratio was the Hollywood standard in the silent film era until the 1930s with the introduction of “talkies”, when the image size needed to be reduced to accommodate the extra space needed for a sound track. A 1.37:1 aspect ratio known as the “Academy Standard” became the standard.5 The dimensions of the projection screen corresponded with this ratio while its actual size varied depending on the depth, width, and height of the given venue ranging from the small nickelodeons in the 1920s to the massive movie palaces popular in the 1930s and 1940s. The architecture of early movie theaters were modeled after the proscenium theatre with a large arch looming across the front, downstage area. This archway physically cut off the actors from the audience, reinforcing the imaginary fourth wall of Realist Theater in the late 19th century. Early projection screens were often located on an actual stage right behind a decorative proscenium arch. The use of a projection screen for the public exhibition of motion pictures transformed movies from an individualized parlor game curiosity to a group viewing experience. This collective experience set early Hollywood cinema apart from other individually-consumed popular media like photography, newspapers, dime novels, and comic books. Light-emitting diodes. Utilizing technology developed in the early 20th century, light-emitting diode displays use semiconductor diodes (like lightbulbs)

5 Other common aspect ratios include television at 4:3 and, most recently, digital widescreen with a 16:9 in the 1980s. See Gould, par. 3 – 6. 12 that emit light when an electric current enters the circuit. This phenomenon is called “electroluminescence” and was discovered by British WWI Captain H.J. Round in 1907. Practical applications with visible and infrared LEDs were developed in the 1960s by Nick Holonyak of General Electric and were used in science labs to replace seven-segment displays, and William Moggridgeʼs 1979 laptop prototype used a folding electroluminescent graphics display screen. Today, LED display technologies include video boards, store signs, stadium television displays, and backdrops to a buildingʼs architecture. Cathode ray tube. The next significant development in the technological history of the screen is the invention of a cathode ray tube, the cornerstone of television and personal computing screen technologies. Instead of reflecting light, cathode technology generates and displays light from the same source. The actual technology was developed by Scottish electrical engineer A.A. Campbell- Swinton and Russian scientist and inventor Boris Rosing in 1907.6 The cathode ray tube (CRT) works when electrons riding along a filament in a glass tube, much like a light bulb, excite phosphor atoms coated on the screen. A signal sends information directing electron beams to fire in a particular order. For the television, electron beams travel across the entire plane of the screen forming the “lines” of the image. Oscilloscopes, early forerunners to the radar (significant in the history of computing and the Internet), also used cathode technology but, unlike the television set, a direct beam of electrons is sent to a particular location on the screen. Vector monitors use magnets rather than electrons to create the “dynamic screen” of the graphic user interface (Manovich 96 – 98). The invention, production, and distribution of cathode technologies like television and radar in the early to mid-20th century combined the collective accessibility of the projection screen in a (relatively) more portable package that was more effective for the electrical transmission of information.

6 See the FCCʼs Visionary Period, 1880ʼs Through 1920ʼs. 13 Liquid crystal display. While cathode technologies have not disappeared, they are quickly being overshadowed in the United States by liquid crystal displays (LCD), perhaps the most significant screen technology to emerge in the last two decades. The final selling quarter of 2007 marked the first time that LCD TV shipments surpassed CRTs and, even in a slowing economy, LCD screen sales were forecasted to continue to grow over $80 billion dollars (Gruener par. 4 – 6). Although RCA developed a prototype in the 1960s, LCD technology was pioneered in conjunction with laptop computers in the early 1980s (Davis par. 3). Bill Gates and Kazuhiko Nishi of Microsoft set out to design a laptop using the then-experimental LCD technology in 1982. The initial impetus for developing LCD was its potential for the increased portability necessary for laptops. Liquid crystals are substances can polarize light and are affected by electricity, but the display requires either an external light-source or is backlit. The LCD is divided through a grid or matrix that becomes the pixels of the screen. Because of the malleability and durability of LCD technology, LCD screens are everywhere from mobile phones to flat panel televisions. A type of LCD, touch screens work by sandwiching either a metallic conducting or acoustic wave layer between two non-conducting surfaces. When touched, the layers make contact and information about the resulting change is processed. Plasma display panel. Plasma display panels (PDP), often confused with LCD screens, are made up of tiny florescent lights or “plasmas” that emit photons that light up the display electrode. Invented in 1964 by professors Donald Blitzer and H. Gene Slottow with their graduate student Robert Wilson out of Illinois, these photons interact with colored phosphor material that produces the color of the pixel. In 1997, plasma technology was used by Fujitsu and Pioneer to create large flat-panel televisions and is presently popular among HDTV viewers. Image plane. Unlike projection screens, cathodes, liquid crystal displays, light-emitting diode screens, or plasmas, an image plane is not tied to any one particular technology of the screen; its liberation enables the moving image to “haunt everyday life” (Morse 63). An image plane is a surface for the display of

14 moving images not intrinsically tied to any specific screen technology. Experimental screen technologies like transparent “organic light-emitting diodes” (OLED) screens made from a type of clear, light-emitting organic plastic or the “Flexi Display” that uses transparent and flexible plastic circuitry to create a more durable and energy efficient display. These experimental screen technologies approximate the potential of the image plane, transforming any surface, any space, into a potential screen space.7 As Morse asserts, “The screen, in turn, now marks a cybernetic frontier between the physical and the conceptual, the body and the machine, bio-technology and communications” (64). These screens are transparent and bendable interfaces, holograms, moving images projected by a magical device onto empty space, or floating “window” frames. While they often populate the futuristic visions of science fiction,8 they also enter into and inform lived spatial relations, navigating the space between the actual and the virtual. Although this list has focused almost exclusively on visual display capabilities of the screen, of equal significance is the synchronization of audio with onscreen content. Synchronized sound was encoded onto the celluloid frame of film was first integrated into motion pictures in the 1920s with the public exhibition of The Jazz Singer. In order to accommodate this newfound desire, a projection screen with tiny holes that was created to allow sound waves from speakers positioned behind the screen to travel through it or is integrated into the screen. The use of audio tracks and the integration of speakers into the display implicate sound in this technological history the screen in very material ways – screens are simultaneously technologies of sight, sound, and touch. The screen provides one of the primary sites through which electronic media can be visually, auditorily, and even physically accessed.

7 See “Screens of the Future” and “Flexi Display Technology is Now” in Science Daily. 8 Consider films ranging from Bladerunner to Avatar, television series like SyFyʼs Caprica, or video games like Dead Space and Mass Effect 2. 15 The Screen in Theory Even as a key technological component to old and new media, the screen often remains a secondary concern to onscreen content in the study of popular culture. However, it has played and continues to play a vital role in film and media theory. This section introduces several theories of the screen. I begin with Marshall McLuhanʼs distinction between “light on” versus “light through” technology. Next, I focus on apparatus theory in film studies. Finally, I conclude with Jean Baudrillardʼs concept of the “total screen” which, for him, signals the end of aesthetic illusionism. These theories use the screen as a metaphor in their speculations about the perceptual and psychological effects of cinematic and postcinematic spectatorship and subjectivity. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man famously argues that the media is the message, or that a technological form as opposed to the textual content of a given media impacts how we perceive the world and understand our place within it.9 For instance, the speed of electricity introduced the importance of simultaneity in society. Rather than thinking sequentially, the electric age enables the “instant sensory experience of the whole” as a “total field” (12 - 13). Within this context, McLuhanʼs distinguishes between “light on” as opposed to “light through” technologies (129). He focuses on the quality of the screen interface in order to illustrate the contrasting perceptual modes between two popular media forms, film and television. “Light on” is where light bounces on and off of a surface like a projection screen, or the pages of a book. For McLuhan, these technologies generate perceptual focus and aesthetic distance. “Light through” refers to the passage of light through the screen. A stained glass window in the gothic cathedral is a non-electronic example of a light through technology, but the television is McLuhanʼs primary concern. These types of technologies have a “hypnotic, religious intensity”

9 Raymond Williamsʼ argues against McLuhan in Television: Technology and Cultural Form when he considers television as a technology that shapes and is shaped by social institutions. For a great discussion of the debate between Williams and McLuhan, see New Media: A Critical Introduction. 16 (Levinson 9); “[w]ith TV, the viewer is the screen. He is bombarded with light impulses...The TV image is not a still shot. It is not a photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning finger” (McLuhan 272 - 3, emphasis in original). The constant movement of electron beams across the screen fascinates the viewer and draws them in. The viewer is the screen in the sense the mind must continuously reconstitute the onscreen image.10 John Ellisʼ Visible Fiction: Cinema Television Video contrasts the “gaze” of the film spectator with the “glance” of the television viewer; “TVʼs regime of vision…is a regime of the glance rather than the gaze. The gaze implies a concentration of the spectatorʼs activity into that of looking; the glance implies that no extraordinary effort is being invested in the activity of looking” (Ellis 137). Ellis poses a notion of televisual spectatorship in relation to its unique apparatus as opposed to the cinema. Although Ellisʼ notion of “the glance” trivializes the variety of television spectatorships and fandom, he addresses the screen phenomenologically as opposed to psychically. McLuhan asserts that the quality of the interface, the technological component that connects the mind to the given technology like a screen, creates a sensory experience that determines the connection someone has to a particular technology. The electrical movement of beams across a television screen draws the viewer into the technology, capturing his or her attention in a way other media donʼt. Ellis, on the other hand, argues that television encourages passive as opposed to active viewing because one doesnʼt have to concentrate since the apparatus is less isolated from daily activities of the home than the cinema, which encourages less distraction and

10 In Lucas D. Introna and Fernando M. Ilarchoʼs phenomenological analysis of screens, they want to strip away the empirical to find the “screen-ness of screens,” asking what it means to engage with a surface as a screen (Introna and Ilharco 224). The screen is more than a material object, it only really becomes a screen when you turn it on; “we rely on it as a transparent ready- to-hand being that shapes, affects, mediates our own be-ing” (225). Their reading, filtered through the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, concludes that screens call attention by framing what is already presumed relevant information (227 – 228). The fact that something is onscreen already presumes a shared set of values or beliefs and it becomes increasingly difficult for that which is offscreen to be revealed (232). All types of screens as opposed to the “light through” variety illicit attention in a way that other media donʼt. 17 more concentration. While McLuhan focuses on how the television set works, Ellis emphasizes where it is located. Both of these readings, however, are interested in developing a phenomenology of the screen. They focus on the conscious experience of media at the level of the senses. Apparatus theory of the 1970s explores the psychological (as opposed to phenomenological) dimensions of the cinema in relation to the public projection. Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz are concerned specifically with the conditions of spectatorship with the screen symbolizing the ideological space between the “conscious” spectator and the dreamworld of onscreen represented reality. Jean-Louis Baudry focuses on the relationship between the psychology of the spectator and ideological consequences of cinematic exhibition; projection constitutes the time-space where cinematic subjectivity (and the cinema) actualizes. The screen is where this actualization happens. Consider this passage; “Projector and screen restore the light lost in the shooting process, and transform a succession of separate images into an unrolling which also restores, but according to another scansion, the movement seized from ʻobjective realityʼ” (Baudry 2: 346). The transformation of separate images into continuous action through the restoration of light produces, for Baudry, the transcendental subject. The mechanical camera “eye” displaces the material body, liberating subjectivity from the confines of the materiality of consciousness. This liberation is ideological, inscribing the world of film onto reality. In this moment, the screen acts as a mirror; “the mirror, as a reflecting surface, is framed, limited, circumscribed… [the] reality reflected by the mirror is that of the self (the ʻIʼ eye)” (352 – 353). The space of the screen is ideological in the sense that the cinematic reality projected onto it stands in for objective reality. This masked subjectivity of the spectator, confusing the “framed, limited, circumscribed” worlds of film with the ʻrealʼ world, cements the ideological formations of capitalism into the consciousness of the viewer. Later, Baudry parallels the human psyche with the projection process and introduces Lewinʼs notion of the “dream screen” (771).

18 The dream screen is a “surface” in someoneʼs dream onto which images are projected. Because the experience of projection is so closely aligned to the dream-world of the unconscious, it makes the ideological formations reinforced by cinematic representations appear natural. While images are recorded in the world, the projection process operates by another meter or pattern (“scansion”) and onscreen images thus present an alternative (ideological) vision of the real. In Baudryʼs analysis, the screen contains cinematic images masked as objective reality. The screen determines the edges of the composition, standardizing the seemingly limitless and indeterminate experience of cinematic vision. This standardization occurs within the discursive framework of transcendental subjectivity. Christian Metz offers a similar reading of the screen in the context of the projection process. Metz in The Imaginary Signifier outlines the psychological effects of the apparatus. The cinematic screen creates a fantasy that is recorded and fixed in the imaginary as a signifier of the imaginary (801). “The perceived is not really the object, it is its shade, its phantom, its double, its replica in a new kind of mirror” or in other words, the projection screen (802). The spectator is always already an “all-perceiving subject” of the physically absent “other” onscreen. The spectator identifies “with himself as a pure act of perception” and the retina as a “second screen” (803, 805). Consciousness takes on the role of projector and screen in the exhibition process, projecting (attributing oneʼs thoughts to others) and introjecting (replicating in the self) through a mechanized imaginary (805). This connection between the selfʼs imaginary and projection fulfills the desires to see (scopophilia and voyeurism) and hear (invocatory drive), while at the same time maintaining “a gulf, an empty space between the object and the eye, the object and his own body…as with the cinema spectators take care to avoid being two close too or too far from the screen” (809). For Metz, the scopic regime of the cinema produces ideological distance. This arrangement, exhibition standards predicated on the technical constraints of the apparatus, has ideological consequences. For Baudry, the framed images of onscreen worlds

19 transposes into the conscious life of the moviegoer. Metz envisions the screen as a site of translation where the all-perceiving subject fetishes the “elsewhere” of onscreen reality, and “the space of the film, represented by the screen, is utterly heterogeneous, it no longer communicates with that of the auditorium” (811). The actual people in the auditorium no longer matter, only the idealized others onscreen that are, because of the nature of cinema, always distanced. While Baudry and Metz deal with the screen as the primary point of confrontation between the self as spectator and the apparatus, other theories of the apparatus, while continuing to focus on spectatorship, move away from the screen as a metaphor for the mind on film. Laura Mulveyʼs canonical essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” updates Metzʼs argument about scopophilic and voyeuristic desires of sight by taking into account gender politics of cinematic representation through the “pleasure of looking” (834). While Mulvey borrows the ideas of scopophila and voyeurism from Metz, she focuses on the relationship between onscreen images and offscreen audiences. The screen, the “retina” of the all-perceiving subject for Metz, never registers in Mulveyʼs account of the male gaze and spectatorship. Spectators donʼt gaze at a screen, they look through it at the movie. She focuses on the compositional arrangement of the onscreen images of the female figure, articulating the psychological relation between the material world of the (male) spectator and fantasy world of the (female) object onscreen. Baudry, Metz, and Mulvey situate the spectator in front of the projection screen. Mulvey never explicitly mentions the screen in her analysis but continues to draw a boundary (marked by the screen) between on and offscreen. However, both Metz and Mulveyʼs argument about the “gaze” of the spectator is cemented by the technological limitations of the apparatus. Extending into late 20th century French philosophical thought, the screen comes to represent the cultural conditions of the new political economy of postmodern capital as illustrated through the work of Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard dissolves the technical differences between screens and speculates about what

20 he calls in both Impossible Exchange and Simulacra and Simulation the “total screen” (15). From Impossible Exchange: “As for the sign, it is passing into the pure speculation and simulation of the virtual world, the world of the total screen” (5). And, from Simulacra and Simulation: No relief, no perspective, no vanishing point where the gaze might risk losing itself, but a total screen where, in their uninterrupted display, the billboards and the products themselves act as equivalent and successive signs. There are employees who are occupied solely in remaking the front of the stage, the surface display, where a previous deletion by a consumer might have left some kind of hole. The self-service also adds to this absence of depth: the same homogeneous space, without mediation, brings together men and things – a space of direct manipulation. But who manipulates whom? (2: 75 – 6) The total screen offers a geography of signs, of surface that simultaneously experiences the disappearance of depth. The total screen offers something other than mediation. It creates a geography where the bodies can be manipulated without the safety offered by the boundaries of representation. Baudrillard deepens his discussion of the total screen in the essay “Xerox and Infinity” from Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena: We lived once in a world where the realm of the imaginary was governed by the mirror, by dividing one into two, by theatre, by otherness and alienation. Today that realm is the realm of the screen, of interfaces and duplication, of contiguity and networks. All our machines are screens, and the interactivity of humans has been replaced by the interactivity of screens. Nothing inscribed on these screens is ever intended to be deciphered in any depth: rather, it is supposed to be explored instantaneously, in an abreaction immediate to meaning, a short-circuiting of the poles of representation. (3: par. 8)

21 For Baudrillard, the major distinction between the “screens” of painting, photography, and the cinema is the degree of immersion into and interactivity with a given media. This sense of interactivity, of the inter-sensorial, alters the model of spectatorship dependant on the distance between the spectator and spectacle à la apparatus theory. It changes the aesthetic relationship between the image and the body; “the screen is merely virtual -- and hence unbridgeable. This is why it partakes only of that abstract -- definitively abstract -- form known as communication” (3: par. 10). Hence, the screen signals the death of spectatorial distance and aesthetic illusionism. Distinctions between text and image, man and machine, producers and receivers lose their theoretical import when all can be expressed through the virtuality of the screen. The total screen offers no relief, no distance from the “uninterrupted display” of signs which is necessary for aesthetism (2: 75). While apparatus theory observes how the projection screen psychologically transforms individuals into spectators of imagined reality; Baudrillard dissolves the categorical distinctions between media into a generic idea of the screen in society. The transformation of all the world into a screen signals the end of aesthetics because the mind entirely immersed in the virtual world of media. The “total screen” erases spectatorial distance. Theories of the screen engage with the screen in order to interrogate the phenomenal (McLuhan and Ellis) or psychological (Baudry and Metz) effects of media like the cinema and television on the mind of the spectator. For Baudrillard, the death of spectatorship and aesthetic illusionism occur when the total screen erases both phenomenal and psychological boundaries between “actual” and “virtual” worlds. Put another way, the total screen bypasses the aesthetic distance between mind and screen and implicates, or rather immerses, the body into the virtual world of media.

The Screen in Practice A theory of the screen emphasizes what the screen is in relation to the mind of the spectator. This final section moves from those trying to formulate

22 what the screen is and instead considers what it does. What the screen does is interface. It links things together, forms connections, creates boundaries, translates and transposes spaces and times.11 The preceding definition and theoretical discussions alluded to this use of the screen. A screen is a boundary, a barrier, a skin – all types of surfaces that interface. The projection screen links the life-sized body with the life-sized moving image of the body, and the broadcasting capabilities of cathode technology like vector monitors connect physical movements to impulses through the interface. The screen extends the individuated sensory expression of religious intensity into society for McLuhan. Baudryʼs “dream screen” enters unconscious desire into the onscreen fantasy of cinematic representation, while Baudrillardʼs “total screen” erases aesthetic distance. I focus on two specific ways the screen interfaces, each with unique cultural consequences. The first analyzes the screen as a frame by comparing and contrasting the critical contributions of Anne Friedberg and Lev Manovich. The second positions the screen as a threshold, and is my own contribution to the study of the screen as a cultural form. Lastly, I begin to outline my central argument that will be explored at length in following chapters.

Screen as Frame New media theorists Lev Manovich and Anne Friedberg have paid the screen a great deal of attention, one reason being is that the proliferation of screen media has ushered in what Manovich refers to as “a society of the screen” (Manovich 94). In their readings, the functionality of the screen is compared to that of a frame. Used as a metaphor to describe screen space, conversations about framing recognize how the size and shape of a particular screen determines the limits to, or defines the edges of, what is projected or digitally

11 It is important to clarify the idea of “interface” here. Steven Johnsonʼs Interface Culture discusses computer or “graphic user interfaces” (GUI) as primarily the operating system that visually organizes onscreen information. Hardware, like the mouse, is implicated in the way users move through the computer interface (software). Here, I use interface as a verb to describe what the screen does, while Johnson uses it as a noun to describe the cultural significance of the operating system in late 20th century American culture. 23 displayed. The metaphor of the frame illustrates how the cultural import of the screen is always already determined by onscreen content in relation to offscreen reality. Manovich begins his genealogy of the screen with the “classical screen” of Renaissance perspectival painting, defined as a frame “separating two absolutely different spaces that somehow coexist” (95). These “screens” are flat, rectangular surfaces (of a canvas) that divide “normal space” (the space of the body) and “the space of representation” (95). The rectangular shape of contemporary screens derives from the Renaissance landscape paintingsʼ horizontal format. The second screen Manovich offers is the “dynamic screen, the screen of cinema, television, and video (96); “the viewer is expected to concentrate completely on what she sees in this window, focusing her attention on the representation and disregarding the physical space outside” (96). The screen functions as a filter, blocking out what is not within the frame of the screen. The computer ushers in a third kind of screen for Manovich, the “screen of real time” which transmits data instantaneously. Another difference between the “dynamic screen” and the “screen of real time” is that, within the delineated boundaries of the computer screen, no one image or “window” dominates the field of vision. The graphic user interface (GUI) allows for users to navigate blocks of data simultaneously and in virtual reality (VR), the screen itself disappears, “its splitting into many windows in window interface, its complete takeover of the visual field in VR…allows us today to recognize it [the screen] as a cultural category and begin to trace its history” (98). The formation that primarily interests Manovich is the “screen of real time.” In order to articulate the characteristics that make the computer screen unique in his lineage, he describes the well-known history of the computer interface initially pioneered through radar technologies. Developed during World War II, radar uses radio waves to indicate position, direction of movement, and velocity in real time (Gere 144 – 6). The invention of radar technology is attributed to Robert Watson-Watt who, in 1923, was designing the oscilloscope, a device with rotating antennae that warned pilots

24 about incremental weather patterns. In 1941, a circular radar screen or “Plan Position Indicator” (PPI) was used to detect aircraft. The first applied use of the oscilloscope linked to a computer was Will Higinbothamʼs computer game “Tennis for Two” launched in October 1958. SAGE (Strategic Air Ground Environment) and Whirlwind, a nuclear defense network, continued to develop almost all of the technology computers and other multimedia devices used today including the video display (Gere 148 – 151). The computer no longer crunched numbers; it displayed real time information via a human-computer interface envisioned by Douglas Engelbart (Johnson 13 - 16). While Manovich differentiates between three categories of screens and the differences between the ways they frame information, Friedberg tries to link several kinds of screens together using the concept of the frame. Manovich and Friedberg both want to come to terms with the screens of film, television, and computers by implicating the invention of Renaissance perspectival painting for historical legitimacy. The screen-frame of Renaissance painting situates a privileged viewer in front of a seemingly real yet represented space of the canvas. This spatial arrangement between the spectator/viewer/user and onscreen image remains consistent through Manovichʼs notion of the “dynamic screen,” where the only difference seems to be that the onscreen images are now moving. For Friedberg, the frame situates the immobile spectator in front of a framed surface of representational space. Friedberg constructs another type of history of the screen that situates the social significance of “framing” within the general tradition of Western art and architecture in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. She analyzes how expectations about “surface” and “frame” affect modern conceptions of space and time (Friedberg 1), outlining the evolution of the “window” as a conceptual tool used by 15th century Renaissance architect and philosopher Leon Battista Alberti in his discussion of the “open window” and leading towards the multiple “windows” of a computer screen. In De pictura, Alberti writes how the frame of the painting is an open window. The metaphor of the window, however, did not

25 necessarily refer to an actual view (Friedberg 30 - 32). Friedberg explains, “Albertiʼs window emphasized the rectangular frame of viewing, a frame for the spatial realism of perspective” (Friedberg 30). Albertiʼs use of the window frame to describe the optical illusion of perspective is an example of the concept of “framing” as applied to the visual arts and media studies.12 Friedberg uses her cultural reading of the screen as a type of frame in order to understand the experience of spectatorship via the screen whether be it a movie, television, computer, or any other kind of media: As beholders of multiscreen “windows,” we now receive images--- still and moving, large and small, artistic and commercial---in spatially and temporally fractured frames. This new space of mediated vision is post-Cartesian, postperspectival, postcinematic,

12 In Nick Couldryʼs The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses at the Media Age, the frame is a metaphor for how media shape, or rather structure, social reality (level of ontology), not only the way people understand a particular narrative within an already given social reality (level of epistemology). Couldry offers the notion of what he terms the “media frame” so that he may articulate the relation between media power, defined as “the concentration of symbolic power that the media represent” (3), and ordinary people. Explaining how media effect the formation of social reality: “Any theorisation of the mediaʼs social impacts must start from their privileged role in framing our experiences of the social, and thereby defining what the ʻrealityʼ of our society is” (14, authorʼs emphasis). Media forms construct reality because they frame, or define the edges of, human perception. Media processes contain both presences and absences (25 – 6). Secondly, the frame is the primary means through which audiences enter into media. Couldry, however, extends his use of framing well beyond that of a newspaper article; his argument that media “focus our access to the ʻsocialʼ” (16) pushes the metaphor of the frame to its limits. Life, generally, is constantly being channeled by media (be it classical myths or television) to produce and structure society, ideology, and other asymmetrical formations of power. The Place of Media Power is an example of a theoretical approach that tries to speak to the role media play in our lives beyond onscreen representations. However, Couldryʼs use of the idea of framing to explain the symbolic power or “magic” of places associated with media production and consumption illustrates how the use of the “frame” itself as a concept reifies another socially produced binary besides the separation between the magic world of onscreen representations and ordinary life – the division between symbolic systems as circulating discourses and/or texts and the people, audiences, viewers, spectators, agents (bodies) that use them. Like the distance Couldry identifies between the “ordinary world” and the “media world,” there always seems to be an implied separation between the circulation of sign systems or texts and the material reality within which those texts circulate. This is why the political export that Couldry discusses stays inline with other cultural studies scholars; he wants people to interrupt and de-naturalize the media frame, or the socially-produced binary between the ordinary places and magical space of media production, to produce alternative forms of engagement. 26 and posttelevisual, and yet remains within the delimited bounds of a frame and seen on a screen. (Friedberg 6-7) The screen marks a boundary, delimits, or frames media space (the “new space of mediated vision”) from the space of the real. Similar to the metaphor of the window used to describe the experience of pictorial space, the cinema screen frames the moving image onscreen by limiting what can be seen by the spectator. Countering the charge of technological determinism often associated with theories about the apparatus, Friedberg argues that the relationship between spectator and screen forms through the “representational convention of the single image in a single frame” (195). The frame situates the immobile spectator in front of a succession of single-framed images: “it is not narrative and not the optics of projection that recenter the spectator, but the frame itself” (Friedberg 83 - 84). The tension between immobility of spectatorship and the mobility of representational space, habituated by the framing function of the screen, prioritizes the “monocular ʻpointʼ of view” of the disembodied (immobile) viewer (Friedberg 29, 86 - 87). The game changer for both Manovich and Friedberg is the invention of the graphic user interface (GUI). The GUI shapes the interaction of a user with his computer; it is how the computer represents itself to the user (Johnson 14). GUIs are semantic spaces primarily organized by the metaphors of the “desktop” and “the window.” Where the desktop signifies organization through spatial depth, a window refers to switching modes with its frame that divides one mode from another. (Johnson 81, 91) The GUI is unique because it breaks down the seemingly sacred barrier between offscreen spectator and onscreen spectacle by presenting the possibility of real-time information in virtual space. The screen acts as the tangible space through which cyberspace materializes. For Friedberg, the new possibilities offered by a graphic user interface still are experienced within the delimited borders of the frame of the window, even if “window” in the context of the GUI is a misnomer. Articulating the screen as a frame is a way to come to terms with the matriculation of the “interface” in digital culture because it

27 maintains a definitive boundary between on and offscreen. Manovich and Friedberg outline the screenʼs role in perpetuating the optical regime of modernity up through the invention and dissemination of the computer. Although I would completely agree that one of the primary functions of the screen is to frame onscreen content, it does not necessarily follow that the screen is only a frame. Since the screen and the frame have been so inextricably linked together, I offer the following list of cultural and social consequences of positioning the screen exclusively as a frame. 1. Onscreen content defines the limits and possibilities of the screen as a cultural form, bypassing both the technological history and physical geography of the screen. For example, Manovichʼs differentiation between the dynamic and real time screens depend on the invention of the graphic user interface, not historical changes in the history of screen technology. Arguments focused on analyzing the screen as a frame make claims about onscreen content like the graphic user interface, but use the object-ness of the screen in order to ground the analysis in a material reality. The notion of the screen as a frame continues as the dominant reading because it is connected to the logic of representation where what is onscreen stands in for the screen itself. Representations frame the power play between agent, institution, or zeitgeist and the production, reception, and regulation of symbolic goods. Displacing the screen with a discussion of onscreen content generalizes and potentially neutralizes the political and social significance of the screen as a cultural form because it never really needs to take into account its singular histories and geographies. 2. Alternative histories and geographies of media and technology are displaced in favor of more conventional Western narratives like the kind Manovich and Friedberg employ. They both begin with the Renaissance, the “birthplace” of Western modernism, shift to the introduction of (Western) cinema into popular culture, and almost skip over television completely to get to the apex of technology today, the ultimate media machine – the personal computer. In

28 order to clearly grasp the difference between the computer screen and all that came before, some tenuous arguments have been made. Manovichʼs distinction between the “dynamic screen” and the “screen of real time” depends on the assumption that information up to that point hadnʼt been transmitted in real time, especially strange since radar was an extension of live radio and television broadcasting. The difference between a television set and computer monitor isnʼt that fact that one is more “live” than the other, but in the way magnetic field generates vectors that allow users the ability to visually manipulate onscreen computer graphics. Manovichʼs history isnʼt really focused on the screen, but the graphic user interface. Tracing the history of the GUI is an important task to be sure, yet one that needs to be understood as a software application and social practice that screen technologies like the vector monitor enable but donʼt determine.13 3. The materiality of the screen becomes secondary to onscreen content. A canvas, no matter what is on it, is not a screen. A painting does not turn “on” and “off” like a projection screen, cathodes, or liquid crystal display; these screens are designed to present the mechanical reproduction of light.14 Also, unlike a painterʼs canvas, movement is implicated in the mutability of the screen as a cultural form. Electrodes fire at different rates, light bounces of the silver-coated surface of a projection screen. Additionally, the invention of perspective has less to do with the screen as a technology. Rather than being an intrinsic quality of the screen, perspective (and, of course, narrative) helped make legible the presentation of movement as “movies” or “films” for early cinemagoers. 4. Manovich and Friedberg downplay the connections between different media, deemphasizing the geography of media in favor of medium specificity. This oversight reverberates throughout the history and geography of the screen.

13 Really, itʼs the mouse thatʼs pivotal to the shift between DOS and a GUI like Windows. For a discussion of the invention of the mouse, see Johnson (1999). 14 This is why the “silver screen” is silver, silver and grey tones allow for better image contrast in a darkened movie theater. 29 For example, one of the interesting points about the timeline of screen technology is the degree to which the television and personal computing intertwine. Both computer monitors and television sets both use versions of cathode screen technology, with the personal computers in the 1980s and early 1990s plugging into the television. The big shift in the technological history of the screen occurs with the development of laptop computing technologies (as opposed to general “computer” technologies). The liquid crystal display developed for the laptop enables a degree of portability that cathodes donʼt really have. In the 1980s, Sony tried to develop a relatively flat cathode ray tube for its “Watchman” that apparently ate batteries and was comparatively expensive to the LCDs of mobile phones, mp3 players, PDAs, or Nintendo GameBoys and Sony PlayStation Portables popular today. Geographically, the screen both occupies a space and is a space. Where screen technologies are situated and their relation to other screen technologies affects how people interact with onscreen content as a collective. This geographical relationship between screens and bodies is what constitutes the screenscape. 5. A final consequence of decoupling the screen from the frame is that it reveals a basic assumption about the relation between screens and the bodies that watch them. The assumption is that, as a frame, the screen intrinsically produces distance, separating spectators and the spaces of onscreen representations. Paul Virilioʼs cathode window allows one to “view the horizon of globalization,” a process in which the spectator herself is implicated, at a distance (16).15 When the screen is defined exclusively as a frame, what is on

15 For Virilio, the screen transforms our relationship to time and space. He presents a general understanding of the screen as a “cathode window” that translates the three dimensions of space into two dimensions. This translation produces a “zero degree of architecture” (2:73) where cinematic images are confused with architectonic forms, causing architectures to dissolve into a “wall-screen” (Friedberg 187). Virilio resists making technological distinctions between screens because he sees all screens gravitating to the computer screen, “the ultimate window, but a window which would not so much allow you to receive data as to view the horizon of globalization, the space of its accelerated virtualization” (Virilio 17). The screen is the site where the logic of speed unfolds. 30 the screen is always already limited, inscribing an ever-present push and pull between the “here” of the body and the “there” of onscreen information. The production of distance and framing of onscreen information via the screen splits the phenomenal experience of screen media into a dialectic where the material world of reality faces off against the virtual world of (cinematic, televisual, digital) fantasy. At stake is the positioning of screen space as a practical geometry where the screen marks the boundary between representation and the real. Yet the screen carries representational significance and is concurrently a material site of media convergence. Given the variety of screen interfaces in media landscapes and their multiple functionalities, the screen is more than the boundary between the space of onscreen representation and offscreen realities. As a frame, the screen represents a spatial relation between audiences and onscreen content. The screen marks a boundary between viewer and viewed, inscribing a distance between the “here” of the body and the “there” of representation. No matter if they are gazing or glancing, spectators or users, or whether or not your screen is a projection screen, cathode, liquid crystal display, big, small, round, square, thick, or thin – subjects are situated in space and at a distance looking in at the virtual spaces of cinema, television, or the information superhighway through the framed surface of the screen. From this position, the screen as a frame renders a subjectʼs body immobile. Within the viewing regime of “classical Hollywood” (the focus of theory about the cinematic apparatus), once a spectator assumes his or her position in the auditorium, they should theoretically sit relatively still and quiet for the entirety of the film. Similarly, a personal computer “user” is usually fairly stationary in front of a monitor or LCD. While he might be typing or mousing around, movement is still limited. A similar assumption could even be made about mobile phones, where people often stop watching in order to read a text message, walk more slowly while talking on the phone, or forget to move forward at a green light while searching online while

31 driving. The subject seems physically passive in front of media content, even when they are scrolling through online content or using a portable LCD device. Screens fix people spatially in order for them to appreciate the experience of an image moving through time. While the body in space is static, the image in time is dynamic. This reading follows from Friedbergʼs extended analysis of the “virtual window” where the frame of the screen positions an immobile spectator in front of the virtual mobility of the moving image. This experience of the screen is a disembodied one. Screens transports the mind of the spectator, not his or her body (thatʼs what gets left behind in the theater or behind a desk), to the far away places of onscreen fantasy be it Star Wars or the vastness of cyberspace whose limits cannot ever be completely known. The paradigm of the “screen as frame” needs to be resituated in order to appreciate the embodied, affective relations people have with their screen technologies. In The Language of New Media, Manovich explains that the screen is now being revealed as a cultural form precisely at the moment when it is being outdated, as the introduction of virtual reality is essentially functions outside of the framed limits of the screen. But today, screens seem to be everywhere, from shopping malls to the multi-screened environments of ubiquitous computing that “appeals to us as a kind of interactive television that monitors and rearranges our physical world” (Bolter and Grusin 175, 213). Instead, this list of cultural and social consequences reveals the conceptual limitations of articulating the screen as a frame. The critical contribution Manovich and Friedberg make is to expose the history of the screen as a frame, even if they failed to question the foundation of that formation. In Introna and Illarcoʼs phenomenological reading of the screen, they argue that its essential being is in its capacity to frame information. What the spectator sees is the limited, bordered, and bounded by the framed chasm of screen. Yet, screens do more than frame onscreen content. For one, they form the building blocks of virtual environments, entertainment spaces, and, increasingly, urban landscapes. As Baudrillard suggests, a reinterpretation of the screen necessitates a reevaluation of the cultural conditions of spectatorship,

32 aesthetics and politics. My reading of the screen as threshold prepares to take on this task.

Screen as Threshold Margaret Morse begins her essay “Body and Screen” (1999) by evoking the notion of the threshold: “The screen of the cinema, video, and the computer is a threshold that divides the ordinary and the everyday from other realms that seem truer or larger than life” (63). Friedberg also makes mention of the concept of threshold in relation to screen studies: The frame becomes the threshold---the liminal site---of tensions between the immobility of a spectator/viewer/user and the mobility of images seen through the mediated “windows” of film, television, and computer screens. But the frame also separates the materiality of spectatorial space from the virtual immateriality of spaces within its boundaries. (Friedberg 6, her emphasis) The frame of the screen is the place where the mobility and immateriality of the image meets the immobility and materiality of the spectator. Here, the threshold is a material “site” or space of transformation. The space or “frame” of the screen fixes the spatial relation between spectator and on-screen spectacle. While Friedberg uses the notion of the “threshold” as a spatial metaphor that describes the function of the screen as a frame, the concept simultaneously describes the temporality of objects, spaces, or substances. Unlike Morse and Friedberg, I try to take into account the spatio-temporal dynamics of nonlinear change in my reading of the screen as a threshold. A threshold simultaneously signifies both a beginning and an end. My use of “threshold” encompasses two usages of the term as both “critical point” (DeLanda 9) and horizon of possibility. As such, the screen feeds into and evolves the affective and perceptive qualities of an event. The event is the medium through which intensive processes and extensive properties emerge; “The beginning is an indeterminate giveness, which by virtue of its indeterminacy

33 cannot be said exactly to have preexisted. But neither can it be expected to end” (Massumi 212). The screen enfolds its technological history and visual field into the emergence of the event; it feeds back into its own evolution and anticipates the virtual potential of modulation. Thinking through the metaphor of the threshold ascribes a kind of order to a non-linear construction of history, where a series of threshold points can connect together as if in a multi-dimensional, ever-evolving “connect-the-dots” game in order to map out the dynamism of institutional, cultural, or technological change. This game is what Manuel DeLanda in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines plays, locating potential threshold points from which the technological- centered history of intelligent machines takes shape. As opposed to the frame, the idea of the threshold appreciates the multi-dimensional and often fragmented relationships between bodies and screens. It requires an appreciation of time as an organizational tool. Instead of the passivity that a metaphor like the frame produces where relatively disembodied spectators sit in front of a moving image, a threshold marks a temporal relation through which bodies collectively experience the dynamism of media space in the context of the screenscape. The term “screenscape” refers specifically to the dynamic mixture of screen technologies, onscreen content, and cultural expectations about the screen unfolding within the context of the event. In “The Poetics of Augmented Space”, Manovich traces the shift in research agendas in the beginning of the 21st century from virtual reality to physical spaces occupied by “electronic and visual information” as in the cases of video surveillance, mobile media, and visual displays (2: 221 – 2). The introduction of these types of technologies overlays “physical space” with “dynamic data” (2: 223) and, in turn, augments it. Ubiquitous computing, intelligent architecture, smart objects, and e-paper are a few of the examples that Manovich cites that fits into this framework (2: 223). Borrowing from the idea of augmented (as opposed to virtual) reality, Manovich argues that augmented space offers the opportunity to think about the spatial relations of digital information and computer data that all too often is

34 conceptualized as immaterial (as the VR paradigm does). While the notion of “augmented space” focuses on the effect the introduction of a variety of new media technologies and digital interfaces has on the social experience of space, I want to use the idea of the screenscape to emphasize how a variety of screens, mass or new and analog or digital, are deployed in a variety of affective capacities. Large scale displays in urban settings, televisions in public places, cell phones for personal use, the body under surveillance – all of these screens work together in an evolving media ecology often neglected in favor of focusing on only one type of media in a particular space, be it film, television, Internet, or mobile communications. The screen as a cultural form is the constitutive component of the screenscape that structures contemporary ecologies. In my dissertation, I argue that the transformation of a space into a screenscape is biopolitical. Emerging from the later work of Michel Foucault where he focuses on the “unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power penetrates subjectsʼ very bodies and forms of life” (Agamben 5), biopolitics is an overarching term bringing together philosophies, theories and analyses attempting to understand how institutions of power affect populations, asking how the constitution of “life” (Agamben 1) reflects in the articulation of that power. Foucault analyzes how a “new nondisciplinary power” develops not individuals but a “multiplicity of men” as “global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on” (Foucault 242 - 243). Positioning the screen as a threshold focuses on the topological unfolding of a space into the screenscape, migrating through the geography of the screen, the varieties of screen media, the multiplicity of onscreen texts, social contexts, 16 affective bodies, and biopolitical populations.

16 In the virtual philosophy of Manuel DeLanda, the move towards topological space is a way to escape the strictures of geometry that focuses on standardization rather than processual transformation. Topology provides the means to maneuver through several scales concurrently, meaning that the screen is significant at the level of the body (cell phone), the level of the population (digital billboard), or globally (Internet). 35 Consider these three commercials for “personal digital assistants” (PDAs) as preliminary examples illustrating how the screen positioned as a threshold transforms the embodied perception of virtual space into a feeling of continuity shared with the whole population. The advertisements for the Apple iPhone, Blackberry Storm and Palm Prē, all mobile devices that use touch screen technology, feature people communicating with and through their phones. The Apple iPhone advertising campaign highlights the productʼs touch screen capabilities. In a commercial released in early 2009, white, male, well-manicured hands scroll through and deploy a series of “apps” or applications.17 The user holds the device in his left hand while his right index finger draws across the touch screen in order to pull through and advertise the variety of applications available through the iPhone. The male voiceover proclaims, “If you want to read an MRI, thereʼs an app for that, and if you just want to read a regular old book, thereʼs an app for that.” The commercial promises that, with just the touch of a finger, the world is quite literally at your hands. Variations of the advertisement illustrate different applications and uses of the iPhone from playing video games to keeping track of calories while trying to lose weight, but always have the same white, male hands interfacing with the iPhoneʼs touch screen. This and similar iPhone commercials sell the ability of the screen to connect to a variety of applications with the touch of a finger. The iPhone offers direct and immediate access to the screen without the need for peripheries like a keyboard or mouse. At the moment the screen is touched, a connection is established between the user and the digital interface. The commercial insinuates the hands that maneuver seamlessly through a variety of applications could be yours, as the perspective offered by the advertisement is an extension of an offscreen body situated directly in front of the television. With “a screen that expands your horizons,” the Blackberry Storm advertising campaign makes similar promises to the Apple iPhone about its new

17 See video of commercial available at . 36 touch screen smartphone. The launch commercial for the Storm begins with the slogan “Press and Be Impressed” and, when the “click screen” is touched, a myriad of individual logos for social networking sites alongside symbols like a guitar, headphones and dancing woman that stand in for leisure activities flow towards the Stormʼs touch screen and expands outward again as a transition.18 The next segment demonstrates the accuracy of the touch screen keyboard, but features “light” rather than actual fingers touching the pad. The device rotates and floats to the right in the frame, and the soccer player who kicked the device moves into the frame of the screen. Similar transitions continue demonstrating the photo, GPS, and social networking capabilities of the device. Another television spot in the same campaign features a woman facing a floating, transparent window.19 When she reaches out to touch it, a young boy flying a kite within the frame of the smartphoneʼs video recording interface unfolds into 3D. Image planes begin to layer behind her, and she touches the screen again. A rock concert unfolds from a recording to “real life” as logos of social networking sites fall into frame with tennis players hitting over a calendar. The third touch reveals business applications, a movie theater and photographs. These layers merge back together to form the casing of the Blackberry Storm with an image of the woman shown through the interface with a male voice-over asking the audience to “touch and connect, to everything you love in life.” Instead of a pair of floating hands demonstrating how the device works, these Blackberry Storm advertisements show how the world can be brought to you at the touch of a screen, and simultaneously, how it comes alive for you through the screen. The layers of image planes demonstrating the multiple uses for the Blackberry Storm inform an aesthetic of screen space. While the Apple iPhone campaign illustrates how that technology fits into your pre-established routine, the Blackberry Storm campaign also asserts that a sense of connection and continuity occurs in that the space between onscreen and off - the space occupied by the screen. The

18 See video of commercial available at . 19 See video of commercial available at . 37 choice of mobile phone determines the quality of that liminal experience of the screen as threshold. The Palm Prē campaign takes a similar approach to the Blackberry Storm.20 A voiceover proclaims, “Itʼs a phone that takes place in real time” leading into Joanna Gikas of IO Echo singing, “Youʼve got me under my skin.” Like the Blackberry commercial, an aesthetic tension develops between a 2D Facebook page featuring feeds about Gikas with images that become “live” recordings of performances. These recordings gain an additional element when the interactive Facebook page transforms into the architectural circuitry of the Prē itself. Unlike the woman in the Storm commercial, Gikas is the object of fascination trapped in the ever-changing virtual space of the screen. A second Palm Prē commercial begins with a woman in a flowing white sundress walking towards a boulder in the middle of expansive field of bright green grass.21 She turns on her Prē that depicts the field. The camera zooms out from the device to reveal what seems like over a thousand martial artists surrounding her. While her voice-over tells how she is connected to her family and friends, both today and in the future, the martial artists adapt their moves to visually narrate the degree to which “life” is always rearranging itself and the beauty when life “simply flows together.” In contrast to both the individuated user of the iPhone to the layered interactions enabled through the Blackberry Storm, this commercial depicts a series of bodies moving together with their actions unified through the womanʼs touch. Rather than digital information responding to the bodyʼs touch, the bodies of the martial artist react to the onscreen diegesis readily available through the Palm Prē. The woman at the center of the composition is an “ordinary” white, slender woman at the center of the collective yet separated by her gender, race, and wardrobe while her voiceover proclaims she is integrated into the fold as “life” itself. To see is to experience life; to see through the screen is to experience

life harmoniously and beautifully.

20 See video of commercial available at . 21 See video of commercial available at . 38 In these three advertising campaigns, the screen as a threshold incites a qualitative transformation at the biopolitical scales of the body and population. My primary goal for this project is to present a coherent critique of the biopolitics of the screenscape through which bodily affective capacities collectively resonate at the scale of the biopolitical population using a broad range of examples ranging from these mobile phone commercials to the international sporting event of the US Open. I attempt to outline the biopolitical implications embedded in the interactions between bodies and screens and to recognize the critical possibilities of positioning the cultural form of the screen as a threshold.

39 CHAPTER 2

BODIES IN POPULATIONS

In the “Right of Death and Power over Life” from The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Michel Foucault outlines the two basic forms of “power over life” which would serve as a major preoccupation for the rest of his career. The first focused on the body: …as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces...an anatamo-politics of the human body. The second...focused on the species...the body imbued with the mechanics of life...effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. (2: 139, emphasis in original) The body as a “machine” performed the functions necessary to preserve, maintain, and continue the species. As Londa Schiebinger suggests, the species likewise involved a “mechanics” centered on the classification of humanity based on race and sexual difference otherwise known as the objective principles of the natural sciences. These mechanics formed in the eighteenth century during the early stages of capitalism and created the means through which politics became about managing “life” at simultaneously the scales of the body and the population (Foucault 2: 141). Biopolitics extends the power of the State from control over bodies within a population to control over bodies as a population. Sex was the political issue that tied these two forms - the body and the population - together as a “political technology of life” (2: 145). While the disciplining of sex at the scale of the body occurred through sexual repression and discourses of normalcy, sex is also the only means through which humans as a species can survive; sex “fitted in both categories at once, giving rise to infinitesimal surveillances, permanent controls, extremely meticulous orderings of space,...to an entire micro-power concerned with the body” (2: 145 - 6). This chapter begins

40 by tracing how the concepts of the body and population have changed since Foucault introduced the notion of biopower. Responding to these changes, I focus my attention on the question of affect and how it relates the study of the population in the context of critical media studies. My conclusion outlines why the study of affect and the population is significant to understanding the screen as a cultural form.

To Affect and Be Affected Since Foucault positioned the body and the population as the basic forms defining the scope of biopower, philosophical interventions of feminist and queer theories in the United States also recognizes the body as a problematic.22 Judith Butler imagines the body as dynamic matter living out or performing the trauma of heteronormativity, even as this relation of power that produces the body comes from a cultural form outside of it (Clough 7 - 8). In an attempt to reconcile the binary between matter and form, Elizabeth Grosz displaces the centrality of the mind in the formulation of modern subjectivity. The bodies of women seem particularly vulnerable to the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, since the mind is associated with interiority, while the body is “formless, passive, shapeless matter” and the mortal container for the immortal soul (Grosz 5 - 6). Grosz points to 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza who rejects Cartesian dualisms and the body as a self-contained substance in favor of an idea of an infinite substance (God) composed of affections of the infinite substance; “an individual entity (human or otherwise) is not self-subsistent but is a passing or provisional determination of the self-subsistent” (Grosz 10). A finite thing is actually a process, rather than a self-contained substance, contributing to the whole (God). As a process, it has infinite potential to change. However, that potentiality is always already incomplete in that it is only ever a part of the whole. Because it is a productive and creative process, the body does not have a true

22 See Thacker, 2003 for a compelling reading of the body in/as code. He negotiates the seemingly disembodiment of the virtual with the materiality of the body. 41 nature and varies depending on its context. Limits and capacities emerge through the interactions between the body and its environment. However, Grosz evaluates the body rather than focusing on its capacity to affect and be affected (Dale 1). In other words, Grosz downplays the significance of “affect” in developing her model of corporeality. Affect is a contested concept often used synonymously with either feeling or emotion, but it is neither.23 A feeling is a sensation classified in relation to previous personal experiences, while an emotion is a projection of a feeling. Emotions broadcast our internal state to the world or they are “contrived in order to fulfill social expectations” (Shouse par. 4). Affect is the experience of an intensity before it is codified as a feeling or broadcast externally as an emotion. The William James-Carl Lange theory of affect claims “bodily responses give rise to affective states” (Brennan 4). A simplified example of the James-Lange theory would be stating a proposition like, “laughing makes us happy” rather than happiness causes laughter. Staying in line with Cartesianism, this approach makes affects passive in response to the active biological body; they are the unintended byproducts of being in a body. Affect, however, has also been a concept that enables critical theory to move beyond the dualism of mind and body and provides the means from which to consider the relationship between bodies, technologies, and environments. As a starting point, I want to go to Brian Massumi who in Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation defines affect as follows:

23 Related to the following discussion of “affect” is Raymond Williamʼs “structure of feeling” from Marxism and Literature. Williams writes, "If the social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we have indeed to find new terms for the undeniable experience of the present: not only the temporal present, the realization of this and this instant, but the specificity of the present being, the inalienably physical, within which we may discern and acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not always as fixed products, defining products" (128). Meanings, values, and ideologies are experienced; "It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations...We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity" (132). The “affective elements” to which Williams refers are emotions as “structures of feeling” as opposed to affective bodily capacities. 42 Affect is the virtual as point of view, provided the visual metaphor is used guardedly. For affect is synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other: the measure of a living thingʼs potential interactions is its ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into those of another...Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them. The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. (3: 35) The virtual is a combination of habits, tendencies, incipiencies – a field of potential where “opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt” (Massumi 3: 30). Here, the virtual should be thought about in relation to the actual as opposed to the real. For example (Lister 124 - 125), transubstantiation in the Catholic tradition is when the bread and wine change to the body and blood of Christ. This change is real, but virtual in that the Eucharist, as an event, anticipates the formation of bread and wine into body and blood. Even though the food continues to taste like wine and bread, virtually the objects become something else. The virtual is expectation and anticipation that shapes the actual yet is not beholden to what already exists in actuality, which is why it is autonomous. Virtuality implies openness, and affect is the embodiment of virtuality as a perspective. Affect is also about transformation from one state or phase to another. This transformation can be one of rupture or one of continuity; affect changes bodies from the inside out, yet it paradoxically is a social phenomena in that it depends on the participation and interaction between living and non-living things. Rather than describing how objects are, the study of affect focuses on how bodies change in relation to other things, bodies, and affects. Social-psychological. Investigations of affect occur in three related yet clearly distinct trajectories. The first speaks specifically to the work of American psychologist Silvan Tomkins from the mid-20th century who developed a

43 descriptive and prescriptive theory of affect. In an attempt to understand human motivation, “Tomkins argues that affects function as analogue amplifiers [intensities] that create within the organism experiences of urgency” (Demos 19). After Tomkins asserts natural selection has heightened specific affects related to preservation, people, and novelty, he identifies the adaptational advantages of nine primary affects grouped together as either positive, neutral, and negative (Demos 21).24 Although they correlate with any number of physical responses like facial expressions, breathing, blood pressure, or vocalizations, these varied responses are not affects; affects offer a qualitative experience that cannot be reduced to a set of anatomical reactions. Rather, they are the biological and genetic portions of emotions. Unlike the Freudian drive with a specific aim or objective, the connection between affect(s) and object(s) is more abstract and subject to change; “affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects” (Sedgwick 19). This enables a productive freedom or “structural potential” associated with affect - the complexity of human behavior - that the Freudian drive denies given its instrumentality and dependence on binary models of behavior (Sedgwick 19, 101). Eve Sedgwick, American theorist of gender and queer studies, uses Tomkinsʼs psychological description of affect, an alternative to the tradition of Freudian psychoanalysis already rooted in feminism, as starting point from which to consider the quality of the connections between the body, environment, and technology. Tomkinsʼs affect theory fits historically into a period Sedgwick identifies as the “cybernetic fold” between the 1940s and 1960s where scientistsʼ understanding of the brain and life processes is effected by the possibility, the immanence, of powerful computers while the actual computers were not yet available (Sedgwick 105 - 6). Sedgwickʼs “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold:

24 The nine primary affects include the positive affects of enjoyment/joy and interest/excitement, the neutral affect of surprise/startle, and the negative affects of anger/rage, disgust, dissmell (bad reaction to smell), disress/anguish, fear/terror, and shame/humiliation. 44 Reading Silvan Tomkins” written with Adam Frank begins by passing off the easy critiques of Tomkinsʻs hyper-structuralist theory and scientist-esque writing style in favor of reading his work productively. She isolates his “habit of layering digital (on/off) with analog (graduated and/or multiply differentiated) representational models” (Sedgwick 101). The on/off binary logic of digital code corresponds to the nature of the Freudian drive that is either functioning or not, while the multiple (but not infinite) amplification of affects speaks to the expression of the analog. For Sedgwick, critical theory all too haphazardly separates out the analog (the animal) from the digital (the machine). Tomkins points to “a heterogeneous mixture of digitally structured with analogically structured representational mechanisms” where a “discrete on/off (hence digital) event” is triggered by quantifiable (hence analog) stimuli” quantified again through the dimension of time (Sedgwick 101 - 2). The inefficiency of this layering of cognitive and affective systems “enables learning, development, continuity, differentiation” (Sedgwick 107). Sedgwick also addresses critical theoryʼs fascination with infinity alongside Tomkinʼs willingness to think of the complex and multiple interactions of affects and spaces as finite (Segwick 108). She critiques those attempts at reading affect as a historically constructed phenomenon because they transform affect theory into an allegory of hegemonic versus subversive structurations of power and ironically dismiss possibilities for qualitative differences between affects. Political-philosophical. The second trajectory downplays the psychology of affect in favor of its philosophical and political implications. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattariʼs reading of Spinoza call attention to his conceptualization of affect as the key component of his metaphysics. Part III “On the Origin and Nature of the Affects” of Ethics presents Spinozaʼs philosophy on the nature of emotion, with “emotion” defined as “the modifications of the body, whereby the active power of the said body is increased or diminished, aided or constrained, and also the ideas of such modifications” (def. 3). The power of a “thing” comes from its “endeavor to act” (prop. 3). This endeavor – the anticipation of any number of virtual becomings – is not exclusively the domain of the conscious mind as the

45 ability to act arises within both the body and mind as a unitary organism. Therefore, emotions affect the mind and the body simultaneously by either increasing or diminishing the power of activity in the body (prop. 10). This movement constitutes the bodyʼs capacity to be affected by an object, image, or other emotion (prop. 15 - 20, 27); “he who conceives, that he affects others with pleasure or pain, will, by that very fact, himself be affected with pleasure or pain” (prop. 30). In Spinozaʼs explanation of affect (affectus), he uses the term as a verb as opposed to a noun. Affect is an action, while an emotion is the modification after that action – that intensity or amplification – has occurred. For me, this is the subtle yet significant difference between affect and emotion. An emotion is affective in so far as it changes the capacity to act, to affect or be affected. They are intertwined, but not the same thing. Returning back to Massumiʼs definition, affects can only be understood as changes or modulations from one state to another. In his lecture on Spinozaʼs concept of affect, Deleuze calls affect “any mode of thought which doesnʼt represent anything” in contrast to an idea which is a “mode of thought defined by its representational character” (Deleuze 1). Layered alongside perception, or the succession of ideas that constitutes experience, is a regime of continuous variation driving the power to act or a range of potential that Deleuze defines “puissance” as opposed to “pouvoir” or the power of domination or discipline à la Foucault. Puissance, or the power to act, is central to understanding embodied perception. Early 20th century philosopher Henri Bergson asserts in Matter and Memory, “there is no perception without affection” (Bergson 60). The introduction of affect into the framework of Foucaultʼs definition of biopower makes the body into more than a machine to be disciplined and maximized, but a force folding into and constituting the “machinic assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari 3). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A

Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia use the example of a book to clarify the meaning of term, where “...there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of

46 deterritorialization and destratification” (4). A book, like a body, combines a series of finite processes that continue to produce a multiplicity of effects rather than one “correct” way of reading the text; “One side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities or circulate” (3 - 4). An assemblage creates a sense of a totality in flux. The body has meaning not from any internal or essential truth, but through a collection of bodies and affects connected through each other in a continuous mode of becoming. Affect is a key component in a contemporary conceptualization of the body as a dynamic process, but is not exclusively theorized in terms of the human body. Technologies produce affective bodily capacities beyond the limits of the flesh and enable the body to seemingly become more alive; “The technoscientific experimentation with affect...inserts the technical into felt vitality, the felt aliveness given in the preindividual bodily capacities to act, engage, and connect – to affect and be affected (Clough 2). Deleuze and Guattariʼs discussion of the assemblage in relation to the bodyʼs capacity to affect other bodies and objects or to be affected by them calls attention to the notion that affect is social in character. Teresa Brennan in The Transmission of Affect explains, “the transmission of affect means, that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies. There is no secure distinction between the ʻindividualʼ and the ʻenvironmentʼ” (6). Likewise, the transmission of affect undermines the dichotomy between the biological and social. Just like one cannot posit individuality outside of society, nor can biology exist outside of the social arrangement of organisms in a group. Brennan is interested in how “social interaction shapes biology” (74) through hormonal and chemical entrainment. However, bodily affective capacities as an expression of the social also occur in spaces other than a hormone and pheromone-filled room. Lauren Berlant extends the field of inquiry when she analyzes public spheres as “affect worlds” where affective responses as opposed to rational thought shapes civil

47 society. Berlantʼs essay “Affect, Noise, Silence, Protest: Ambient Citizenship” discusses George W. Bush, John McCain and Barack Obamaʼs push to get past the “filter” of the news media and speak to the people when this filter has been a way to get past the noise and make communication possible. To “skirt the filter” means to bypass the message in favor of the noise, “the funk, the live intensities and desires that make messages affectively immediate, seductive, and binding” (par. 2). This desire is crystallized in Obamaʼs message of “hope” where the noise becomes the message – when form and content seamlessly transition from one to the other in a perfect moment of rhetorical continuity. Cloughʼs “Introduction” to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social locates the turn to affect in critical theory in the context of torture, terrorism, and political transformation; “the affective turn invites...experimentation in capturing the changing cofunctioning of the political, the economic, and the cultural, rendering it affectively as change in the deployment of affective capacity” (3). Political, economic, and social changes from information and communication systems, media technologies, and biopolitical networks of control effect our bodies and subjectivities in ways that cannot be reduced to psychology (3). The study of affect in the context of critical theory and cultural studies moves the focus of the body beyond physiology to think about the connections between (biological and bare) life, (digital and analog) information, and (mass and new media) technologies (14). Technologies like those of the screen, through both its content and its form, trigger affective bodily capacities. Historical-aesthetic. The third trajectory links affect to the study of aesthetics, specifically how art objects produce and transmit affect (Shepard par. 1 - 2). This relationship with affect is firmly rooted in the history of aesthetics from the classical period. Aristotleʼs Poetics describes how the aim of a tragedy should be the production of fear and pity (part 14) preferably through the inner structure of the piece rather than through spectacle. In Rhetoric, Aristotle defines the “Emotions” as the feelings in men that affect judgment (book 2, ch. 1). From Bharata Muniʼs Indian aesthetic theory in the Nātyasāstra, a rasa is a “juice” or

48 “flavor” that denotes the emotional state conveyed by an artwork in the person who views it. Bharata identifies eight different rasas like “love” and “disgust” each associated with a specific color and deity. Immanuel Kantʼs Critique of Judgment lays the foundation of modern aesthetics. He introduces the Sublime as the unbounded expression of greatness, an aesthetic judgment of the whole. Kant positions the Sublime as reflective, while affects form prior to and informs reflection. William James focuses on how affective responses become a way through which the quality of art as a means for expression can be assessed in a way other than analyzing its iconicity or symbolic meaning. From William Jamesʼs Principles of Psychology: [W]e must immediately insist that aesthetic emotion, pure and simple, the pleasure given us by certain lines and masses, and combinations of colors and sounds, is an absolutely sensational experience, an optical or auricular feeling that is primary, and not due to the repercussion backwards of other sensations elsewhere consecutively aroused. (468) The aesthetic quality of a composition, whether it be visual or auditory, produces affective states as emotional responses in the body of the observer or spectator. This premise asserts that affect can be composed and experienced through the object. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari assert that art is a “bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects” (2: 163). While philosophy produces concepts; art produces sensation with its goal being to move past habits of perception and enter into the conditions of creation (Smith sec.5). It is important to remember, however, that the aesthetic-affective potential of the art object has historically been linked in the Western European tradition with the objectification of emotional bodies of women in opposition to the reasonable minds of men. Yet, the discussion of affect in the context of aesthetics provides a means to consider the social character of bodily affective capacities alongside the transmission of affect via objects (art or otherwise), technologies, and nonhuman organisms and systems.

49 Weaving the bodily capacity to affect and be affected into Foucaultʼs anatomo-politics of the body expands the “mechanics of life” into the realm of the virtual. Affective bodily capacities become an aesthetic medium whereby the networked tendrils of biopower can grow and flourish. It also implicates the production, distribution, and consumption of (media) technologies like the screen that produce affective capacities into the biopolitics of everyday life. Yet, part of the politics of “life” cannot ever be completely controlled because of its virtual autonomy. Layered alongside the mechanized subject disciplined by law is the potential for ethics rooted in the social character of affect. The meaning of bodies comes from its many relations (including asymmetric relations of power) rather than some essential humanism.

Biopolitics of the Population If the concept of the body has become a problematic as illustrated by my brief introduction of affective bodily capacities in psychology, philosophy, and aesthetics, the meaning of population has remained relatively stable in critical discourse. Population can refer to a group (number, race, gender, class, etc.) of inhabitants within the delimited boundaries of a territory or space, organisms belonging to the same species, or statistically speaking, the group from which samples are drawn. Both the biological and social sciences use the term, the former looking specifically at the composition of human and nonhuman species while the latter uses “population” demographically or, in the Marxist tradition, to refer to a socio-historical construction of modes of capitalist production. Beginning with the biological sciences, “population thinking” is a term coined by Earnest Mayr to describe a shift in early 20th century evolutionary biology away from essentialism of typology that asserts their are “natural states” or “types” of a species and towards the idea that a range of variation exists in a species resulting from mutations, recombinations, and environmental responses as one generation becomes another (OʼHara par. 2 - 6). From Mayr:

50 The assumptions of population are diametrically opposed to those of the typologist. The populationist stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world. What is true for the human species, that no two individuals are alike, is equally true for all other species of animals and plants... All organisms and organic phenomena are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind of organic entities, form populations of which we can determine the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation. Averages are merely statistical abstractions; only the individuals of which the populations are composed have any reality. The ultimate conclusions of the population thinker and the typologist are precisely the opposite. For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different. (4 - 5) Here, Mayr outlines the primary difference between typology and population thinking. Typologists hope to clarify the inherent boundaries between species by looking for a set of primary characteristics that define one against the other, while populationists study variations within an already ascribed field of difference that is the population. Even the boundaries between species vary depending on the scale of the analysis, as to whether or not the scientist is studying a particular “class” or “phylum” of animal and how it interacts within its given or artificial environment.25 In Manuel DeLandaʼs application of Deleuzeʼs ontology to the physical sciences, he stresses population thinkingʼs emphasis on heterogeneity

25 The distinction between typology and population thinking is extremely useful in understanding the post-structuralist critique of humanism. Humanism attempts to define the essential characteristics of what makes “us” human as a population, while post-structuralism emphasizes variation and difference. Humanism separate the human from its environment or context, while post-structuralism situates the body in a context. This being said, the abstraction of human as a philosophical concept is by no means valueless from a critical theoretical perspective, but it needs to be discussed as such and not as something intrinsic or essential to the preservation of humanity as a species. 51 and difference explicit in Charles Darwinʼs scientific theory of evolution. From A Thousand Plateaus, “Darwinismʼs two fundamental contributions move in a direction of a science of multiplicities: the substitution of populations for types and the substitution of rates or differential relations to degrees” (Deleuze and Guattari 48). The dynamic processes occurring within populations are intensive; “the coupled rates of birth, death, migration and resource availability correspond without resemblance to the differential relations that characterize a multiplicity” and the stability or periodic population trends correspond “to a distribution of singularities” (DeLanda 61). DeLanda, Deleuze, and Mayr, all echoing Charles Darwin, situate the population as a specific type of assemblage that, again, approaches from one side a sense of totality as the singularity of the species and from the other the intensive dynamics of change implicit in the notion of biological variation. Thomas Malthusʼs warnings about the dangers of population growth in the late 18th and early 19th centuries placed the question of the population front and center in the social sciences, specifically the study of political economy emerging during the Enlightenment. Though Malthus resists the identification of essential characteristics of the human species, he evaluates the population as a natural form essential to the preservation of humanity. From Malthusʼs An Essay on the Principle of the Population: The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second. (13) The general premise of the An Essay Principle of the Population is that a population can grow at a far faster rate than food can be produced. Yet, all societies want to increase population. The consequence of this “power of population” for Malthus include the inability of the lower classes to improve their

52 circumstances because they bear the burden of population growth because more bodies in the labor pool drive down wages while the price of food remains the same. Forces of depopulation like wars, epidemics, plagues, and famine or any general increase in death rate is a positive check on population, while preventative checks include celibacy, marriage postponement, birth control, and abortion. Malthus even suggests that borrowing practices of animal husbandry, specifically the “breeding” of the best, brightest, and beautiful, may contribute to the longevity of the species. These types of solutions are the only way to control and limit poverty in society. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels critique Malthusʼs theory of population growth in Das Kapital by flipping it on its head. Poverty is not created by overpopulation, but by the exploitation of the labor force inherent in the logic of capitalism; “capitalistic accumulation itself... constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of workers, ...a surplus-population” (Marx section 3, par. 2). Marx contends that there are no intrinsic principles of population because each mode of production creates a unique demographic. Studying the population isnʼt only about looking at numbers and ratios, but analyzing social relations. Marx positions the concept of the population as an historical formation built on a particular mode of production. He focuses less on variation and change within the population in favor of developing a deep description of the homogeneity of the two principle classes of capitalism, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and how they function economically and politically. Marxʼs use of the population serves as a conceptual antecedent for the idea of the “mass” as it is deployed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the autonomous individual of Enlightenment subjectivity is lost to the uniformity of popular culture; “the conspicuous unity of macrocosm and microcosm confronts human beings with a model of their culture: the false identity of universal and particular” (95). A “unity of style” or “stylized barbarism” (101) occurs in conspicuous production and

53 consumption habits of the population as a whole. The culture industry produces popular culture to be consumed by this mass, debasing art by denying the possibility of stylistic variation and aesthetic difference by making everything “ready-to-wear” (107). For Foucault, the concept of the population as he deploys it in the lecture series Security, Territory, Population is continuously articulated and negotiated through the “life” of the body. The unity (though I doubt Foucault would ever refer to it as such) of the macrocosm of the population and microcosm of the body in the context of biopower doesnʼt produce a mass culture. Rather, it produces liberal subjectivities based on the maintenance and growth of the population at the scale of the species within the context of a biopolitics.26 When Foucault outlines the “self” in the context of this post-disciplinary society, he does so by countering it with the notion of subjectivity conceptualized as personhood endowed with sovereign rights of the nation. Foucault argues that the population is the primary means through which biopower is organized, but this idea of a population is used differently than in the context of a disciplinary society structured through the power of the sovereign state where the size of the population indicates the overall power of the sovereign (3: 68). While the notion of the sovereign subject positions the individual in relation to the philosophico- juridical norms of the nation-state, a biopolitical critique focuses on a group of bodies as populations as opposed to citizens through which social power is constituted and organized. Foucault explains: [T]he population no longer appears as a collection of subjects of right, as a collection of subject wills who must obey the sovereignʼs will through the intermediary of regulations, laws, edicts, and so on. It will be considered as a set of processes to be managed at the level and on the basis of what is natural in these processes. [...] [T]he population is not the simple sum of individuals inhabiting a

26 See the “Course Summary” of Foucaultʼs The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978 – 1979. 54 territory...it is dependent on a series of variables. Population varies with the climate. It varies with the material surroundings. It varies with the intensity of commerce and activity in the circulation of wealth...It also varies with peopleʼs customs,...ethical-religious value,...[and] the means of subsistence. (3: 70 - 71) Where the former deploys disciplinary technologies to regulate what the State considers deviant behavior within a population, the latter takes up the population as a node of constant variation. The primary quality of the biopolitical population is that it, like affect, is marked through its capacity to change; “the population appears therefore as a kind of thick natural phenomenon in relation to the sovereignʼs legalistic voluntarism” (3: 71). Bodies do not submit to disciplinary power, but regulate or care for themselves as they enact and define the social relations that control them through habit. Foucault traces the genealogy of the Christian pastorate in order to illustrate the role of the population in relation to the government. The power of the pastor or “shepherd” over his “flock” is not exercised over a territory, but over a flock and its movement from place to place (3: 125). The shepherd watches over his people, but not to discipline them as does the eye of surveillance. Instead, the shepherd watches to help improve the well-being of the collective. In order to help the flock, the pastor must attend individually to the needs of everyone; “pastoral power is an individualizing power. [...] He does everything for the totality of his flock, but he does everything also for each sheep of the flock” (3: 128). Pastoral power is a power exercised on a multiplicity in an attempt to manage the habits of his population of sheep (3: 129). The concept of governmentality describes the management of these habits in practice based on “the naturalness of their desire, and of the spontaneous production of the collective interest by desire” (2: 73). The government doesnʼt discipline, it enables the fulfillment of the desires of the population as a collective body. The biopolitical population extends from the biology of the species through to the constitution of the “public” (3: 75).

55 This spectrum constitutes a differential field or topological space within which a body acts. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri deploy the Foucauldian definition of biopower alongside Deleuzeʼs “Society of Control” in their genealogy of Empire in Empire. In the movement from a society of discipline to one of control (recognizing that Foucault asserts more than once that this transition is not teleological as in Marxʼs historiography since the mechanics of disciplinary power do not disappear), the social body is subsumed by an affective, qualitative, and open power that is developed virtually: Society, subsumed within a power that reaches down to the ganglia of the social structure and its processes of development, reacts like a single body. Power is thus expressed as a control that extends throughout the depths of the consciousnesses and bodies of the population-and at the same time across the entirety of social relations. (24) The macrocosm of the population transforms into a singular, biological entity presumably with the capacity to affect and be affected. The singularity within the population becomes the whole of social life as expressed through the unfolding of the event.

Collective Affect Modulations To conclude this literature review that outlines the two key concepts I utilize in my dissertation, affect and the population, I go to Brian Massumiʼs argument about affective modulation and the event in contemporary American politics in “Fear (The Spectrum Said)”. Here, Massumi brings together the biopolitics of the population with the affective bodily capacities through the network of screens hailing the affective bodies of the audience as a biopolitical population in formation. He positions television as an event medium that provides a “perceptual focal point for the spontaneous mass coordination of affect” (33). With eyes glued to the TV screen after 9/11, television served as a medium for

56 collective affect modulation (46), or put another way, the screen functioned as a virtual space that triggered changes in affective capacities at the scale of the population. Massumiʼs essay serves as a conceptual starting point from which I consider the biopolitical function of the screenscape in the unfolding of three events – a television series, a rock concert, and a sporting attraction. The terror alert system implemented in the United States by the Bush administrationʼs Department of Homeland Security in March 2002 presented a “spectrum of perception” that presented insecurity, or fear, as the “new normal” (31). While taking into account the variety of ways bodies reacted to it, the terror alert system formed a site of “collective affect modulation” (33) where it initiated a transformation from one affective state to another, remembering that affect refers to “a prepersonal intensity” (Massumi, 2: xvi) as opposed to a feeling that is individuated sensation already experienced or emotion that is the social projection of that feeling. As such, affect can be transmitted between bodies; “the power of many forms of media lays not so much in their ideological effects, but in their ability to create affective resonances independent of content or meaning” (Shouse par. 14). The “event” is the medium within where the collective modulation of affect occurs on television or online, or put more generally, through the screen. The power of the terror alert system stems from its potential to initiate unstructured change, but also in its capacity to regulate perception. The terror alert system associates the quasicause (anticipated but not yet actual) of terror with the effect of terror, initiating the virtual effects of fear at the level of the population. The automation of bodily fear translates into the politics of preemption; “the alert system is a tool for modulating collective individuation. Through the mass media, it addresses itself to the population from the angle of its potential to reindividuate differentially” (Massumi 46). The terror alert system as it emerged through the multimediated image event that was September 11, 2001 was directed towards a kind of collective nervous system that existed outside the reach of any concrete notions of ideological struggle. Politically, this

57 allowed for the Bush administration to effectively (and affectively) bypass content in the construction of the doctrine of preemption. My interest in Massumiʼs argument comes from the connection between collective affect modulation and the screen as a perceptual focal point through which the event-medium unfolds. Although Massumi specifically addresses the television, the cultural form of the screen is the physical space where bodily change (the production of fear in the case of the terror alert system) occurs. And, like bodies themselves, the variety of screen interfaces and their geographies that constitutes the “screenscape” allows for the positioning of content in relation to other content; diversity creates resonances between subjects and screens. In contrast to 9/11, however, the three different events this dissertation investigates is not crafted as a national trauma. Instead of rupture, they offer spaces where bodies gather in a moment of historical continuity. Folding into the prepersonal intensity of the body on the scale of the population, the narratives forming about continuity and connection become something else. Rather than fear, what results through the interactions between bodies and screens is the production of continuity, the sense of connection, as an affective intensity that propels the virtual becoming of the event itself. While change (or more to the point, modern progress) always seems to be conjoined with a personal, political, national, or international trauma like 9/11, the expression of continuity is likewise a site for social, cultural, political, and biopolitical affective modulation of the virtual. Change emerges not only from rupture, but from the anticipation and preservation of continuity. The experience of connection as affective resonance conjoins with the production of fear through a perceptual scale like the terror alert system. The strategy of preemption is a key example, where the attempt to preserve and maintain the continuity of the present underpins the logic which legitimates the politics of post-9/11. This is what makes the terror alert system effective as much as it is a joke; it concurrently modulates fear and transforms the “collective” into a prepersonal intensity. At the point that it reindividuates differentially the expression of

58 connection, the terror alert system is exposed as artifice because it positions the collective as mass. Instead, the examples I focus on in the next three chapters offer the individuated experience of collective connection as a form of self- expression, a prepersonal intensity, in a network society.

59 CHAPTER 3

BLANK SLATES AND SCREENSCAPES

This chapter explores the screen and the screenscape in and as narrative in Joss Whedonʼs science fiction television series Dollhouse. The central premise of Dollhouse is that the invention and application of Encephalic Communication Encoding (ECE), a biotechnological interface between the brain and computer, enable a personʼs entire persona (memories, emotions, desires, physical affectations) to be wiped clean so his or her body can be imprinted with another designed and composited persona of a paying clientʼs choosing. The Dollhouse is, at least on the surface, a high-profile prostitution ring that sells the opportunity to fulfill deep and dark desires to the extremely rich and/or powerful. The hidden agenda of the owners of the Dollhouse, the Rossum Corporation, is revealed throughout the course of the two seasons and in the season and series finales, “Epitaph One” (1.13) and “Epitaph Two” (2.13), set in a dystopic future where anybody who comes in contact with “tech” can be remotely wiped and turned into tools for the preservation of Rossum. Dollhouse serves as the perfect metaphor for understanding the screen (and body) as a threshold, simultaneously a field of potential and site of transition. While the architecture of the Dollhouse integrates a variety of screen technologies into daily lives of the characters, its screenscape also includes the bodies of the actives themselves. Although the dolls have been wiped of their individuated memories and emotional responses and are treated like “blank slates” or empty bodies by representatives of the Rossum Corporation that own all of the Dollhouses and associated technologies, they still have the capacity to affect and be affected. Instead of blank slates, the dolls are more like “screens” in that they are liminal spaces open to the possibility of intensive change. They are thresholds and, as such, they are sites of collective affect modulation. The

60 discovery of this capacity is one of the major narrative arcs in the series. Eventually, the protagonist Echo (Eliza Dushku) learns how to access the approximately eighty personas that have been imprinted in her mind and supposedly wiped after each engagement. She simultaneously represents a body and a population, a screen and a screenscape. As a cultural text, Dollhouse narrates the connection between the body, population, and affect to the constitution of the screenscape. The basic forms of biopower inform two levels of analysis; the body and the population with “sex” being the political issue that tied them together (Foucault 139 – 146). Like sex, the social character of affect also connects these two forms. As a prepersonal intensity, affect forms at the scale of the body as it resonates through the biopolitical population. In this relationship between the basic forms of biopower, it would be easy to consider affects as things that “mediate” between the body in relation the population, to visualize a gap or space between the body and the population that affect, and additionally cultural production and consumption, fills. Assuming a Marxist logic, culture and its capacity to structure feeling (Williams 132) is the ideological mediator between the individuated self and the hegemonic powers that be. While the process of mediation implies that affects serve as links or intermediaries in the process of cultural production and consumption, it would be a mistake to think of affective bodily capacities functioning in this way. The body is always already implicated in the biopolitics of the population, and the population is always already implicated in biopolitics of the body. Biopower doesnʼt work through mediation. The process of mediation assumes the construction of two separate entities linked through an intermediary, but the politics of life doesnʼt need intermediaries to function because it occupies the entirety of the field of play. As opposed to mediation, modulation offers a way to think about change without assuming the construction of two separate entities; modulating from one musical key to another doesnʼt divide the composition (the field of play) into two separate forms, but nonetheless illustrates intensive change in the composition.

61 Extending this example, the modulation between keys illustrates an affective change because the shift itself alters the bodily experience of melody at the scale of the collective listeners. Affects donʼt mediate between two forms of biopower; they modulate (affect change) at the microscale of the body and macroscale of the population. Positioning the screen as a threshold implies that the screen, like the musical composition, is a site of and for modulation. Affect embodies the process of shifting, with the different keys as bodies and populations. Also, the screen as a threshold is virtual; it anticipates movement and change in much the same way that the score anticipates music in performance. This is a significant point of departure from often used the metaphor of the “frame” to describe the cultural significance of the screen. As a frame, the screen mediates. As a threshold, it modulates. The screen affects and is affected, it shifts bodies and populations into different keys within the biopolitical field of play. And, like the interplay between the body and the population, the screen is the microscale of the macroscale that is the screenscape. The screenscape is more than a collection of screens dispersed and distributed across an environment, as the population is more than bodies grouped together. Returning to Michel Foucault in Security, Territory, Population; “[T]he population no longer appears as a collection of subjects of right.…It will be considered as a set of processes to be managed at the level and on the basis of what is natural in these processes” (2: 70). The screenscape is a set of processes managed at the level of what is most (technologically, financially, politically, culturally) productive in these processes depending on who or what does the managing. The management of the screenscape as a collective of technologies, images, interfaces, ideas, spaces, and times requires no intermediary nor does it mediate; the screenscape modulates within the evolving and expanding biopolitical field of play.

62 Welcome to the Dollhouse The comparison between the body-population and the screen- screenscape plays out in the fictional world of Dollhouse. The dolls, or actives as they are called while imprinted with a persona and go on an engagement, are thought to be “blank slates” that merely reflect the persona imprinted onto them. Or, more to the point, they act as the frame through which the imprinted persona takes form. But, like the screen when positioned as a threshold, the bodies of the dolls can do more. The can affect and are affected. Ironically, the series depicts a present-day world27 where the ultimate screen technologies – the dolls – do something other than mediate. They modulate at the macroscale of the biopolitical population. As a population, they resonate with and through the screenscape. I begin by discussing the assertion that the body of a doll is a blank slate and compare it to the idea of the screen as a frame. As the narrative develops in the show, this validity of this assertion is put into question by what the dollʼs behavior. The body of the seriesʼ protagonist, Echo, represents a challenge to the idea of the blank slate.

Wiping the Slate Clean At the end of the opening credit sequence, Echo lies down in her “bed” and a matte white door slides over her body. The camera zooms out to reveal five sleeping chambers arranged around a center point to form a star-like pattern. The five covers over their sleeping bodies radiate as the background fades to black. As the setting of the Dollhouse disappears in the darkness, the five luminous rectangles look like glowing screens clustering around the title of the show.

27 A majority of Dollhouse takes place in the present day. Presumably, this technology exists without “our” knowing. The only two episodes that donʼt take place in the present are the unaired season one finale “Epitaph One” (1.13) and the series finale “Epitaph Two” (2.13). These episodes occur almost a decade into the future and present a dystopic vision of America after imprinting technology has gone remote and wiped the entire population in order to create an army that directly (affectively) answers to the will of the Rossum Corporation. 63

Figure 1. “Vows”. Screen capture from opening credit sequence.

This image is the final shot of the opening sequence and forms one of the recurring symbols for the series. These five “screens” represent the dolls literally connected together through the word “Dollhouse.” From the beginning of the series, dolls are envisioned as an extreme version of the proverbial blank slate. What is a screen without content, without image? Is the empty rectangular space merely a tabula rasa or “blank slate” to be written upon by moving words and images? John Lockeʼs assertion that the mind is a blank slate in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding forms a critical touchstone for Enlightenment thought and modern philosophy. In Book II of the Essay, Locke identifies two sources based through perceptual experience from which reason and knowledge derive. The first is sensation and the second, reflection. For sensation, the qualities of “external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions” (ch. 1.3). Ideas develop through the sensory experience of the world outside of the body while reflection, on the other hand, refers to the mindʼs understanding of its own operations. The idea of the blank slate works alongside the basic logic of empiricism, where knowledge derives from sensory experience

64 as opposed to the rationalism of René Descartes, for example, which generally asserts that knowledge stems from the mindʼs innate ability to deductively reason. While these two epistemological positions should not be viewed in stark opposition, they typically form the poles in modern debates over the nature and limits of knowledge and the mind (Markie par. 1 - 2). The biotechnological interface at the center of Dollhouse hinges on the presumption that the mind is, quite literally, a blank slate – or, at the very least, can be made into one by implanting active architecture and wiping someone elseʼs personas. However, in the context of Dollhouse, the blank slate is more akin to an ontological state of being or a type of existence. This use contrasts Lockeʼs discussion of tabula rasa that he uses to describe a theory of knowledge, an epistemology as opposed to an ontology. The series situates the dolls, especially when they are between engagements and living inside the Dollhouse, as blank slates. In this blank slate or tabula rasa state the dolls are vulnerable to, well, life. Theoretically, they are physically, mentally, and affectively cut off from the world around them. Their existence consists of polite generalities, coloring, tai chi, massages, and pre- established scripts like, “I try to be my best.” While in this state, the dolls need to be heavily protected, secured and surveyed, as they are extremely vulnerable and valuable to the world outside. The Rossum Corporation extracts their bodies and beings from the population and uses them as raw materials for capitalist production. This protection continues after the dolls have been imprinted. Each doll has a handler who remotely monitors their physical, bodily responses to the specific engagement to gage the activeʼs safety. A mutual bond or “trust” for a handler is imprinted onto each doll so they instinctually know who to go to when in distress. If a problem happens, the handler can intercede on the dollʼs behalf after receiving permission from Ms. Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams), the head of the LA Dollhouse. For each engagement, the house programmer Topher Brink (Fran Kranz) designs an imprint that fulfills the parameters of the given assignment. These imprints piece together memories, affects, specialized

65 knowledge, language, and can even trigger glandular responses as illustrated when Echo is imprinted with the persona of a mother who can breastfeed (2.02). They are stored on portable hard drives called wedges with the types of engagements the actives go on range from fantasy and wish fulfillment to personal security assignments and corporate-approved criminal activities. The imprint writes onto the “blank slate” state of existence of the doll, and it is wiped away after the engagement is completed. In its “blank slate” state, the dollʼs body is an empty container that an imprint temporarily fills. The dollʼs use value depends only on its capacity to frame (or contain) the persona. After the persona is removed, the body is again blank as it waits for another set of protocols. This resembles the cultural formation of the screen positioned as a frame where the screen literally contains the moving image, television broadcast, graphical user interface, or whatever content or information happens to pass through it; this screen is only important when something is being projected, transmitted, or displayed through or on it. As such, the screen marks a boundary between the “here” of the body and the “there” of onscreen information. In theory, this is precisely what the bodies of the dolls should do. The dolls mark the boundary – they mediate – between the “here” of the actual and the “there” of the virtual. Their bodies frame the imprinted digital content that passes through it.28 They really only come alive when Topher turns them “on” by imprinting their minds with a persona, with onscreen content. Their importance rests in this capacity to frame or mediate “life” at the biopolitical scale of the species, but when not in use they are vulnerable to it just like the screen. They can be written upon by graffiti (as the rogue doll Alpha remotely wipes and writes whatever he wants onto their minds), ripped or torn down (the doll codenamed Sierra is raped by her handler while in her “blank slate” state), and altered in any number of ways that prevent them from working as a screen.

28 See Hansen, 2006 for a discussion of the body as a frame in the context of new media studies. 66 Their handlers and the Dollhouse must protect the dolls in order to prevent these possible alterations from happening, and they do so with very little success. The metaphor of the bodies of the dolls as frames is only ever hypothetical in the context of the show. Events in the unfolding narrative of the series challenge this presumption of the body as a blank slate, or as a frame. Several plot developments threaten this “blank slate” existence of the unengaged dolls beginning in the episode “True Believer” (1.05) when Topher and Dr. Saunders (Amy Ackers) discover the doll Victor (Enver Gjokaj) is physically attracted to Sierra (Dichen Lachman), something thought impossible as dolls should be unaffected. This attraction continues to develop while they are in their “blank slate” states. In the second season, the couple falls into the routine of eating together and waiting patiently at their dining table for the other to return from an engagement. When Victorʼs contract with the Dollhouse expires and he leaves, Sierra continues to wait for him. When the army division with Rossum recruits Victor, now Tony, for a “group think” experiment (2.09), Topher imprints Sierra with her own persona, Priya, and together with Echo they try to save Tony. When Priya and Tony meet each other as themselves, their affective attraction they had to each other as turns into love. Another example of a doll surpassing his framed existence is with the character of Alpha (Alan Tudyk) who, in the back-story of the series, retains the affective intensities, memories, and skills from his imprints. The cacophony of personas makes him mad, leading to a “composite event” where he killed several people and successfully escaped the confined parameters of the Dollhouse. The threat of his return looms over the entire first season and is realized when he breaks back into the Dollhouse in order to “rescue” a particular imprinted version of Echo. His master plan is to make Echo like him and imprint multiple personas on her brain so she can transform into a Nietzschian superman like him. His plan is foiled when Echo, rather than reacting to this “personality dump” with gratitude, responds by physically beating up Alpha.

67 The most pressing threat to the “blank slate” existence of the doll is Echo, an active who begins to experience a sort of residual, sensory feedback even after the imprints from her engagements have been wiped. Echoʼs ability to be something other than a container or frame for the script written on her brain begins as early as the third episode of the series. In “Stage Fright” (1.03), Echo must act as a bodyguard to a popular singer, Rayana Russell (Jamie Lee Kirchner) who continues to be resistant to having this level of protection even after receiving multiple threats on her life. To appease the star, her head of security hires the Dollhouse to imprint Echo with the persona of Jordan, a talented backup singer. Alongside this persona, Topher includes a built-in mission parameter for her to protect Rayana from harm. Conceptually related to the transitional element of layering used in the opening credit sequence, the persona layered on top of the parameter make Jordan the ideal form of protection for Rayana as someone who can get closer to her than any type of hired security personnel. Jordan discovers that Rayana hired the stalker to kill her, and in turn, “protects” Rayana pushing her to the edge of a scaffold. In this moment, Jordan forces Rayana to immediately confront the possible consequences of her own death and in so doing, protects her from herself as Rayana inevitably chooses to live. Responding to Echoʼs behavior, her handler Boyd Langton (Harry Lennix) observes that Echo “seems to have the ability to think outside the pieces that we give her and create...,” with Dr. Saunderʼs (Amy Ackers) interrupting him, “...create a new approach to the problem.” Echo adapts to a context and, rather than following an already written script, can change within the set of goals Topher imprints in her mind much like a gamer within the simulated structure of a video game who solves each new problem with abilities gained from previous levels. Even without consciously understanding what she is doing, her body reacts to the situation at hand. This mutability, even while imprinted, illustrates the dollʼs capacity to change as opposed to being “written on” by experience as with the metaphor of the blank slate. As a screen, Echo is more like a threshold than a frame. As the episode with Rayana illustrates, Echo can change keys within the

68 context of the composition given to her; the “creativity” Boyd and Saunders speak of is Echoʼs ability to modulate within the boundaries of the imprint rather than merely frame it. She not only plays each note, but also improvises within the composition written for her. As the narrative arc unfolds across the course of two seasons, Echo begins to retain emotional triggers from her engagements even after her brain has been wiped of specific memories. She carves pieces of information that she retains onto the back of the plastic screen that covers her while she sleeps at the Dollhouse, has “urges” to continue incomplete engagements like in “Man on the Street” (1.06), begins to read (something that dolls canʼt do because they have no memory save for the habituations encoded into their brains to keep them under control), and eventually gains control over the multiple memory downloads in “Meet Jane Doe” (2.07). Echo uses this ability to take down the mainframe computer at the Rossum Corporationʼs headquarters in Tucson, Arizona. In Dollhouse, Echo represents something more than a blank slate, a frame for the personas downloaded to her mind. She, as a screen, is a threshold – a site of potential where the possibilities and limitations of the affective body reside. Although Echoʼs ability to control the multiplicity of imprints floating around in her head is unique to her biology (2.12), other dolls in the series are also thresholds in that they can affect and be affected. The attraction Sierra (Priya) and Victor (Tony) have for each other is affective, a prepersonal intensity because they, as dolls, literally have no personhood. Alphaʼs madness results from an overload of imprints concurrently modulating within the singularity of his body. The “blank slate” state of the dolls rests on the assumption that the body, like the screen as a frame, can be made into a mediating machine that expresses the content imprinted onto the brain. However, what cannot be suppressed is the bodyʼs ability to intensively change, to affectively modulate from one “key” to another in order to adapt and evolve into a given context – to be creative as Echo is when she is forced to adapt her imprint in order to fulfill the parameter of the assignment.

69 Whedon insinuates that the body of the doll is something other than a “blank slate” or “screen as frame” from the very beginning of the series. The opening scene of the pilot episode “Ghost” (1.01) is a video interview where DeWitt explains to Caroline Farrell, Echoʼs pre-doll identity, what it means to become a doll. As DeWitt hands over a cup of tea to Caroline she calmly proclaims, “Nothing is what it appears to be.” At that moment the point-of-view shifts from the video feed of a surveillance camera over the two characters to a medium shot of Caroline. The conversation continues: Farrell: It seems pretty clear to me. DeWitt: Because youʼre only seeing part of it. Iʼm talking about a clean slate. Farrell: Clean an actual slate? You always see what was on it before. DeWitt: Are you volunteering – Farrell: [Standing up] I donʼt have a choice, do I? Howʼd it get this far? DeWitt: Actions have consequences. Farrell: Oh, god. Youʼre loving this, arenʼt you? DeWitt: Iʼm sorry if you donʼt understand what Iʼm offering here, but what we do helps people. If you become a part of that it can help you. Farrell: Right. Youʼre just looking out for me. DeWitt: Perhaps better than you have. We can take care of this mess. After your five year term you will be free.. Farrell: I donʼt deserve this. I was just trying to make a difference. Take my place in the world, you know, like she always said. And now Iʼm…I know. [Sitting down] I know. Actions have consequences. DeWitt: What if they didnʼt? The scene cuts to two high-speed motorcycles weaving between cars on a public roadway. One of the motorcyclists stops and takes off her helmet, revealing Echo (formerly Caroline) living her life where actions seemingly have no consequences. As the series progresses from this representation of Echoʼs theoretical life without consequences, it asserts that Caroline is right and a slate

70 cannot be wiped clean. In that case, who or what is Echo? Does she exist apart from or inside the persona of Caroline Farrell? As a doll, she is not any more or less real that she as Caroline, any more or less actual. Echo is the screen as a threshold.

Any Body as Everybody The argument defining the body as a screen carries biopolitical consequences within the narrative of the series. Returning to “Stage Fright” (1.03), when Jordan (the persona of Echo) approaches Rayana after she discovers she hired the stalker, Rayana explains, “Iʼm not a real person. Iʼm everybodyʼs fantasy. God help me if I try not to be. I know you werenʼt grown in a lab, but I was...God put this voice in me and forgot to make it mine. I donʼt feel it. I donʼt feel anything”. Rayanaʼs speech offers an ironic point of comparison to the doll, but the beauty of the “fantasy” offered by the Dollhouse is that it, unlike Rayana, is not meant for everyone. An activeʼs imprint is designed to tailor fit a particular situation at a given time or personal preference. The fantasy of the popular singer appeals to the crowd, while the fantasies offered by the Dollhouse fulfills the desires of usually only one specific customer. Echo is customizable, while Rayana is one size fits all. A primary difference between a pop star like Rayana and an active like Echo is that Rayana is designed to appeal to a mass audience while the doll is continually re-crafted in order to appeal to an extremely specific niche market. Echo can be any body to everybody. The customization of Echoʼs body acts as a mechanism of control through which the biopolitics of the population continually forms and reforms. From Gilles Deleuzeʼs “Society of Control”: Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point. (authorʼs emphasis, par. 4)

71 When the government joins forces with the Dollhouse in an attempt to bring down a cult in the episode “True Believer” (1.05), Echoʼs body is crafted into a tool for post-disciplinary surveillance; her body can adapt to, or modulate from, situation to situation in order to control them in a way that the proverbial “all-seeing eye” of the disciplinary surveillance cannot. Topher implants cameras into Echoʼs eyes so they can survey the compound even as Echo herself is blind, and she succeeds in entering the compound and saving many innocent lives when the cult leader attempts to burn everything to the ground. This literal transformation of the body into a technology of surveillance illustrates the increasing threat or “risk” that any body might be a doll. In the world of the narrative, the doll represents the production and distribution of risk in post-industrial society. Ulrich Beck in Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity argues that the formation of a risk society is the effect of reflective modernization (10). The demystification of the classical industrial society leads towards a preoccupation with the principles of industry that act like “theoretical scenarios and political recipe books” that determine social relations. The intensification of risk in industrial society forms the foundation of contemporary forms of modernity. The production and distribution of wealth occurs alongside the production and distribution of risk; “the promise of security grows with the risks and destruction and must be reaffirmed over and over again to an alert and critical public through cosmetic or real interventions in the techno- economic development” (Beck 20). The threat of risk replaces the threat of poverty and inequality inscribed into modern capitalism. Focus moves from hunger to obesity, from scarcity to the side effects of wealth. Briefly comparing Dollhouse to another science fiction television show, it becomes clear how the series speaks to the question of risk in the biopolitical context of a population in formation. Any body could be a Cylon robot in the re-envisioned science fictional television series Battlestar Galactica. While this possibility encourages species profiling which leads to the development of biological “tests” that distinguish Cylons from humans in Battlestar Galactica (1.06), the risk in Dollhouse isnʼt

72 about the preservation of humanity against the threat of the machine. Instead, the population evolves in relation to the bodyʼs degree of immersion in or proximity to the screenscape. Rather than being a product of apocalyptic storytelling as with Battlestar Galactica, the preservation of the human as a scarcity, Dollhouse presents the body of the doll as a side effect of wealth. And, proximity to the screenscape offers the promise of security and control to those who pay and are in control like the Rossum Corporation. The transformation of Echo into a mechanism of control represents a body completely immersed in the screenscape to the extent that the body becomes a screen. Non-active characters like Topher, DeWitt, former FBI agent turned Echoʼs handler and love interest Paul Ballard (Tohmoh Penikett), and Boyd enfold into the population through the qualities of associations they have with the Rossum Corporation, their knowledge of imprinting, or even the fascination with the mystery the Dollhouse as a myth. In the context of the series, the “body as screen” serves to expand the scope of the Rossum Corporationʼs power. It enables the formation of a population designed by and for the political, financial, and cultural influences the Rossum Corporation represents. Other dolls are also used as mechanisms of and for control of the population; once a character is involved with the Dollhouse, he or she has little to no chance to escape its expanding influence. In the episode “Man on the Street” (1.06), Agent Paul Ballardʼs neighbor and love interest Mellie (Miracle Laurie) is revealed to the audience as “sleeper active” November who, he later learns, is there to keep track of what he knows about the Dollhouse.29 November/Mellieʼs

29 In “The Hollow Men” (2.12), Paul and November, who has been wiped of her actual persona of Madeline and re-imprinted with the persona of Millie, pair up after the collective representing the LA Dollhouse goes to Rossumʼs headquarters in Tucson and Mille reminds Paul that sheʼs not real but rather a program. He responds, “So am I...and it doesnʼt matter anymore. We feel what we feel, and I didnʼt want to reach the end without you, okay?” To be able to feel is what makes her real, but Millieʼs affective body is also her downfall. In order to disrupt the destruction of the mainframe, Boyd, who the persona of Caroline imprinted into Echo reveals as the secret head of the Rossum Corporation, plays the phrase that triggers her as a “sleeper active” and she begins to attack Paul. The moment she affectively modulates and transcends the limits of her parameter, she kills herself in order to preserve the whole.

73 presence threatens Paul, but not as disciplinary deterrent. Instead, they want him to continue to search for Caroline in order to see where it leads and what it uncovers. Rather than November/Mellie preventing unwanted behavior, she encourages him to discover how deep the rabbit hole goes. Once he learns the location of the Dollhouse and inadvertently helps its real threat, Alpha, enter the building (1.11), DeWitt recruits him as Echoʼs handler with the condition that they let November go. After Paul is inside, he cannot escape. For Paul, the “body as screen” serves as his introduction and initiation that brings him into the fold of the Dollhouse. For the Rossum Corporation, it is the goal. The second season reveals the plan of the corporation to develop a remote wiping device that will be able to imprint anyone (2.07) inevitably leading towards the dystopic future where contact with any type of “tech” has the capacity to wipe or transfer a persona from body to body (1.13, 2.13). As the population expands, the only hope for the “actuals” rests with a biology of Echo, an activeʼs body more deeply immersed in the Rossum Corporationʼs network than any other. In the second season of Dollhouse, Echo evolves into something other than a mechanism for the control of the population – she becomes the population. She stands apart from the other actives in that she discovers that her body retains affective triggers from her engagements and, eventually, learns to manage them. Echo explains to her handler Paul, “I remember everything. Sometimes Iʼm someone else and then I come back, but I still feel them. All of them. Iʼve been many people. I can hear them - sometimes suddenly. Iʼm all of them, but none of them is me” (2.01). Echoʼs ability to feel “all of them” indicates a degree of bodily awareness thought impossible after someone is wiped, but the body that is coming alive is not Caroline Farrell as she was before she became a doll. Rather, it is Echo that emerges as an affective body with the capacity to perceive the feelings of everyone as opposed to their own individuated emotions, even as those feelings are not associated with a particular memory or lived experience. When the multiplicity of personas imprinted onto her brain and expressed affectively through her body, Echoʼs “actual” persona, Caroline,

74 becomes one of the many. Rather than lamenting the loss of her own “individual” personality, Echo embraces it. She wants to be Echo, she fears Caroline. In the series finale set a decade in the future, Echo chooses to go underground for several years so that she can retain her population of imprints even after Topher explodes a literal “information bomb” (Virilio 108) that reverses the remote wiping capabilities of the Rossum Corporation (2.13). Echo cannot be herself without the population of tangled voices in her mind, an embodied tower of Babel. Instead, she is the population. Recalling that biopower functions through modulation rather than mediation, Echo isnʼt a mediator to the voices in her head as in the schizophrenic psychological narrative of multiple personality disorder, she evolves through them. She can mix and match her memories, skills, and emotions and modulate into something or someone else that is greater than the sum of its parts or each individual voice. Echo is simultaneously the body and the population. The biopolitical field that is Echo symbolizes the “screen as threshold” – a space where the affective body and biopolitical population unfold through the screenscape.

Exploring the Onscreen Screenscape of Dollhouse Thus far I have discussed in detail a key component in the screenscape of Dollhouse, the affective bodies of the dolls resonating with the biopolitical population as explored primarily through the character of Echo. The bodies of the dolls are screens in that they are sites of potential open to intensive change. As such, they are implicated in the biopolitics of the population. This section explores other screens in the screenscape of the Dollhouse, remembering that a screenscape is the interaction between screen technologies, content, geographies, and cultural expectations about the limitations and possibilities afforded by screen space. I review the quality of the connections between these other screens, the actives, and other characters that populate the world of the Dollhouse. I look at what these screens do in relation to other screens, and how their presence enters into both the narrative of the series and the constitution of

75 the biopolitical population. This section concludes by flipping the metaphor “body as screen” on its head and exploring a moment where the screen mutates into a bodily presence in the onscreen screenscape of Dollhouse. Layering. The layout of screens in relation to the geography of the Dollhouse creates a series of layered spaces that are all implicated in the exploitative practices of the Rossum Corporation, but in varying capacities. The set design of master programmer Topher Brinkʼs office best illustrates this layering. His office is divided into three distinct functions as indicated by the types of screens in the area. The place where actives receive their “treatments” or imprints of other personas, a developmental workshop, and a living space visually separated by the assorted types of screens at his disposal. The chair that transfers imprints to the brain of the active is front and center in the treatment area, centrally framed by the physical threshold of the glass doors separating this space from the workshop. A wall of computer monitors flank the chair, displaying flickering images of the brain in action, the “heat sensitive” neon outline of the body as it reclines in the chair, biometric information about the actives, and additional streams of data. Their onscreen representations reinforce what is biologically at stake in the imprinting process. While less orderly, the developmental workshop is also marked by several cathode ray tube monitors as opposed to LCDs stacked vertically alongside a desk surrounded by wires, pliers, and a magnifying glass. In the third layer of his office, a single television set positioned in front of a worn couch in the living space seems the most ordinary, connected to XBox 360 video game console played by Topher. The screen indicates an informal area for relaxation and play. These three layers of screened spaces indicate the unique function of each separate space, from hi-tech lab to leisure area. Yet, the distinctions between these areas are in degree rather than kind. Both video gaming and the science fictional biotechnology of imprinting simulate environments and human behavior, and the screens lining the walls of Topherʼs office suite provides the means through which this connection can be visually composed. Video games

76 simulate environments by creating a series of parameters within which a user can openly explore the system. Likewise, imprinting provides a set of behavioral parameters through which an active explores a given scenario. The play and imagination of gaming is quite similar to what Topher does when he wipes dolls or develops remote wiping hardware. The designer anticipates probable behaviors and their consequences within the immersive world of the video game, as does Topher, anticipating probable behaviors and their consequences within the immersive world of Los Angeles. “Belonging” (2.04) introduces another type of screen into the Dollhouse, another layer in Topherʼs office – a transparent LCD. The episode focuses on the story of the active codenamed Sierra (Dichen Lachman) and how she became involved with the Dollhouse. An extremely rich and powerful yet slimy neuroscientist noticed Priya, Sierraʼs “actual” name, selling artwork along the boardwalk of Venice Beach. He asked her to create an expansive piece for him and showed it off at an art opening, expecting her to sleep and/or fall in love with him in return. Resisting his multiple advances, the neuroscientist drugged Priya so as to make her appear insane and asked the Dollhouse to help “cure” her by implanting active architecture. As a doll, she could be programmed to love him physically and emotionally. The primary plotline deals with the discovery of Sierraʼs story and the inevitable fallout. Topher uses the see-through screen to explain his discovery that Priyaʼs insanity was actually drug-induced to Echoʼs handler turned head of security Boyd Langton. As they walk down the hallway while Topher excitedly talks to Boyd the situation, continuous dolly shot smoothly transitions through the open door of the office as Topher emphatically asks Boyd to “look” as he motions to an offscreen object. When they stop moving, the camera continues to pull beyond the frame of the transparent LCD and stops on the other side of the screen. The screen frames Boyd and Topher as they look at the glowing blue and yellow image of Sierraʼs brain in front of them; the audience sees the two characters layered through the transparent display.

77

Figure 2. “Belonging”. Screen capture of transparent LCD.

As Topher explains the difference between drug-induced and actually insanity using Priyaʼs original brain scans, he zooms in on the see-through interface and the image of neural pathways layer in front of the bodies of the two characters. This layering behind the transparent screen visually implicates Topher and Boyd in the “rape” of Sierra, since the technology Topher develops and the corporation Boyd represents enable Priyaʼs exploitation to occur. While Topher begins to understand the power of the technology he uses, Rossumʼs indifferent reaction to it illustrates their amorality in relation to the “products” like Sierra that make the corporation billions of dollars. The narrative implication of the Topherʼs layers of screens extends to offices outside of the LA Dollhouse. The condition of these additional screens in relation to those in the LA Dollhouse reinforces character traits of those intimately involved with the technology. On one end of the spectrum, Alpha builds his own imprinting chair in an abandoned warehouse. The monitors he uses are beat up, ragged, and old compared to Topherʼs office. Since the walls of the warehouse fade into the background given the low-key lighting, the appearance of the screen

78 technologies Alpha uses (beyond what is on them) alongside his patchwork imprinting chair reinforce his madness driven by the simultaneous expression of multiple personas. On the other end, the second season introduces the Washington DC Dollhouse and its own enigmatic programmer, Bennett Halverson (Summer Glau). The DC Dollhouse seems more hospital and less spa- like, and, like the wall of monitors, the space where Bennett imprints actives is more cramped and sterile. When Topher visits the DC Dollhouse in an attempt to retrieve Echo after she has been captured, Bennett uses a handheld hologram device to show Topher her design of her imprint for the brain Senator Daniel Perrin (Alexis Denisoff). This hologram device is a three-dimensional image plane, presumably a more advanced technology than the screen technologies Topher has at his disposal. Narratively, the brief use of this technology indicates that the DC Dollhouse is extremely well-funded by the Rossum Corporation and perhaps even more technologically advanced (i.e. dangerous) than the LA Dollhouse. Surveillance. The “body as screen” serves as a mechanism of control in the context of post-disciplinary surveillance practices, as do other screens in screenscape. Everyone intimately connected to the Dollhouse is under surveillance in one way or another. The many screens around the complex and beyond reiterates that everyone in this narrative world is either watching or being watched onscreen. The presence of these screens offers a way to visualize the ubiquity of surveillance to the viewing audience. For instance, the onscreen images of brain maps alongside running streams of data indicate the monitoring of the biological processes of the actives. In season two, Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) uses both a tablet PC and iPhone in “Belle Chose” (2.03) his attempt to keep track of Echoʼs vitals and whereabouts as her imprint of a college student who seduces her professor (the professorʼs fantasy) is accidentally exchanged with that of a serial killer. In “The Public Eye” (2.05), DeWitt sends Echo to discredit Senator Perrin in order to interrupt his plan to unveil the Dollhouse and his key witness, former LA Dollhouse active codenamed November, Madeline

79 Costley. Imprinted as a call girl, Echo sets up Perrin by videotaping their supposedly illicit activities. While she explains to the drugged senator what they did together, the live video feed from the camcorder Echo holds plays on the television in the background of the hotel room. Here, part of what it means to be screened is to be surveyed, to be caught in the moment as the example with Senator Perrin and Echo illustrates. In the case of Madeline, surveillance is also a means through which a sense of self is constituted. She becomes a public witness because to be seen is to be present - to be something other than a doll. Madeline became involved with the LA Dollhouse to escape the pain of the death of her child from cancer, so to reassert herself she needs to go onscreen. Unknowingly to Madeline, her testimony (and Perrinʼs quest to uncover the Dollhouse) is orchestrated by Rossum and discredited in order to paint the corporation as the victim of baseless charges and write their private interests into public law. Along with Madelineʼs betrayal, the conclusion of “The Public Eye” complicates the power dynamic often at play in surveillance. Upon capturing Echo, DC Dollhouse programmer Bennett Halverson tortures her after she reveals she has a past with Echoʼs “actual” persona, Caroline Farrell. When Bennett begins the series of painful wipes, she looks up at the surveillance camera and turns off the feed in order to conceal her actions against Echo from anyone who may be watching and possibly disapprove the torture of such a valuable asset. As Bennett hides the torture of Echo from the surveillance cameraʼs feed in her laboratory, so too is the torture hidden from the television audience as they watch the scene unfold onscreen. To be offscreen means to be in control. Bennettʼs power comes from knowledge of her surroundings and her ability to circumvent both the “all-seeing” eye of the surveillance feed and coincidently the spectator viewing the characterʼs actions on his or her screen of choice. The screen as a cultural form not only is significant in its capacity to reveal, but also to conceal. In “Meet Jane Doe” (2.07), Echo also uses her own portable screened device combined with the knowledge of her environment in

80 order to break an illegal immigrant out of prison while she, herself, is living away from the Dollhouse with Paul Ballard. Echo stealthily takes a picture of the woman with her iPhone and uses it to make a fake identification card. Like Bennett, Echo is also able to bypass those who watch, the prison guards in this instance. The subplot illustrates Echoʼs potential that will be needed in order to fight against Rossum and the Dollhouse that exploited her body and gave her the means from which she can resist their technology. The screenscape of Dollhouse speaks to the possibilities and limitations of post-disciplinary surveillance as a means to control the expanding population. Contact. In addition to its connection with surveillance, the screenscape of Dollhouse enables contacts to develop between characters, the constantly expanding network of personas and bodies, and the world outside of the Dollhouse. These connections help the biopolitical population, represented by the scope of the screenscape as managed by the Rossum Corporation, to grow. In the premiere of the second season entitled “Vows” (2.01), Senator Perrin announces the beginning of his investigation into the Rossum Corporationʼs inhumane experiments with humans on television. All of the primary non-active characters in the Dollhouse - DeWitt, Boyd, Topher and Ballard - watch his announcement on the flat screen in DeWittʼs office. Together, they question what needs to be done, anticipate possible outcomes, and question their own fates as participants in the exploitation and conspiracy Perrin describes. In this brief scene in front of a television set, several types of contacts are established. The first is between the power infrastructure of the LA Dollhouse and Senator Perrin, a contact that plays out when Echo is sent to disrupt his plans by discrediting him publicly with an orchestrated sex scandal. Another occurs when the idea of the Dollhouse becomes a tangible possibility within public consciousness. The first season episode “Man on the Street” (1.06) plays with myth of the Dollhouse, framing each act with documentary-style interviews of people “on the street” talking about whether or not they think the Dollhouse exists and if they would use the technology if it were accessible to them. With the onscreen revelation by

81 Perrin, the anticipation about what could be actualizes as a discourse of possibility. The Dollhouse is actual, even as it dabbles in the virtual sciences. The pronouncement defines the limits of the Dollhouse as an event in formation, even as those limits have been secretly drawn since the science of imprinting was first imagined in 1993 by Clyde, one of the founders of Rossum who as banished to the attic early on by his secret partner (2.10) later revealed by Carolineʼs imprint to be Boyd Langston (2.11). Secrecy meets revelation, a connection that drives the narrative development of the second season. While the pronouncement connects the presence of the Dollhouse to the outside world, other types of contacts occur that are even more ordinary yet equally significant. Here, the characters involved come together in a shared moment – they connect through the revelation that yes, the Dollhouse does exist. Another contact occurs in “Getting Closer” (2.11) when Echo and DeWitt stand in front of her television watching a video of Caroline before she became the active Echo. Echo is afraid that, once implanted with her old memories, she will revert back to her former self. The screen provides a means through which she can connect to her past persona while also keeping it at an aesthetic distance. DeWitt acknowledges the possibility of Echo and finally learns that the preservation of the species that is threatened by the plans of the Rossum Corporation requires her to trust what she thought she could control. In Whedonʼs previous television series before Dollhouse (including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly together known as the “Whedonverse”), one of the prominent themes has always been the power of the “chosen” family to work and grow together in order to achieve the objective of fighting vampires, demons, or even survival, but also to protect and learn from each other. In Dollhouse, this family is decidedly absent for a majority of the series. The main characters – Echo, Sierra, Victor, November, DeWitt, Topher, Boyd, and Paul – only actually come together as a “collective” or “community” (that continues to evolve into the Whedonesque chosen family in the decade that passed between the next to last episode and series finale) when the Dollhouse as it was in the beginning of the series (a high-

82 profile prostitution ring that fulfills the deepest fantasy of the rich and willing to pay) is threatened by either an external source like Perrin or by the internal directives of the Rossum Corporation. This group of disparate characters with their diverse and often conflicting interests and motives, this future family, forms in front of the screen. And, the collective continues to expand and evolve through the potentiality of the screen as threshold. The screen acts as a catalyst for its formation, simultaneously a strength and a weakness. The screen is, at the same time, a weakness for this fledgling collective. The screen also functions as an opening through which the Dollhouse is penetrated. Contacts formed through it are not contained within its frame, but continue to modulate into the unexpected. As Topher and Bennett (who has been brought from the DC Dollhouse) piece together Carolineʼs broken wedge (portable hard drive that contains her persona), the active Whiskey who is imprinted with the memories of the house doctor Claire Saunders as well a hidden agenda to prevent these repairs shoots Bennett in the head. After Whiskey escapes, the LA Dollhouse is compromised by Rossum agents. Topher, covered in Bennettʼs blood and brain matter, must quickly finish reconstructing the wedge while in shock over his loss. DeWitt leads him to his desk as the glowing brain scans on the stack of monitors in his workshop flicker behind him, providing the primary light for him to continue Bennettʼs work. Even as the screen indicates the fragility of the temporary collective that formed in opposition to the purpose of Rossum, this fragility leads to a connection gained through shared pain. Topherʼs assistant Ivy (Liza Lapira) attempts to help him, but as she settles down to his left Topher glances first at her and then at Bennettʼs blood splattered onto the screen behind her. At this point, the image on the monitor has blinked out leaving “snow” or “noise” onscreen contrasting the red of the blood. Topher looks at Ivy as she says, “I can do this. I can do this.” Topher puts his hands over hers and gently tells her, “I got it from here. Youʼll get your chance. You slip out. In the real world you can write your ticket any place you land.”

83 “I really do want to help you.” Interrupting her, “Then live. You have a remarkable brain. I think it should stay in your head. Ivy, donʼt become me. Go. Go!” This exchange is the first time he acknowledges Ivy as someone other than his maid. The blood of the screen reminds him of the consequences of being involved with the Dollhouse and, in an act of selflessness, he asks her to go and save herself. The noise-filled monitor splattered with blood is the material object that helps him to connect with Ivy in a surprisingly intimate and unexpected way. Echo makes a similar offer to the Priya (Sierra) and Tony (Victor), asking the reunited lovers to leave for the night. When they return to the Dollhouse in the next episode expecting to find the collective ready to take on Rossum by destroying the mainframe, the building is empty. They search and eventually see this same bloodied screen as the first clue to the tragedy that occurred during their absence. Transition. The screen has been read as a mechanism of biopolitical control and a means through which connections within the population are established and maintained as the narrative unfolds. In Dollhouse, the screen is also a site of and for transition. This use of the screen specifically speaks to the way the series is edited, how scenes seamlessly connect together through both the material presence and symbolism of the screenscape. Here, the screen is a threshold is not only a metaphor of the dollʼs affective body in relation to the biopolitical population; it is a space through which a new continuity between scenes and sequences is created. For example, the episode “Echoes” (1.07) returns to Caroline Farrellʼs former university when a dangerous pscyhotropic drug developed in a Rossum-sponsored lab is released on the campus. Sierra and Victor are the primary actives deployed by the Dollhouse for this particular case, but Echo while on another assignment, sees the news story about the “outbreak” on television and feels compelled to go to the campus even though she has no idea as to her connection with the situation. Echo doesnʼt respond to the content of the story, but nonetheless resonates affectively with the setting

84 through the screen. The television modulates Echoʼs affective bodily capacities to the extent that she travels to an unfamiliar territory for no apparent reason. The screen that Echo watches in the bedroom provides a transitional element linking the space of one scene to another. A shot of the onscreen television coverage fades into the same “unscreened” view of the chaos on campus. The use of the screen to seamlessly transition from the room where Echo sees the story on television to the university setting creates continuity through the physical presence of the screen. David Bordwell outlines what he calls intensified continuity in contemporary American film. In response to scholars claiming the post-classical period in American film (post-1960s) is characterized by “narrative incoherence” and “stylistic fragmentation” (16), Bordwell argues that newer films intensify classical continuity editing of Hollywood cinema. He notes increased editing speeds (16), a more dramatic contrast between close-up and long shots (17 - 19), and a camera in constant motion. Bordwell identifies international cinemas, the previsualization of film on a television set or video monitor, and the faster rhythms of modern life as potential causes for the intensification of continuity. Aesthetically, “the style aims to generate a key moment-by-moment anticipation [that] tries to rivet the viewer to the screen” (24). These techniques hope to call attention to onscreen content and “sharpen emotional resonance” (24). Rather than only calling attention to the onscreen content framed by the screen, this new continuity calls attention to the screen as a threshold that modulates from the actual to the virtual, or vise versa. Returning to the metaphor of the musical composition, the screen visually signifies an intensive change in key that itself constitutes a visual continuity in the context of the screenscape. Returning to “Echoes” (1.07), Caroline and DeWitt discuss in a flashback Caroline possibly becoming a doll. As DeWitt astutely observes, “Nothing is what it appears to be,” the scene cuts to a brain scan on an LCD screen and pans through the present day campus lab. The image on the screen connects the content of the flashback with action in the present day. Another example of the

85 transitional screen occurs after Topher and Bennett convince DeWitt and the Rossum corporate head to try to develop a remote wiping device that can target specific bodies in order to capture the on-the-run Echo and Perrin in “The Left Hand” (2.06). The scene pans across a moving image of neural pathways, perhaps a screen saver, displayed on a computer monitor to Bennett and Topher working together to develop the tech in her office in Washington DC. No narrative reason exists for this screen shot; at this point in the second season, the nature of the imprinting process and its effects on the brain have already been established. Also, the computer monitor faces away from the viewpoint of the characters in the room and seems somewhat out of place as it sits on one of the laboratory tables. Its total existence in mise en scéne is as a space of transition, of modulation. This link, however, is not stable or explicit, but processual and in flux. The use of the television set and computer monitor as transitional elements in these examples illustrate that the screen as a threshold is a site of transition and change. Dollhouse also uses image planes as transitions apart from any specified screen technology. At the beginning of several episodes during the first and second seasons a teaser explains the plot developments from the previous episode. As the voice of Eliza Dushku says, “Previously on Dollhouse,” a vortex of glowing rectangular screen interfaces, each presumably representing a unique imprint, begins expanding outwards with a white flash as if caught in the centrifugal force created by the pull of frame onto the image. This force transitions to the clips from previous episodes intended to situate the audience into the serialized narrative arc of the series. A similar action occurs near the end of the open credit sequence when an iris composed of the same types of interfaces forms around Echo after Alpha imprints her with multiple personas and she, in turn, fights against him. The vortex zooms out into an image of Echo in the chair opening her eyes after she has been wiped. The same thing occurs at the end of every episode, with one primary difference. Rather than the illusion of expanding outward into the world, the vortex of screens pulls inward, as the final

86 onscreen image becomes one of many “screen” possibilities. This centripetal force temporarily closes the narrative world of the series until it reopens for the next episode. This pushing and pulling from one episode to the next seems explicitly sexual, with a multiplicity of screens penetrating the final image.30 A version of this vortex enters into the second season when after Echo recognizes her ability to resist being wiped clean by Topher, begins to gain control over the downloads in her mind and can access individual imprints at will. She scrolls through the imprints like a card catalogue visually represented by the same multiplicity of rectangular screen. Each image plane signifies one of many narrative or “persona” possibilities for Echo. Her power comes from her genetic ability to physically control the screenscape imprinted in her head, and the repetition of this screen iconography in the series creates a visual continuity from episode to episode. Apart from the vortex of screens that reoccurs in these several capacities through the course of the series, the opening credit sequence includes another type of transition using the screen as a visual component. The sequence begins with a fade-in from white to the skyline of Los Angeles that leads to a series of images of Echo. Each image is seamed together by a partially faded iris wipe layered behind lines of flickering dots that approximate the look of data streaming across a screen. This special effect creates the illusion of layering several transparent images on top of each other, similar to the layered screenscape that comprises Topherʼs office. The clips of Echo actually seem like theyʼre playing behind another screen running binary code. In the opening credit sequence, the layer of screen is used in combination with iris fades-outs from one clip to the next. Visually, Echoʼs body as screen evolves through the screenscape of Dollhouse.

30 Recall Anne Friedberg from The Virtual Window (2006), “As beholders of multiscreen ʻwindows,ʼ we now receive images---still and moving, large and small, artistic and commercial---in spatially and temporally fractured frames. This new space of mediated vision is post-Cartesian, postperspectival, postcinematic, and posttelevisual, and yet remains within the delimited bounds of a frame and seen on a screen” (6 - 7). 87

Screen as Body The screenscape of Dollhouse cannot be reduced to any specific type(s) of screen technology, but instead forms through the interactions between screens, characters, narratives, and transitions. The “screen as threshold” is implicated in each of the above resonances. Both body and population form layers in the screenscape, mechanisms for control, and liminal sites for connection and transition. Positioning the body as a screen, illustrated by Echo and the collection of dolls on display in the Dollhouse, reveals biopolitical consequences of the body filtered through the technological substrate. But, recall that the body and screen exist within the same field of play; the screen does not mediate between the body and the population, but is a constitutive component of their mutually dependent becoming. As the body is a screen, so is the screen a body that comes alive and enfolds into the biopolitics of life. In Dollhouse, the privileged moment where the screenscape seems to come alive occurs in what is known as “the attic.” The first season introduces the attic as the place where malfunctioning dolls and people are sent. When Echo, imprinted as an investigator, exposes the head of security Laurence Dominic (Reed Diamond) as a National Security Agency (NSA) spy in “Spy in the House of Love” (1.09), DeWitt punishes his disloyalty by sending him to the attic after wiping his memories. She reiterates that the attic is the worst of possible fates, including death. The attic continues to be a threat for those who misbehave, a proverbial “time out” from which nobody – or more to the point, no body31 – has ever returned. The climax of the second seasonʼs narrative arc sees Echo, Sierra, and Victor sent to the attic after Echo and Sierra rescue Victor from the Rossum Corporationʼs military wing (2.09). By this point in the series, the latter two actives have been imprinted with their initial personas while Echo has fully achieved her “awakening” as a body in control of the imprints she receives.

31 After he is sent to the attic, Dominicʼs wedge is imprinted onto the active Victor when a thumb drive arrives that only he can open in “Briar Rose” (1.11) so technically his persona resurfaces. 88 When DeWitt sends them to the attic, Topher painfully cleans their minds in a Frankenstein-esque sequence and, afterwards, their bodies are preserved in a gelatinous goo and plastic wrapped. An attendant inserts three tubes hooked up to electrical wires into the brain and a feeding tube down the throat. In the attic, the only use values these bodies have are their biological processes that sustain the networking capacities of the brain. As Echo, Victor as Tony, and Sierra as Priya travel through each otherʼs nightmares they discover that the attics in every Dollhouse across the globe are interconnected and their brains are used as data processors powering the Rossum Corporation.32 Three glowing screens adjacent to still bodies in the attic stand out against the blackness of the attic.

Figure 3. “The Attic”. Screen capture of the layout in the attic.

32 Those condemned to the attic experience perpetual nightmares in order to make the brain into a more effective data processor. Why? Because fear produces adrenaline, speeding up the firing neurons to make a more effective network. Like the actives themselves, the value of the condemned in the attic comes from their biology. 89 The monitor on the bottom indicates fluid temperature and displays a cool blue outline of Echoʼs body along with a picture of what seems to be a generator connecting other bodies to Echoʼs. The middle screen displays Echoʼs vital stats while the top records a running stream of unidentified information that stops when her body is “disengaged,” clinical speak for dies. Besides the onscreen content, a blue power button glows at the bottom left of each display. These power buttons are the only visible indication that the monitors physically exist in the dark vastness of the attic as something other than the image plane. They are the only companions to the bodies of the condemned lying in a coma-like state where they mentally exist in a perpetual nightmare. The sole indication that this body is alive comes from the information displayed on the monitors, and the only seemingly “living” object in this space (other than the attendants that only briefly enter the scene) are the screens themselves reporting that yes, the body is there as a life laid bare33 by the technology the Rossum Corporation develops and owns. These bodies in the attic are victims not only of the Rossum Corporation that uses their brains for its own gain, but of the transformation into bare life by imprinting technology represented by three monitors looming over their motionless bodies. Interestingly, the position of the three screens in the room is reminiscent of where the murderer would stand as he looks over the body of his prey. For example, in the popular television series Dexter, the vigilante and serial killer Dexter often stands over his victims, talking to them of their past crimes as they lay on a sterile metal table. He hovers around their bodies, waiting to be killed, in a position of power. Likewise, the three screens loom over the body. In this instance, the screen seems to come alive. Just like the body of Echo represents the screen as threshold, screens transform into body – a body, like that of the serial killer, that occupies the position of power34 in the scene. The screenscape of Dollhouse forms through a mixture of seemingly outdated and potentially cutting-edge media technologies, including the bodies of

33 A reference to Agamben, 1998. 34 Quite a literal position of power, as the screens are “on” and working properly. 90 the actives themselves. The “body as screen” and “screen as body” enables the formation, expansion, and maintenance of the biopolitical population comprised of bodies brought into the fold as they become immersed into the screenscape. This type of population emerges through the production, consumption, and distribution of the modulation of bare life into the affective body enabled through the process of imprinting; the screen as threshold represents this transformation. At its core, the quality of the connection between bodies and screens implies the formation of an ethics based on the modulation of ordinary space into screen space. The body and screenʼs capacities to affect and be affected are at the center of this ethics. The transformation of the body into a screen is exploitative. Using bodies as sites of potential crafted by the personal and political desires of others or as spaces of display where those desires can be lived out is a virtual form of exploitation. To be a screen like Echo is to be subjected to the collective will of the biopolitical population; to resonate throughout the screenscape is to be a display for the content of others. She can only ever be the anti-hero; in the series finale it is Topher, who has been driven mad by the guilt of creating the remote wiping biotechnology the Rossum Corporation uses to take control over the bodies of presumably the global population, who saves the world (2.13). When Dollhouse first aired on FOX, it prompted a debate around the blogosphere about the exploitation of the body in the series. Bloggers questioned whether the series was condemning or justifying the exploitative practices that drives the premise of the series. The posts and fan videos by bloggers framed their objections to the show through varying perspectives on feminism in part because of the already established popularity of series creator and producer Joss Whedon and his feminist “credentials” earned through the fairly progressive representations of women and sexuality in the Whedonverse. For example, the fan video entitled “It Depends on What You Pay (Dollhouse)” posed on April 29, 2009 by giandujakiss cleverly sets clips from the series to the song “It Depends On What You Pay” from the Fantastiks, a song that parodies the idea that rape is

91 acceptable and accessibly depending on what you pay, opening with the pronouncement, “The cost, señor, depends upon the quality of the rape!” The clips from Dollhouse range from hypersexual images of Echo and the other dolls on illicit engagements, scantily clad while taking a shower, and receiving imprints cut in with clips of clients, handlers, and DeWitt who run the prostitution ring. Responding to comments about the video, The Angry Black Woman asserts on her own blog that the series is a “rapefest” and she doesnʼt buy the argument that she doesnʼt get the subtlety of Whedonʼs message nor does she buy that he is a feminist. The same week, Shannon Palmaʼs post on Feminist SF: The Blog! that claims that Whedonʼs attempt at subtle horror of the seriesʼ premise requires “to much work” to enjoy it while Charlie Jane Anders on io9 compares the hyper- sexual advertisements for the show to the problematic introduced by the character of Echo. This back-and-forth about the overtly sexual representations of dolls and the assertion that the form of prostitution in the series legitimates rape was no doubt driven, at least to some degree, by the immediacy of their affective responses to the exploitation of and by the “body as screen.” For me, what makes the narrative so compelling is that as the series progresses and addresses each of these representational concerns about rape, fantasy, sexuality, and even narrative subtlety, what continues to be the primary ethical concern is the “screening” of the affective body. As a meta-narrative, Dollhouse ironically speaks to what actors in a television series are asked to do. Studios buy beautiful bodies and place them in a ready-made fantasy where they are successful as actors when they can imitate affect as intensive change – the body (and screen) as threshold. The “body as screen” must surrender the capacity to affect and be affected to the maintenance of the biopolitical population; to be immersed in the screenscape means to be subjected to it. Herein lies Dollhouseʼs ironic fiction of the screen as a threshold.

92 CHAPTER 4

STEALTH SCREENS AND MOBILE PHONES

This chapter extends my analysis of the onscreen screenscape of the television series Dollhouse to the onstage study of the live performance of Nine Inch Nailʼs Lights in the Sky tour where I focus on the type of the interactions between the screen and body. I position Dollhouse as a cultural narrative about the limitations and possibilities of biopower – the modular interlacing of bodies, screens, population, and screenscape. The specter of the “body as screen” transforms bodies into spaces ready to be occupied by onscreen content as much as they are open to express the affective intensities of the population as a screenscape. This textual reading insinuates a biopolitics of new media practices like digital imaging, remixing, and computer animation coupled with the networking capabilities of online distribution. The range of participants who create content, from corporations to teenagers, participate in the evolution of the screenscape. Trent Reznor, the lead singer and driving force behind Nine Inch Nails (NIN), is also a creator of content in that he has written and performed industrial rock music for more than two decades. Although heʼs been settling into a niche market ever since the height of his popularity in the nineties, Reznor has extended his creative pursuits to include digital imaging, remixing, computer animation, and online distribution. Added to this list are his experiments with the screen, specifically in relation to his live performances during the Lights in the Sky tour occurring throughout 2008 across major cities in the United States and around the world. The tour accompanied the release of NINʼs The Slip, an independently produced and distributed free of charge by Reznor. I attended the show as a fan on September 29, 2008 in Jacksonville, FL without a clear idea about what was going to transpire and with no intention of writing about it. While the concert opened with pyrotechnics that far surpassed those in typical rock shows, it

93 became something else entirely in the second act of the performance. The stage transformed into a seemingly magical place when three layers of stage-sized screens lowered onto the stage space where Reznor performed. In other words, the setting modulates into an onstage screenscape. Reznor and his touring band become immersed within this onstage screenscape, dynamically interacting with the screens that surround them. His actions and movements within this environment suggest that the screenscape offers opportunities for “inhabitants” like him interact with their surroundings; Reznor represents the fantasy of the artist who surrenders to the will of the screenscape. The figure of the artist and what it means to be one reflects the contextual interplay between art and society from classical poets and abstract expressionists of mid-century modernism to the artist formerly known as Prince. While the notion of the artist is often synonymous with the visual arts, others use the term to preserve the territory of high-art as opposed to low, mass, or popular culture. 35 Even with these elitist associations and itʼs through critique in light of the social character of meaning-making, I hold onto the term because in the framework of this analysis itʼs what Trent Reznor publicly presents himself as, or at the very least, what he hopes to portray. Speaking exclusively to his persona as a rock star and “free culture” advocate (Lessig 30), Reznor wants to epitomize what it means to create in the digital world. In this context, being an artist refers specifically to someone who produces and enables the production of cultural content. The possibilities offered by “participatory culture” blur the boundaries between the producers and consumers of popular culture making production and consumption a “collective process” (Jenkins 3, 4). Reznor publicly supports and joins the collective production and consumption of popular culture and frames it as a fight against the corporate record company who tries to suppress creativity in favor of profit (Buskirk par. 2 -3).

35 The idea of the “auteur” applies specifically to the creative vision of the film director as developed in 1950ʼs film criticism. As auteur theory suggests, a film should be an expression of the director. 94 Reznorʼs facilitation of the production of cultural content occurs within an American cultural context where new media plays an increasingly significant role in politics, entertainment, education, artistic production, and interpersonal communication. Part of this context is the political economy of the music industry that has changed dramatically the 21st century. The legal battle over the online music distribution service Napster ending in its July 2001 shutdown brings into focus the competing cultural values between the Internet ethos of open access to information and the political economy of entertainment industries that hold legal copyright to media content. This cultural debate informs the institutional framework of the commercial music industry today. Since 2007, Reznor has independently financed NIN following his split with Universal Music Group, the parent company of Interscope Records. Privileging the promise of open access, Reznor released Ghosts and The Slip online and free of charge under a Creative Commons license with limited edition hard copies available to purchase. He has released professionally recorded footage from concerts to be cut together by fans and illegally distributed copies of his own songs for remixing purposes. As an independent producer, Reznor paid for the development, technology, and support crew employed in the Lights in the Sky tour through his independent production company. In addition to the creation and facilitation of cultural content for collective consumption, Reznor is the architect of his own onstage screenscape. The preproduction work and interface design for Lights in the Sky began during NINʼs Live: With Teeth tour where Reznor used one large scale, semi-transparent screen in order to display video footage reinforcing themes for specific songs. According to Reznor, the use of three screens in Lights in the Sky was an extension of the Live: With Teeth design concept. The show, designed by Reznor and Rob Sheridan, his artistic director and realized in part by lighting designer Roy Bennett and the tech company Moment Factory, combines laser technologies, particle-based animation that runs off several Linux-based devices simultaneously (the visual display is live and interactive), choreographed staged

95 lighting, and three primary screens, a high-resolution Barco D7 screen and the two semitransparent “stealth” screens (the military connotations here should not be overlooked) which are reflective elements linked together like a chain so they can be transparent or opaque depending on how they are lit (Gardiner par. 11 - 12). Two of these screens working in tandum as in Lights in the Sky combined with the LED display upstage created an onstage immersive screen environment. Besides the screen layout, a second design element includes both the closed circuit camera system streamed live through the Linux-based computer terminal and the preprogrammed song cues controlled by the artistic director and lighting designer via the mother board. This technological infrastructure underlies the live performance of Lights in the Sky that I attended in 2008. These components, quite literally, formed the walls and beams of the onstage screenscape built by and for Reznor. Part of what it means to be an artist in the digital world, at least for Reznor, is to enter into the screenscape and in so doing, surrender to the population.36 The biopolitical scales of the body and the population, like the relation between the screen and the screenscape, are not two qualitatively unique forms mediated by the production and consumption of culture. Instead, think of the body as a pawn and the population as a collection of chess pieces, classified at the level of the “species” as either black or white, all on a chessboard. Each move depends on the previous and with each step, the composition changes as it modulates from one “state” to the next. Extending the metaphor even further, affective bodily capacities are similar to the rules or habituations established prior to the start of the game that determines the way each piece relates to each other as opposed to the actual position on the board. Rather than positioning himself or his artwork (which includes his persona) as a mediator between the individual and the collective, Reznor wants to modulate from within the screenscape with

36 See “Intelligent Skin: Real Virtual” (Bühlmann, May 2008) for a fascinating reading of the screen being used as a component of architecture, specifically of a home. The transformation of walls into “intelligent skin” creates the simultaneous expression of what she calls the “real virtual”. 96 the hope of discovering, like Echo does in Dollhouse, what it means to be creative. Maneuvering through the screenscape means to be controlled and secured (Deleuze 2: par. 1 - 5). Ironically, a control society is precisely what Reznor speaks against through both his music and his commitment to Creative Commons licensing, online distribution, and his inclusive definition of artistic creation that includes remixing and other fan practices.

Lights in the Sky and on the Screen Reznor and his touring bandʼs interaction with the three onstage screens is a model of a screenscape; itʼs more than a screen, but is cut off from the cultural expectation of the imaginary “fourth wall” of modern theater. It is a screenscape on display as opposed to the screen as a display for onscreen content – the screenscape as an aesthetic moment transformed into an experiment in “performance art piece” or “object” by Reznor. This presentation makes the Lights in the Sky live concert a prescient example for this dissertation because it situates the art object in a space of confrontation. Yet, it remains open to resonances through the intersection of screen technologies, GUIs, animations, audiences, and artist that transform Reznorʼs performance into an expression of the seamlessness and singularity of the screenscape. This section begins by exploring the transition from stage space to screenscape. I focus on how Reznor, positioned as the artist at the center of his creation, maneuvers through these three large screens. I detail his interactions, specifically how he uses the screen to play a game of hide-and-seek with his audience and experiments with the responsivity of the screen to his body.

Transition from Stage to Screen After a brief pause, a screen lowers across the front of the stage. More waiting. Music begins to creep through speakers, but the band is still missing from the scene. All thatʼs there is the blankness of an empty screen waiting to be filled. Then, the seemingly opaque screen imperceptivity transforms into a

97 translucent field and three spotlights reveal the silhouettes of Reznor with the two members of his touring band flanked on either side of him. After performing for several minutes in this configuration, animated particles begin to fall onscreen, creating the effect of the group standing in raining light.37 The scene is constructed through simultaneous projections layered onto the three screens. As the performance continues, the band stays standing behind the downstage stealth screen rather than moving in front of it. The stealth screen both reveals and conceals; Reznor and company are able to stand behind the screen because it can simultaneously be looked through and at because it can be either translucent or opaque depending on the angle and position of light.

Figure 4. “99”. Fan image taken by Choltrop at the concert in Jacksonville and posted to NIN.com.

37 See fan video of a similar performance available at . 98 A few metaphorical key changes or perceptible modulations occur the transition from stage to screen. First, there is a shift in focus from the individuated body of Reznor to the screenscape within which Reznor is the central figure. In the beginning of the concert, the audience is situated in front of him in a typical proscenium style set-up, as if watching a modern play or film. Reznor sings to spectators, attempting to engage them by pointing and speaking at them. After the screens become part of the concert, Reznor no longer interacts with spectators in this same way. Once the screens lower, he shifts his attention to them rather than those watching him. As an audience member, I experienced a perceptible distance between Reznor and the rest of the crowd when the performance art portion of the concert began. Not that the stage affords an up close and personal relationship with those on it, but attention shifts from him to his body as it interacts with both the materiality of the screen and the digital stream of particles. Reznorʼs rock star persona transforms into an affective body when the screenscape that surrounds him comes alive; his physical interaction with the screens as he performs, as opposed to the performance in and of itself, becomes the focus of the performance.38 Secondly, the materiality of the screen moves to the foreground. The screen, or rather combination of screens, become objects to be dealt with, a tangible geography and physical space as much as it is a “virtual window” (Friedberg 7 – 12) to the otherworldliness of cinematic, postcinematic, televisual and posttelevisual representation. Reznor approaches the screenscape as an artistic medium rather than a technological component of media. He interacts with the screen as a material, physical presence or threshold as much as it is a frame. During the performance of the song “Only”, Reznor seems to sensuously caress the screen, his physical body coming through an opening of particles created through his touching of the screen itself.39 Additionally, when the

38 See Hansen, 2006 for another reading of the body in relation to virtual space and digital code. 39 See fan video of a similar performance available at . 99 configuration of the three screens changes the band must adjust their stage positions to take the placement of the screens into account. They are not only a backdrop for the display of images or graphics, but an actual set within which the characters must move. The three screens constitute almost the entirety of set design along with the instruments, microphones, and lighting. At the same time, the physicality of these screens in action reconstitute and reinforce the separation between Reznor, his touring band, and the audience. There is a definite boundary between performers and spectators represented by both security staff of the venue and personal security of NIN guard this barrier. The screenscape is vista to be looked at from a distance for a majority of the people in the venue; only a privileged few can be part of the dynamism of that onstage screenscape during the live performance. These two changes, the shift in focus to the screenscape and the foregrounding of the screenʼs materiality, occurring in this transformation from stage to screenscape illustrate how the modulation from stage to screen integrates the technological history of the screen that I briefly reviewed in my first chapter as well as the media histories of video and animation, and the processes of transcoding alongside the cultural expectations of the rock music concert, the theatrical convention of the stage, and fandom alongside the social barriers maintained between artist and audience. Resonating within these technological, cultural, and social histories is the interaction of the body with the screen that is simultaneously technological, cultural, and social.

Onstage Interactions between Body and Screen The onstage screenscape expands the notion of the screen and body as frames; the screens mark a threshold point for the embodied perception of media space. For Mark Hansen, new media expose how the body is a “frame” filtering through and making meaning out of a cacophony of information including images, sounds, smells, textures, and concepts that constitute media ecologies (47). The body is where information collects and meaning happens, even as the embodied

100 experience is always partial within the unfolding of the media event. For the NIN concert, however, Trent Reznor does something other than filter meaning out of the information that surrounds him. He performs with the screen. I turn to Brian Massumi to consider the implications of Reznorʼs performance. In the chapter “The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image”, Massumi ponders Ronald Reaganʼs improbable transition from bad actor to great communicator. When discussing one of Reaganʼs statements about movie acting, he asserts that while the successful actor sees himself as others see him, Reagan recognized himself on the screen; “[h]e [Reagan] wants to transcend, to be someone else. He wants to be extraordinary, a hero. It jolts him that when he strikes the pose he sees himself” (49). As the great communicator, Reagan moves beyond the mirrored version of the self and enters into the transitional space of “movement-vision” (50 – 51). Rather than using the screen to identify with his self, he sees onscreen an objectified mirror-self that is himself. Reagan views himself from the position of a “virtual observer” (51). In so doing: Reagan invents a technology of the event that is also a technology of the self and a technologizing of the self. He starts from the need to portray a scene culminating in an event that can be taken as exemplary….The generic or exemplary event is short of actual. It need only be acted. But its acting yields a reality of its own. Through his performance of the exemplary event, Reagan effects an actual change in his life. That change is expressed as a blend between the exemplary event and his ordinary world, a bleed between the two. (55 – 56) The event is the anticipation of change. The attempt to be another self, the anticipation of becoming, is what drives Reagan the politician. He doesnʼt see himself as a hero of the people, but as someone who is trying to become something else. Each transition, anticipation, or bleed from one self to another creates affects. Affect makes continuous the disjointed movements of the body resonating, changing, becoming.

101 As an artist, Reznor hopes to initiate change through his productions. In so doing, he changes himself. Reagan observes himself onscreen as himself pretending to be someone else; the screen is the cultural form where this recognition of the movement-vision for Reagan that Massumi describes transpires. Reznor uses the screen as something other than a mirror; he makes it into an artistic medium and creates his own screenscape that, like Reaganʼs performance of the exemplary event, anticipates change. It anticipates the need to adapt, to become something else, or even for the screens themselves to disappear by either a play of light or the actual rising or lowering of the stealth screens. What makes the screenscape virtual is its capacity to anticipate intensive change, or rather, its capacity to modulate as a threshold. This virtuality is what is on display at the NIN concert, with the constitutive components pieced together by the affective bodily capacities resonating between Reznor and his screens, his audience, and through the embodied perception of himself as a performer simultaneously onstage and onscreen. Like the affective bodily response by Reagan when he visually encountered himself as himself onscreen, the interaction between body and screen at the NIN concert also produces affects. These interactions, however, are not exclusively about watching images onscreen, but moving within and among the screenscape. Reznorʼs privileged body is at the center of these interactions with the screenscape; he is the critical touchstone around which every virtual element in the performance revolves. Besides being the persona driving NIN as a collective (Reznor, like Echo, is the collective), his movement elicits a real time response. Through his look, speech, and touch he tries to control the screenscape, how it forms and resonates from the stage through the entire venue. As the creator in the screenscape that he finances and creates, Reznor stages (at least) two distinct yet related interactions that bring him in contact, in conversation, with the surrounding screens. First, Reznor engages in a game of hide-and-seek where the screen is used to both reveal and conceal his body from the audience. This “game” is able to function through the layering of screens and bodies that make

102 up the ecology of the screenscape. Second, the responsiveness of the screens themselves to Reznorʼs body (his touch and the noise from the band) is another type of interaction that produces affects. Every action that Reznor makes reverberates in the live, particle-based animations being projected onto the stealth screens. What is onscreen becomes a residue (rather than a reflection) of Reznorʼs movement and voice. The responsivity produces continuity between the onscreen visual imagery, music being performed, and the body in motion. Hide-and-Seek. The lights go out as the screens lower across the lip of the stage. Spectators murmur and wait for Reznor to reappear and begin the second set, but he doesnʼt. Instead, a blue field of light begins accompanied by some drums and a xylophone. Then, the silhouettes of Reznor flanked on either side by the other members of the band appear through openings. Only after the instrumental section has been going on for five or so minutes when some additional light is flooded on the stage do spectators realize which “body outline” is Reznorʼs and which belongs to the guitarist and drummer. These outlines are typically produced by combining a strong overhead spot and backlight, but Reznor uses the combination of this lighting and the reflection of light via the computer animations being projected on the stealth screen to produce the dramatic, extreme “star lighting” effect. The introduction to the screened portion of the concert is one of many times where Reznor plays “hide-and-seek” using the stealth screens as his favorite hiding place. At the start of “Greater Good”, the downstage stealth screen displays what looks like some kind of organic, moving substance in flickering neon blue tones.40 The animations look somewhat like a time-lapse recording of bacteria growing, pulsating, in a Petri dish. In the center of the screen is a lighter, more mobile mound of particles. This central shape seems the most active of all of the particle mounds that flank the frame of the screen, almost recognizable as something other than the dancing particles that were used in the previous performances. For

40 See fan video of a similar performance available at . 103 the first thirty seconds of the performance, these organic animations of modulating mounds appear onscreen while Reznor is nowhere to be found. Then, extremely subtly, Reznorʼs silhouette backs into the stage left corner of the screen. Dwarfed by the vastness of the stealth screen, he faces the offstage wing while crouched over in a profile position. He is barely visible and, for spectators sitting to the right of the venue, very similar to my position when I attended the concert in Jacksonville, remains imperceptible given the angle of their view. As a spectator, I did not initially notice him enter the frame of the screen because I was still trying to figure what I watching, trying to make sense of the imagery before me. Interestingly, I was not the only person who couldnʼt find Reznor. In one of the YouTube videos of the live event, the camera of the fan roams the stage until he focuses on Reznor and proclaims, “Ah, heʼs right there”.41 When Reznor does finally appear, the organic imagery begins to make more sense. The active blob in the center of the screen can be recognized as an extreme close-up of Reznorʼs face recorded live by an offstage cameraman. Once the spectator finds Reznor, the animations begin to take on a form. When he physically leans forward, the close-up becomes more extreme. When he leans back, his fingers and microphone become more discernable. In this example, Reznor compares and contrasts his own onstage presence with the video feed being projected onto the stealth screen. He hides his body behind the screen, appearing gradually as a silhouette, and then projects his extreme close-up onscreen. Reznor is both “in the flesh” – live – and onscreen at the same time. This interplay between on and offscreen is what is unique to this show. A similar game occurs in “Only” when Reznor stands behind the downstage stealth screen. At first, the band can be seen through the “fingerprint” image projected onto the screen, and then is hidden by a field of white noise. As Reznor moves toward the screen, he is briefly visible through the particle field. When he steps back, Reznor is, again, hidden by the onscreen imagery.

41 Fan video with reaction from audience member available at . 104 Part of the power dynamics involved in the game of hide-and-seek Reznor plays during the concert as a whole hinges on his own iconic, celebrity status. Reznor has cultivated a following of fans that debate the minutia of his life and art. Case in point is the online Twitter debates like those over his nuptials and whether or not his marriage betrays his iconic outsider and rebel persona (Kreps par. 2 - 3). The hide-and-seek game he plays in the responsive screen environment created onstage adds an intriguing kink in a fanʼs explicit goal to see and hear NIN. He disappears from the stage for fairly large chunks of time, performing songs behind the stealth screen and out of sight from the audience. Sometimes he slips into the spectacle as with “Greater Good,” and sometimes the reveal is more dramatic like with the instrumental sequence that initially introduces the screenscape. Reznorʼs use of the screen to conceal his body (not his voice) engenders a type of curiosity where the audience is asked to explore the screenscape, remembering that they as a whole have no access to the screens in this multimedia production. The audience is asked to find Reznor, make sense of his surrounds, and connect the materiality of the screen to the music he performs. The screens are the primary material objects alongside the creative use of stage lighting that Reznor uses to achieve this affect, and what is one of the primary activities people do with their screens today? They search. The sense of curiosity created through the search for Reznor is built into the concert through the hide- and-seek games as the movement between the revelation and concealment of the body. The dynamism of the screenscape Reznor creates is dependent on the success of this search and the degree of curiosity the spectacle produces for both Reznor and the audience. Spectators must find Reznor in a field of heterogeneous media elements, and in so doing, they learn from afar what to do in the screenscape. This search is less like a mystery novel with clues gathered along the way leading to an inevitable conclusion and more like the game “Whereʼs Waldo?” where in a mess of visual imagery, a singularity (Waldo!) waits to be discovered. The Internet poses a similar type of searching pattern, a non-

105 linear network where information is sifted through in order to locate a particular item(s) within a seemingly infinite set. While this kind of searching is by no means a “new” sign of teleological technological promise offered by the dotcom revolution of the nineties, it offers a spatial imaginary through which the totality of a biopolitical population can be grasped. The seeds of this spatial imaginary come through “layering” or what Manovich calls “compositing” common to many non-linear image, sound and video editing software. Take the popular program, Adobe Photoshop. In all of its incarnations, the power of the software is its capacity to allow users to create multiple layers or composite parts than can each be independently manipulated. The final image is a compilation of these layers in a visual whole. Sound editing uses a similar type of logic, layering tracks together to produce a single compilation. Before the digitization of sound editing, each track stood in for a single microphone. The Beatlesʼ famously utilized a four track recording system, while todayʼs sound editing software enables interested users to piece together over a hundred tracks. The DJ has come to represent the promise of layering in popular “remix” culture (Lessig 2: 14). Layering, as it used in these types of programs and deployed as a cultural process, differs aesthetically from modernist collage, postmodernist pastiche, and cinematic montage. Manovich rehearses these distinctions in his discussion of the logic of selection (123 – 136) and its counterpart, compositing (137 – 160) as two of the primary operations utilized by new media. Collage combines selected elements to create a whole while pastiche brings together a set of elements to play with style. For Eisenstein, montage is the juxtaposition of images to produce psychological and ideological responses whereas “computer culture” composites disparate elements into a “seamless whole” (Manovich 144). Beyond these particular software programs and related artistic pursuits, layering provides a means through which the experience of the kind of screen environment that Reznorʼs stage show begins to approximate can be conceptualized. It constructs a terrain within which bodies in populations

106 resonate. The stealth screens, quite literally, form a series of layers on the stage. It is the combination of different projections on each layer, the vertical rows of particles on the downstage screen coupled with the flickering patterns in the center stage screen that create the effect of rain, for instance. Even as they are staggered to frame Reznor and the band as during the performance of “Terrible Lie,” the interplay between the screens as layers create the dynamism of Reznorʼs onstage screenscape. Reznor utilizes the screens as layers in order to reveal and conceal his body in this environment, but is his body itself a layer? Yes, in the sense that his positioning between the stealth screens allows for some of the visual effects like the dramatic silhouettes and the faux touch screen. Reznorʼs physical presence emphasizes the multi-dimensionality of screen space; the body becomes a single component implicated in the unfolding of an evolving ecology, a screen in the screenscape. Reznorʼs onstage performance among the screens visualizes what it means to be a body in a population. Even though Reznor is integrated into the onstage screenscape, his position as artist affords him a type of creative control over its becoming. He reveals and conceals himself, manipulating the screen that responds specifically to Reznorʼs touch. The game of hide-and-seek he plays with his audience is the means through which he asserts his agency as a performer and celebrity. Spectators arenʼt so lucky as to be able to control their presence onstage. During “Survivalism,” a closed-circuit camera system installed around the premises signals out specific audience members and projects them live during the song. The message of the performance is about surveillance itself, the ubiquity of it in contemporary American culture, as the live feeds as projected on the LED screen mimic a large-scale security system database monitored during a given event. These spectators cannot hide among the screens like Reznor can. The separation of the audience from the onstage screenscape makes them, including myself as an individuated member of that audience, vulnerable to being surveyed. Reznor is more in control of his surroundings because he is an active consumer of and participant in his media environment. Security functions by

107 retraining multiplicities by constructing paths and organizing circulations, creating circular links between effects and causes or what can be controlled and what canʼt be controlled. During NINʼs Lights in the Sky tour, Reznorʼs presence and nonpresence, his capacity to play hide-and-seek amongst the onstage screens, is something that he can always control. His ability to be in charge of his own body and the imaging of his body as it appears onstage is an idealized version of an artist who can determine the terms of oneʼs own circulation within the constitution of the population. This idealization, however, can only go so far. Reznorʼs artistry is subjected to the power dynamic within the Linux programs he uses, the availability of a space where he can perform, his accessibility to a power source, and the vulnerability of the program to corruption like viruses or hacking. Complaints about how the computer controls blink out during the performance mirror my own experience watching the concert in Jacksonville last fall when the pieces of the light show displayed on the front screen kept disappearing. During the final “Head Like a Hole” encore, the red NIN symbol displayed on the downstage stealth screen had a part of an “N” blinked out.

Figure 5. “Opps”. Fan image taken by innerg07 at the concert in Jacksonville and posted to NIN.com.

108

In these moments, the screen asserts itself as a material reality outside of Reznorʼs control. Another power dynamic comes from the audience recording his game of hide-and-seek using their mobile phones or other devices. Even as Reznor “allows” such practices to take place during his concert, his body is still an object that can be captured onscreen by the audience or mass that he is separated and protected from. Layered within the unfolding of the screenscape not only onstage but through the entire venue, the sense of control he has over the onstage screens dissipates as the territory of the screenscape expands and the object of the search, the body of Reznor, is captured on video. Responsivity. Distinct from yet related to the hide-and-seek game that Reznor performs is the play of “responsivity.” By responsivity I mean the quality of the connection between the offscreen actions and the onscreen reactions or reverberations of those movements. The success of the “motion control” features like the remote controller and the balance board for the Nintendo Wii hinges on the responsivity between the physical movement of the player and how quickly and accurately that movement registers within the video game. The responsivity of the Wii typically functions through a correspondence between an offscreen action that mimics the onscreen movement of an animated character or something of the like. Another degree of responsivity is implemented by popular technologies like the iPhone or Nintendo DS that offers immediate onscreen reactions to a userʼs touch or pen as opposed to the “remote responsivity” of the Wii. Touching the actual, material screen is a mode through which somebody maneuvers through a given interface or series of applications. Touch screen technology is, as the name implies, a technology of the screen. It works by layering two surfaces with an electric current or laser beam sandwiched between them. When a user touches the surface of the outer screen, the flow of the current or beam is interrupted and signals the device to react in that particular spot. Both types of responsively inform the quality of the interactions between the

109 screen and body. In the first, the screen is the material border to the parallel universes of animated wars and victimless car chase. The second forces a physical contact between the body (or pen controlled by the body) and screen. A touch screen, however, still doesnʼt account for depth. The interaction via the user interface isnʼt recognized as the finger or pen approaches the touch screen, only afterwards. Reznor layers both of these iterations of responsivity into the performance and introduces the illusion of depth into the parameters of the interaction between screen and body. During the performance of “Only”, the onscreen animations on the downstage stealth screen are seemingly controlled by Reznorʼs body and how far or close he stands to it.42 The touch screen works via a series of lasers running along the back of the downstage screen that indicates Reznorʼs position onstage and reacts accordingly within the onscreen animations. Initially a white field of particles, when Reznor approaches the screen the particles separate to reveal his body. The closer he gets, the larger the “opening” in the field. As Reznor moves across the stage, the opening follows him. He moves back, and the opening closes and the field is reconstituted. Then, the white particle field gives way to a series of streams that momentarily expose the rest of the band playing behind Reznor. After the chorus the “touch screen” returns. Reznor again moves up close and steps back, illustrating that the opening in the particle field isnʼt a prearranged animation but, like a video game, is occurring in real time. The onscreen imagery, however, is secondary to Reznorʼs interaction with the screen. The materiality of the touch screen in relation to Reznorʼs body is whatʼs on display. Another example of the touch screen occurs in a transitional moment during the performance. The drummer comes out onstage and, on the second stealth screen, lights up a series of boxes

42 See another fan video of a similar performance available at . 110 by “touching” each individual square during the introduction to “Echoplex.”43 His actions initiate the initial beat that leads in to the performance of the song. The drummer returns at the conclusion of “Echoplex” and deactivates the onscreen light boxes. What drew me in as an audience member, however, wasnʼt the image of the squares themselves along the back screen but the drummerʼs interaction with the screen that caused them to appear and disappear. The same can be said for the streaming white particles that basically looked like snow on a television set. What was interesting was Reznor emerging from the noise and into sight by means of his own bodyʼs proximity to the stealth screen. The illusion of the touch screen, even if Reznor and the drummer arenʼt actually touching anything, establishes continuity between onscreen and offscreen. Every offscreen action, specifically movement toward and away from one of the two stealth screens or LED display, has an onscreen reaction. What Reznor does, specifically in relation to his proximity of the screen, reverberates in onscreen images that record his presence. The responsivity, however, doesnʼt only occur through this illusion of a touch screen. Take for example the performance of “Terrible Lie” in the third act of the performance. At this point, the three screens have changed position. The stealth screens have been raised to allow for Reznor and the band to move more freely on the stage. However, they remain staggered so as to continue to project images; intensities as opposed to images would probably be the better term at this point given that approximately 90% of what is onscreen are bursts of color and light. Amorphous red, orange and yellow particles flash on the three screens in the same rhythmic patterns of the song. The onscreen content magnifies the beat, as opposed to lyrical content, of the soundscape NIN cultivates during the concert. What is onscreen corresponds to the real time unfolding of the event. The screen enters into and evolves the soundscape (the screen as a cultural form implicates sight, sound, and touch).

43 See fan video of a similar performance available at . 111 Like with the touch screen, the onscreen content responds to bodily movements as they occupy the screened stage space. The visual information being flashed onscreen are signals filtered through a computer program responding to the live musical performance of “Terrible Lie”.44 Returning to the individuated performance of “Terrible Lie,” the flashing lights on the stealth screens corresponding to the rhythm of the song that indicate a type of responsivity where the correspondence between onscreen and offscreen connects through the bodily movements of NIN, can also be read as a translation of a primarily auditory and haptic expressions (rock music performed live can be felt just as much as it is heard) into visual cues. These sensory translations are common in musical performances, and have been used to help people with limited hearing abilities to “experience” music when a series of flashing lights echo the rhythms and intonations of the music, a mediated type of synesthesia that extends the visual possibilities of live performance. Now, spectators are not only searching for Trent Reznor, but can be visually stimulated via flashing lights and animations on the multiple screens. The faux-touch screen on display during “Only” and the responsivity of onscreen graphics to the soundscape of the concert, the music that NIN produces as opposed to the noise produced via audience participation and interaction, establishes continuity between onscreen and offscreen. When David Bordwell writes about the production of continuity, he discusses how the shot- reverse shot produces a sense of anticipation (Bordwell 16). The affectation of anticipation sutures the audience member to the narrative.45 However, the habituation of anticipation between continuity editing and the affective body that Bordwell describes occurs through the frame of the screen. For NIN concert, the screenscape adds another dimension to the production of continuity. The

44 See a fan video of a similar performance available at . 45 As a counter-example, Hong Kong cinema that deploys the pause-burst as opposed to the shot-reverse shot where a period of waiting is accompanied by a “burst” of action. Rather than filling in the gaps, the film holds attention via a sense of shock. 112 responsivity of the stealth screen to Reznor and the drummerʼs touch along with the live unfolding of animations that correspond to the music NIN performs establishes a sense of continuity between onscreen and offscreen. This continuity is not an exclusive characteristic of the onscreen content, but occurs through the screenscape. The three acts of the concert are marked by the revelation and removal of the stealth screens. The responsivity of the screens extend the emerging continuity between the actual and virtual elements that create the spectacle and produces an affective intensity characterized by the sense of connection that envelops everyone and everything into the spectacle. In this moment of continuity, of connections, things adhere together as a whole. Each concert in the Lights in the Sky tour becomes a part of this continuity through the quality of the interaction between body and screen. Reznor becomes connected to the (digital, screened, animated) world through the responsivity of his screen environment. Rather than anticipating what comes next, I found myself in awe of the quality of the interactions between screens and bodies as they modulate within the screenscape on display. The sense of connection, a coming together as a continuous whole, is constructed via the play of responsivity through the openness of Reznorʼs physical body to the screenscape. This connection seams the body to a generic, abstract sense of the whole. This “whole” is the affective expression of the biopolitical population. In order to be an artist like Trent, you have to submit to this population as it expands and evolves through the screenscape. Reznorʼs fantasy of the artist as creator in the context of the screenscape plays out not only in the centrality of his stage position, his rock star persona, or financial investment. He creates through his proximity to the screen itself. His significance as the artist recedes as the territory of the screenscape expands. As his captured body moves from media platform to media platform, from recorded video upload to YouTube and downloaded by some random graduate student who uses it in her dissertation, the idea of artistic creativity and control over the

113 object seems to lose relevance when the screenscape is deterritorialized and reterritorialized through the screen of my laptop.

Light from the Screens The screenscape as it is produced, rehearsed, and performed by NIN during each concert date on the Lights in the Sky tour comprises only one of many possible perspectives of the multidimensional event, that being of a ticketholder (myself) experiencing the spectacle put on for her. I now turn my attention from the body of Reznor to those watching him. During the performance, spectators are implicated in the onstage screenscape. Specifically, Reznor brings each unique audience into the performance via a series of closed circuit cameras located around the venue that project a mixture of live and prerecorded images of fans onto the high-definition LED screen during the performance of “Survivalism”.46 The audience watches themselves watching NIN. The image quality was grainy, approximating the greenish-grey of a night-vision view. This moment of onscreen self-surveillance is fully realized through the screen, especially poignant as the video feeds look like a recording on a series of monitors located in a security station. Unlike Reznor, the audience has no opportunity to collectively define the terms of its engagement with the screenscape. Reznor consumes as much as he is being consumed by the people who attend his show. Coupled with the presence of Reznor as the embodied persona of the rock star, his onstage interactions with the three screens act as the primary media spectacle for the audience to consume. The game of hide-and-seek and play of responsivity, however, cannot be actually experienced by anybody in the audience. Instead, they can only be virtually anticipated. Anticipation resonating affectively produces habituations, where automatic habits are affective bodily

46 For fan video of a similar performance, see . 114 responses that memory uses to ground the passage of time (Deleuze 78). The onstage interactions between screen and body resonating within and beyond the audience triggers what seems to be an automatic habit of going to the screen and capturing the moment before it passes. During the NIN concert, this habit was satisfied by the use to portable screens to view and record the screened spectacle as an event. The attempt to record an event in its unfolding via text, image, video, or any number of other media becomes a site where the biopolitics of the population plays out. This section traces this habit in action, a habit that is increasingly satisfied by one-on-one interactions with portable screen technologies.

Offstage Interactions between Bodies and Screens The lights dim, murmuring subsides. With beer in hands, spectators collectively wait for the grand entrance. When the combination of spotlight and fog reveals his presence, the bright screens of mobile phones47 begin to dot the darkness of the venue. Observing the behavior of concertgoers like myself at the 2008 Jacksonville edition of Lights in the Sky (and, again, at the Tampa stop for the NINJA tour where NIN headlined alongside Janeʼs Addiction in a much more conventional concert without stealth screen technology), spectators interacted with their screened, mobile, multimedia devices in a several ways. Most obviously, they contacted people (either by calling or “texting”) not at the concert to say that they were there and that Reznor was, in fact, onstage at the moment. In a similar vein, I sent a text to my friend arriving separately to tell her that the concert started and she was running late. The integration of a digital camera and or video recorder into mobile transforms the device into a multimedia machine. The photo, video, and browsing functions of these portable screens enable users to communicate ideas and information via text, voice, image, and video either

47 As a tool for telecommunication, the ability to send images and upload video via a mobile device is a key element of the screenscape. Given that the increased amount of memory in mobile devices allows for a more complex GUI and data compression, phones can effectively and efficiently access the Internet and surf the Web. 115 person to person(s) or through the Internet. Depending on the type of technology they have, spectators can choose to send what they recorded at the concert to someone directly or upload it to the Internet at that moment or after the fact. These “bootlegged” archives of the NIN performance are utilized for both personal pleasure (I use a picture from the concert as my phoneʼs wallpaper) and public distribution via NIN.com or any other website for that matter. When I attended the Jacksonville performance of the Lights in the Sky tour, I didnʼt quite know what to expect. I went to NINʼs tour accompanying the release of the album With Teeth and so anticipated some kind of screen work, but was surprised to the extent of multimedia utilized during the production. So, what did I do? Begin to record as much as my mobile phone would allow. Other spectators, including myself with my own phone in hand, used their mobile phones to record their own live encounter with NIN. Throughout the entirety of the concert, lights from these small screens flash on and off all over the arena. The brightness of its screen among many mimics both the particle animations that flow across the stealth screen and the flame of a lighter waving like a metronome during the slowly paced songs. Also, they appear at the beginning of each individual song, the moment when the introduction of a popular hit such as “Head like a Hole” becomes recognizable to, first, die hard fans, then casual fans, and finally everyone else who heard it repeated endlessly on the radio in the early nineties. Attendees shake their heads in recognition and many begin to sing along. Others press “record” and video capture their favorite song on their mobile phone to save for themselves, send to friends, or upload to the Internet. Double Vision. Through recorded videos and images these screened, mobile devices produce an interaction between the screen and body, even as it is nearly impossible to pinpoint what exactly each individuated spectator does with his or her phone (if he or she even has one). Although not on display in the same way as Reznorʼs body, this interaction is nonetheless implicated in cultural practices of media consumption and convergence because, as a constitutive part of an American technological imaginary, the screen enables a degree of

116 participation on behalf of what becomes an active audience. As such, the automatic habit of memory capture is reinterpreted as the interaction between mobile devices of the screen and the spectators who use them. These mobile screens “double” vision in the sense that they offer a second option from which to see the concert. The device creates another point of view that can be revisited in another form (video) and through another screen. The application of both vision and double requires some explanation. The particular interaction occurs primarily between the screen and eyes. Depending on the type of mobile phone, touch might also come into play. Vision is “doubled” in that users have the option to experience the concert by looking through their screened, mobile devices. Rather than creating aesthetic distance, the potential offered through additional perspectives implicates spectators within the eventʼs formation. The use of mobile screens to experience the concert, literalizing the idea of double vision, mobilizes the screenscape as it crosses the imaginary yet highly-secured fourth wall of the stage and enfolds into the affective modulations of the audience as a collective. At the concert I observed a number of instances – within the my general locale in the Jacksonville arena there were probably upwards of ten – concertgoers raising either their camera or camera-equipped mobile phone over their heads to capture a better angle or use the “zoom” function to get a closer look at the action. These spectators used their devices to potentially enhance their affective experiences of the live performance. Looking through a digital phone at Trent Reznorʼs onstage screen spectacle translates the act of seeing using a digital interface. As the stealth screens lowered and the second act began, these spectators were adding to the multiple layers of the screenscape by watching the onstage spectacle of screens and bodies through the portable screen of a mobile phone or PDA like the Apple iPhone, Blackberry Storm, and Palm Prē. Within the context of the concert, the layering of screens occurring between the mobile technologies of audience members and Reznorʼs onstage screenscape offers another iteration of “doubleness” to which the term refers.

117 The idea of double vision resonates in the continuity of the experience Reznor reconstructs with the deployment of his stealth screens. It extends beyond the application of screen technologies in and of themselves and becomes ritualized and relived in American popular culture. Reznorʼs performance actualizes the potentialities embedded in the promise of these small screens that each user, if you pay enough money and live in the right zone, has the ability to own and access. The population of many, myself included, is enfolded into the strata of security via their own, personal screen made possible by mobile technologies appropriation of capturing bodily habit. In the case of spectators, one of several onscreen experiences occurs through the frame of the screened, mobile device used to both augment the visual experience of the concert and archive the “liveness” of the event itself. This iteration, opposed to the real-time experience of the onstage screen environment Reznor creates, has come to stand in for the “liveness” of the event as it is available online through NIN.com.

The Event Online and Onscreen Websites like NIN.com that archive these live videos, these residues of double vision, form the infrastructural support system that privileges and sells these captured moments. Uploading is a pivotal act of consecration for new media users, absorbing older subcultural practices like bootlegging historically linked to the music industry. Bootlegging exaggerated the intersection of stringent copyright laws and the recording industry during the 1960s in the United States, and has transformed into one of the primary activities for a number of youth subcultures (Heylin 1 - 14). Bootlegging communities were small networks of dedicated fans that often shared audio recordings of live events with others, but the birth and death of Napster coupled with todayʼs online practices of file-sharing (audio and video) resituates bootlegging as an expected and, as in the case of Reznor, encouraged activity. In the case of “Lights in the Sky,” the circulation of the bootlegged “texts” by spectators of the concert connects the unmediated experience of the onstage media environment with the mediation of perception

118 via screen technologies like the mobile phone, digital camera, and even the personal computer used to access NIN.com. A sense of collective connection occurs as the event unfolds, dissipates, and is even reconstituted through personal videos and, most recently, a fan made documentary Another Version of the Truth: The Gift of the concert experience even as it could never be completely duplicated. Mobile phones in particular, but also digital cameras and other portable recording devices – all of which, coincidently, Reznor allows and encourages fans to bring to his performances – enable spectators to participate in the concert by, first, recording and secondly, archiving the live event. Only afterwards when I went online to find videos of the concert did I realize I was engaging in a Reznor approved creative act. The official website of the band features videos recorded at NIN concerts from their portable devices and uploaded to YouTube. The websiteʼs “Featured Gallery” includes popular videos, personal videos of the concert mostly recorded on mobile phones as evidenced by the downgraded quality and length of the videos. NIN.com clearly organizes the rest of the galleries according to concert and tour dates so visitors can easily find a particular item, with most of the clips as individual songs. Besides videos, the website features spaces where fans can read Reznorʼs blog updates, upload images, listen to or download tracks, post remixes, and chat on forums. Also, it advertises NIN: Access, the free iPhone and iPod Touch application that enables users to listen to tracks and look at videos from their portable Apples. As these examples illustrate, recording the event on a mobile device is an official part of the entire concert experience of NIN that is carefully archived on the NIN website. The contemporary mobile phone, in particular smart phones and PDAs like the iPhone, is a screen technology that is implicated in the screenscape of NINʼs concert as a whole.

119 Aesthetics of the Population Interactions between screens and bodies are sometimes brief, sometimes prolonged encounters embedded in habituations that compose the everyday. The tenor of these encounters is highly variable, depending on the type of screen being accessed, the spatial proximity of the screen with the body, onscreen content, someoneʼs general knowledge about a given interface, the geographic distribution of a screen or screens in a space, the space itself, social structures and cultural mores that structure behavior and thought. The different types of interactions between the screen and body analyzed in this essay speak to a spatial and temporal relation from stage space to screenscape. How is this spatial transformation implicated in the biopolitics of the population? The promise (and performance) of the artist actualizes through the interaction between screenscape and the body of Trent Reznor, but in the moment of actualization his body resonates within a collective that he cannot contain. This moment of change initiated by and through the screen as a threshold is where the biopolitics of the population play out. Biopower captures virtual change and affective bodily capacities, and the construction and reconstruction of the screenscape during NINʼs Lights in the Sky tour is a creative act where the attempt to define the parameters of a population in formation can momentarily become visible.48 What are the terms through which populations (as fans, consumers, and participants) form? The interaction between the screen and body creates continuity between the layers of the screenscape from onstage, out into the audience, and into the technological substrate of the unfolding event. The game of hide-and-seek and the play of responsivity form the two primary onstage interactions and the audience practice of double vision forms the third interaction between the screen and body. These interactions resonate within the

48 Also see Beiguelman, May 2008. In her essay entitled “For an Aesthetics of Transmission”, she reviews her art series that used commercial electronic billboards to appropriate public advertising sites. She claims that her work was about the interface itself, as is the NIN concert as a whole. What I describe is an aesthetics of transition (as opposed to transmission) or modulation that speaks to the biopolitics of the population. 120 combination of screens, images, animations, bodies, and technologies. Nested within these resonances, Reznorʼs body anticipates change; like Reagan, he becomes the exemplary event. These interactions between body and screen signal a potential convergence of the genre of industrial-alternative rock, the cultural history of the concert, the technological history of computing, fans, ticketholders, and critics into the screen as threshold where the fantasy of the artist fades as the body immerses into the screenscape. Reznor canʼt stand apart from the biopolitical field of play; he is always already implicated in it by way of his own onstage screenscape.

121 CHAPTER 5

VIDEO BOARDS AND HANDHELD TELEVISIONS

The US Open in New York is the last major tennis tournament in the calendar year and the single largest annual sporting attraction in the United States. Attendance over the course of two weeks totaled over 720,000 people in 2007 with millions watching (via the television or Internet) across the globe. The US Open occurs onsite, online, and on television. The screen is a key component in each of these platforms, including the geographical space where the US Open has been played since it moved from Forrest Hills to the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows. The video boards, projection screens, television monitors, handheld televisions, computer monitors and interactive displays positioned throughout the venue are where the event comes to life. This chapter expands the scope of my inquiry from the onstage screenscape of the NIN concert focused primary on the staged interactions between the three large screens and the body of Trent Reznor to a corporate sponsored screenscape. The 2008 US Open is an “event” in that it is a popular sporting attraction, but also in the sense that it is a site where intensive processes merge with extensive properties as a virtual becoming. These spaces of intensity are crafted through the anticipation of the actual, even as “the generic or exemplary event is short of actual. It need only be acted. But its acting yields a reality of its own” (Massumi 56). At this event, participants make connections not only to other bodies through the screen. They connect with the screen as simultaneously a technology, a cultural form, and a threshold. By outlining the actual and virtual interactions between spectators and the variety of screens available at the 2008 US Open, this chapter locates a series of privileged moments where the affective modulations of the body connecting to and through the screenscape resonate from within the biopolitical formation of the population.

122 As a corporate sponsored screenscape, the US Open is an annual sporting attraction that weaves into the historical narrative of tennis and, more broadly, national memory that enters into the narratives of technological progress and international cooperation and exchange. Event branding oozes through these narratives and is expressed through the affective bodies of spectators through their participation in the screenscape. The experience of a corporate sponsored sporting attraction such as the US Open is much like living within a cellular automaton, a discrete model that offers a predetermined set of choices that dynamically emerges into a self-sustaining and perpetuating ecosystem. As an event, the design of the screenscape at the US Open anticipates the movements and sensations of the collection of participants as a population. The varieties of screens offer a spectrum of possibilities one can engage with American tennis; the more you pay, the more options available.

Screening the Open The US Open as a competition for amateurs dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. In 1968, it was opened to professional tennis players in what is called the “Open Era” of tennis, and the 2008 US Open was the 40th anniversary.49 With its transformation from an amateur to professional tournament, the US Open became one of four majors in the game. The others include the Australian Open played in Melbourne during the last two weeks of January, the French Open (or Roland Garros) that takes place in Paris at the end of May, and the UKʼs Wimbledon that occurs at the end of June and beginning of July. The US Open marks the last time in the season where the menʼs and womenʼs tours, known as the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) and WTA (Womenʼs Tennis Association) play simultaneously. There are five primary tournaments that take place during its two-week span – menʼs singles, womenʼs

49 See “2008 US Open – Itʼs Showtime in New York” .

123 singles, menʼs doubles, womenʼs doubles, and mixed doubles. There are also boyʼs and girlʼs competitions, seniorʼs match play, and a wheelchair competition initiated in 2005 (USTA 135). Because the history of the US Open plays such a key role in the affective experience of it in its contemporary form, I begin by introducing the event as a multiplatform spectacle of screens. After reviewing the research design and methodology of my ethnographic study, I work through a series of interactions between screens and bodies organized through the type of screen interface. These interactions, in turn, speak to the series of affective resonances that produce a sense of connection.

US Open as Spectacle of the Screen Since becoming a professional tennis tournament over forty years ago, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) has made a concerted effort to transform the US Open into a screen spectacle as much as it is a sporting event. The US Open has introduced a number of “innovations…to Grand Slam tennis [that] have not only played a part in the tournamentʼs growth but have had a resounding impact on the sport as a whole” (USTA 135). Several of these innovations deal specifically with the integration of the screen into to experience of the sporting event. For example, in 2006 the USTA introduced electronic line- calling to the US Open. It involves a challenge system where a player has a certain number of challenges that they can use to question line calls and, if correct, have them reversed. As they are processed, the results are displayed on the video boards for spectators and players to see. Electronic line-calling utilizes “shot spot” or “Hawk Eye” technology where a series of six cameras encircle the court in order to measure the tennis ballʼs trajectory and speed as it comes off of the playerʼs racket. This information determines the statistical probability where the ball is most likely to land on the court with 99% accuracy. While electronic line-calling is only available on the show courts (for matches on television) that makes it a possibility only for higher profile players and matches, its alters the

124 tenor of the game as it unfolds on court and adds a new element of strategy to grand slam or more aptly, televised tennis. Apart from electronic line-calling, the current design of the Billie Jean King Tennis Center contributes to the overall entertainment value of the US Open. The principle show court of the US Open, Arthur Ashe Stadium complete with several giant video boards, opened in 1997 (pop star Whitney Huston headlined the dedication) with a price tag of $254 million dollars and seats 22,547 people with 90 additional luxury boxes making it the largest tennis-only facility in the world. Its completion was part of a $285 million dollar effort to renovate the second show court, Louis Armstrong Stadium, and improve the grounds of the facility. In 2005, the tennis courts were painted blue to make it easier for television viewers to see the ball and in 2007, American Express cardholders attending the US Open where given the opportunity to use handheld television that afforded them televised matches to six courts simultaneously as well as to the oneʼs they happened to be attending. As these types of changes indicate, the USTA is interested not only in watching great tennis, but cultivating a distinct “US Open” experience.50 These efforts to make the event more “screen friendly” hope to draw in as many people as possible to American tennis. In so doing, the USTA attempts to use the screenscape to expand the fan base of the tournament, and it is this potential correlation between the introduction of screen technologies with the management of potential spectators where collective affect modulation occurs. The expanded coverage on CBS, ESPN2, and the USA networks51 coupled with online coverage and the eventʼs sheer size extend the number of potential audiences for the game, in general. The US Open has become an event where

50 Some other changes: the womenʼs final in 2001 between Venus and Serena Williams became the first tennis match to ever air on primetime network television (NBC) in the United States. In 2004, the USTA began the “US Open Series” in corporation with ESPN which tracks the points earned during several second-tier tournaments across the states and in Canada and provides players the opportunity to double their prize money if the winner of the series ends wins the Open, as Kim Clijsters did in 2005 winning $2.2 million dollars, the highest purse ever in womenʼs sport. 51 After 2008, the contract with USA network expired. The US Open now airs on the Tennis Channel, ESPN2, and NBC. 125 nationally and economically diverse groups of people come together to form the (onsite, on television, and online) audience for the duration of the tournament. However, tennis continues to be a “niche status” sport in the United States (Wertheim 66), meaning as the sport has become more global demographically, itʼs popularity within the United States is less visible than in the 1980s and 1990s when Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Chris Evert, and later Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi dominated the sport. Journalist Jon Wertheim astutely asserts, “When economists need a vivid illustration of both the promise and the peril of globalization, they could do worse than study professional tennis in its contemporary state. […] American tennis fans who complain that the sport is dying have it wrong. Tennis isnʼt dying at all; itʼs just moving offshore” (65 – 66). In the United States, the niche status of tennis mirrors trends in consumer behavior that pull people towards specialized and segmented forms of entertainment, with the cultivation of fan communities as the means through which a product, be it a particular brand of cola or television series, can be most effectively promoted (Lotz 41, Jenkins 200). To this end, the US Open has deployed a number of strategies in order to cultivate the active fan base in the United States but also appeal to its international audience, including ratcheting up the organizationʼs website to include real time tracking of a playerʼs progress throughout the tournament, scores, message boards, behind-the-scenes video segments, interactive games, etc. Even as these types of online applications are designed to appeal to a broad range of nationalities and demographics across the globe, the US Open still maintains a “national” character evidenced, for example, in its anniversary celebration and commitment to preserving not only US Open tennis history, but American tennis history, in general. The combination of national and transnational or “global” marketing strategies makes the US Open an ideal site from which to analyze the biopolitical population in relation to the screenscape. The screenscape at the US Open, a local event, holds particular transnational implications for the way in which the sport itself makes claims about its global appeal and universality.

126

Research Design and Methodology This project takes an auto-ethnographic approach, blending participant observation and interpretive textual analysis as the primary methods of analysis. As a participant observer, I attended the event as a regular ticket-holder from the night session on Friday, August 29 to Monday evening, September 1, 2008. The rationale behind attending during this block of time is that during the two week event, the middle weekend running through Labor Day is the busiest time with multiple matches occurring simultaneously on several courts in addition to national television coverage provided by CBS and USA networks. My primary research objectives were to map out where large-scale displays and other kinds of media were positioned throughout the venue, assess the intended function of each screen, and observe the way spectators and participants interact with them in order to examine the cultural effects of integration of screen spaces into an environment. In other words, I observed how the placement and dimensions of projection screens and digital displays alongside onscreen content affects the way people flow through and participate in spaces designed primarily for entertainment. I also noted the regulations and policies affecting the use of personal media during the event. I spoke with a convenient sampling of participants about how they use or have used various media before, during, and after the event.

Screens at the 2008 US Open The types of screens I observed at the venue ranged from large-scale video boards to handheld televisions. There are, of course, screens hidden from the typical attendeeʼs view like computer monitoring stations of surveillance cameras of live feeds from each tennis court in the production room. These interfaces, however, are not designed to be interacted with people who attend the event as a spectator, but by production and security staff. This subsection provides an overview of the variety of screens available for general consumption

127 at the 2008 US Open, beginning at the venue and expanding to include the computer monitor(s) and television set(s) of the at home viewer. It includes discussion about intended usages and relative popularity of the given screen as I observed between August 29th and September 1st. Permanent Video Boards. In 2000, a video board was installed on the outside of Louis Armstrong Stadium; “the addition coincides with a big push to make the US Open a sports and entertainment spectacular, with stars from music, stage and screen performing throughout the event” (USTA 132). When entering into the main courtyard at the Tennis Center, the most prominent screen in 2008 was the video board on the outer rim of Arthur Ashe Stadium. In the South Plaza, a large number of people stand or sit along the edge of the two large, rectangular fountains while others maneuver through the standing crowds forging vein-like paths to their alternative destinations at one of the other courts.

Figure 6. View of spectators watching the video board outside of Arthur Ashe Stadium, picture by author. 128

During the day session, the gathering of spectators in front of the video board is less dense. Presumably, they are grounds pass holders that cannot enter into the main stadium. Instead, they watch live updates and scores of matches taking place within Arthur Ashe and across the grounds on what is officially called the “IBM Match Information Display.” For the night session, those gathering in the South Plaza wait for the day session to end in order to gain entrance into Arthur Ashe. Because tennis is not a timed sport and the line-up is always subject to the possibility of increment weather, the start time of the night session is always only an estimate and, once admitted to the grounds, ticket holders are left waiting for day matches to end in Arthur Ashe, the only show court that features scheduled night matches (Louis Armstrong and the Grandstand have lighting systems for when day sessions run long, but no night matches are scheduled in these locations). The first night I attended the 2008 US Open on August 29th I was a part of this crowd, waiting for admittance after light rains throughout the day pushed back several starts from the day session. The anticipation of experiencing my first match at the US Open, building from years of watching the tournament on television through to my long train and subway rides from Connecticut into Queens, seemed to fade as I stood in the East Plaza Gate in the rain while sounds of tennis being played in Arthur Ashe were projected through the anxious mass of people. After the hour delay, night session ticket holders were finally allowed to enter the grounds only to be made to wait outside the stadium. Announcements apologized for the delay and asked that spectators pay attention to the screen above them. This video board enabled a glimpse into the tennis experience that awaited me. As I sat along the edge of the fountain reading score updates and listening to strangers discuss the decline of Roger Federer (he ended up winning the menʼs singles title) or the comeback of Lindsey Davenport (she lost her third round match that night), my anticipation quickly returned within the temporary community of tennis fans that formed in the shadow of the video

129 board above. I was a part of tennis in a way that I had never been, and that sensation of connection was intoxicating. Upon entering Arthur Ashe Stadium, this communal atmosphere quickly dissolved as people dispersed into the massive number of assigned seats. Within Arthur Ashe Stadium, two giant video boards sponsored by Olympus and Citizen are mounted at the north and south ends of its interior. They serve as scoreboards, video displays for player introductions, on- and off- court interviews, sites for “interactive” entertainment during breaks in the on-court action, billboards, electronic line-calling, instant replays, and live feeds of the match being played (presumably for spectators in the upper rim).52

Figure 7. Video board in Arthur Ashe Stadium, picture by author.

52 In new media studies, the notion of “interactivity” as a unique feature of digital culture is a hotly debated topic. Lev Manovich astutely asserts that all media is interactive by nature of it being media (55). The nature of the interaction, like the call to simultaneously be producers and consumers of media, is what is at stake. 130

Firstly, the video boards functions as scoreboards both on the outside and inside of Arthur Ashe. Like many sporting events, keeping score is of obvious significance. The video board provides a space where the score line can be instantly updated not only inside the stadium, but around the grounds and online for interested parties not attending the event. IBMʼs virtualization technology is the primary tool used by the US Open that generates these automatic updates, with the video board inside the stadium only one of many sites where it can be simultaneously displayed. In this regard, the onsite spectator is not privileged over any body else in knowing who is winning the event as this information is generated instantaneously and is displayed across a variety of platforms. In a way, this is a prime example of Jenkinsʼs notion of “convergence culture” where narratives quite literally travel across multiple media platforms (93), but the “score as narrative” generates from one source – the action on court – rather than being pieced together across these platforms. At the same time, the score is not equally accessible to spectators at each individual match at the US Open. While score updates are broadcast on the video board outside Arthur Ashe Stadium, the feed inside the stadium never featured updates from other matches around the venue. Likewise, scoreboards in the Louis Armstrong Stadium and the Grandstand failed to update spectators on other action around the venue. The spectators within the stadiums themselves are insulated, with the permanent display acting as an information barrier to outside activity. The lack of information about other scores on the video boards inside the stadium isolates spectators from other matches, making it necessary to leave the stadium and enter into the courtyard in order to access the information. Something like the score or a general match update would be vitally important to an attendee at the US Open who has the option to choose which match to attend, especially during the first week of the major. The spectators themselves must actively search out the best viewing experience for the money, and that search is made difficult by

131 the lack of updates inside the stadiums proper. This active search helps control the influx of people into one stadium over another. The differences between the outdoor display of information updates and the audience entertainment produced by the indoor video boards create a clear line of demarcation between spectators who are “in” on the real time action on the main court and those who do not have tickets to the main show court, who can only stand next to it by the fountains and listen to echoes of cheers coming from Arthur Ashe. Yet, this line of demarcation is not as simple as distinguishing between the “live” event and the televised broadcast of it. Within the sacred space of Arthur Ashe Stadium, onscreen content includes video introductions of the event and players preceding their entrance into the stadium, brief interviews before and after the match, and commercials during breaks in the action. These features reconstruct the phenomenal experience of the televisual for the live audience (Lotz 37 - 38). This sense of the televisual is heightened by the distribution of personal radios to American Express cardholders. The program called “Radio Live at the Open” distributes small radio transmitters to select spectators so they can tune into live commentary of the match they are watching in person. Conventionally, a major difference between attending a sporting event in person as opposed to viewing it on television has been play-by-play announcements accompanying the live feed, a convention borrowed from radio broadcasting of sports where the commentary, without visuals, provided the means through which a listener could participate in the live event. These radios alongside the displays on the video board also accompanied by audio tracks (the audio feature is unique to Arthur Ashe Stadium), reformats the experience of the televised event for the eventʼs real-time expression. Besides player introductions and interviews, the video board offers a site for instant replay of especially entertaining or significant points that occur throughout a given match. Another use of the video board is for electronic line calling. For any close call, a player can opt to challenge. The challenge system utilizes shot spot technology or “Hawk Eye” only available on certain “show”

132 courts with closed-circuit camera systems and video displays. Unlike the instant replay system used in the NFL where the referee goes under a “hood” in order to determine whether the correct call was made, the challenge system depends not on a visual evaluation of the play by an official, but the computer rendering that displays on the video board and on the umpireʼs computer display simultaneously. The players, officials, live spectators, and television audience know the result of the challenge simultaneously. When the challenge system was introduced in 2006, live audiences began making a verbal cue as the ball traveled along its statistically projected path through to the point where it landed. This cue consisted of a crescendo of “ahs” leading up to an eruption of cheers at the result of the challenge. Tennis commentators who like the system insist that one of its benefits is that it brings the crowd into the game more directly. The tennis players on court often turned to one of the large screens to see the result of their challenge along with the spectators. Additionally, the video boards inside Arthur Ashe display live action of the tennis match as it takes place on court. Presumably, this feature helps people “see” the live action from the perspective of the on court cameras, especially for those spectators located in the nose-bleed seats in the top ring of the stadium. During the Saturday day session when these seats were sparsely populated, I noticed a woman moving upwards in the stands further away from center court, as opposed to trying to move down for a better view. She explained that the reason why she was changing seats to what was presumably a worse viewing position was that she was trying to see the screen better. The woman moving upwards in the stands in order to clearly view the action onscreen, even while she was at the live event, was utilizing her viewing options made available to her by the USTA. The womanʼs movement towards the screen in the stadium illustrates an attempt to maximize this potential offered through the screen and its capacity to display a live video feed of the event. To experience the event “live” means to see it in person, on the video board. While “liveness” has often been and is still associated with the medium of television (Bourdon 182 – 195), this feature is not

133 constitutive of the medium itself with the predominance of the fictional narrative in the American commercial television industry and its seeming perseverance through the transition from network to post-network era television (Lotz 15) as a case in point. What is intriguing about this incident is that the liveness of the event, for this particular woman, is expressed through her connection to the screen. In order to more fully experience the live and in person action of US Open match play, the woman needed to reorient her body towards one of the big screenʼs installed within Arthur Ashe Stadium. Within this context, liveness is not a narrative characteristic made possible by a particular media technology like the remote broadcasting capabilities of television. Instead, it operates as a key feature of the screenscape that optimizes a spectatorʼs viewing experience. Other types of interactions between screens and bodies offered via the large-scale video boards inside Arthur Ashe occur during delays in the on court action. For example, throughout the first night I attended on August 29 rain delays kept interrupting the match. During one of these delays, Billy Idolʼs rendition of “Mony Mony” started playing and two young women dancing to the song quickly appeared onscreen. After several moments, the live feed cut to a little boy who could have been no more than four years old started mimicking their dance. The interior video screens provided the basis of their interaction with each other. The cross-cutting between the women and boy continued for nearly the entirety of the song, him copying their suggestive dance movements with the rest of the crowd responding via laughter and finger-pointing at the screens and, inevitably, towards the location in the stadium of the two parties involved. The exchange was constituted not through verbal cues, but rather the visual experience of bodies onscreen. “Mony Mony” provided the narrative structure that held the bodily interactions together through to its conclusion of this screen dance, which coincidently featured a close-up of the t-shirt of who is presumably the young boyʼs father that read, “I make cute kids.” In this unplanned moment of spontaneous choreography, individuated bodies entered into conversation through the shared experience of the screen.

134 While the television commentators John McEnroe and Mary Carrillo positioned in a booth below the video board on the south end mentioned on-air that spectators were being amused by the dancing of the boy, this brief interlude during the rain delay brought the people together as a collective. Its formation was precipitated through the connection between the bodies of several key participants through which others where pulled into the scene. This connection forms as two offscreen bodies resonate through the cross-cutting onscreen via the live feeds onto video boards. It could be compared to interpersonal communication via a webcam, but ultimately this incident registered quite differently from remote video conferencing because of how the entire audience was implicated in its continuation (if the interplay wasnʼt eliciting a particular reaction, presumably it would not have continued). Interestingly, the boy and women knew exactly what to do to extend the play for as long as possible, and the increasingly exaggerated movements by the women reflected this awareness. They understood that what made them interesting to the audience as opposed to any other scantily-dressed women or cute children that often appeared on the video board during breaks and changeovers was their call-and- response to the bodily movements of the other. During a changeover once the tennis match between Lindsey Davenport and Marion Bartoli resumed, the boy again appeared onscreen, but that prior moment could not be reconstituted. When he noticed himself on the video board he tried to replicate the previous dance moves, but the intensity of the initial exchange – the sense of connection that was palpably felt throughout the venue – could not be revived. The remainder of the evening and for the rest of my time at the tournament, more typical “crowd sequences” served as entertainment during breaks in the action. These sequences consisted of real time video of spectators within the venue waving at the camera, dancing for it, sleeping, or hiding from it. Each shot lasted for no more than eight seconds, with the sequence typically including two or three different individuals or groups of people. A type of reflexivity is implicit in these acts of self-surveillance when spectators

135 can watch themselves “spectating” onscreen. Especially poignant where those moments when spectators recorded their own images (usually using mobile phone devices) displayed on the video board. Yet, these sequences tease audience members with the possibility of, even so-ever briefly, being “stars” on the video board while only a privileged few end up on the display. Even those narrow possibilities suture eyes to the screen, engendering a sense of anticipation that can palpably be felt. These types of interludes, more commonplace than the “Mony Mony” interlude on August 29, single out bodies from the crowd. However, the terms from which they are selected remain inconclusive. Do any perceptible representational trends in who ends up on screen – well-endowed women, cute children, and famous actors – alter an individualʼs behavior so as they can raise the probability of them being “chosen” by the camera operator(s)? Perhaps, but a more discernable effect is that these moments call attention the screen itself as an object to be paid attention to during breaks in the tennis action. The interludes sandwiched sponsorsʼ commercials and promotional campaigns connected to the US Open sandwiched between these crowd sequences. The video board was prime real estate within the architectural design of Arthur Ashe, and the confrontations between screens and bodies during the crowd sequences provide a means through which the potentiality of that real estate can be maximized.53 Additionally, the screenscape at the US Open expands to include the video boards in New York City. This expansion extends the event from geographical boundaries of the Billie Jean King Tennis Center to include urban space. Large-scale video displays or “urban screens” into public settings “create new sites of negotiation between commercial, public, and cultural interests”

53 There are other permanently installed video boards installed in Louis Armstrong Stadium at the north and south ends of the stadium, the same orientation as in Arthur Ashe. In Armstrong, however, there is no audio corresponding to the on screen images. Replacing commercials and “crowd sequences” between points are less dynamic slide shows. Although Hawk Eye is used in Armstrong, there are no video displays of live action in the smaller stadium. 136 (Auerbach 1).54 In downtown Manhattan, the permanent Chase display in Times Square – one of many permanently-installed screens flickering at the center of New York – featured an advertisement for the US Open. The advertisement featured a simplified, graphic representation of Arthur Ashe Stadium.55 The camera zoomed in towards the statement “Chase is a proud sponsor of the 2008 US Open Womenʼs Singles Championships,” quickly moving through the court to reveal a rectangular “2008 US Open” logo with Chase at the bottom, positioned as sponsor. From the logo, the camera pulled away and rotated to position the logo as one of the two video boards inside Arthur Ashe, with the final shot of the stadium dissolving away into the Chase logo. Portable Video Boards. The portable video boards installed throughout the venue are smaller and closer to the ground – physically more accessible to spectators. One is located in the southwest corner of the Food Village just outside of Court 11, positioned at the edge of the dining area where spectators can watch a tennis match while eating or taking a break from stadium viewing. This portable display, much like the video board outside of Arthur Ashe, offers a site where crowds can congregate and tennis can be enjoyed outside the actual stadiums. Unlike the permanent display at Arthur Ashe, this portable video board is positioned along a sidewalk surrounded by potted plants covering the speakers at the base of the screen. The onscreen content was essentially a raw video feed from Court 11. The audio that accompanied this particular portable video board included “court sounds” of bouncing balls, grunting, squeaking sneakers, and cheers from onlookers. There were no commentary, no commercials, or crowd sequences. During Saturday afternoon on August 30 I ate lunch in the Food Village and watched part of the match on the portable video board. Given its location in the outer portion of the food court along a walkway between the outer courts, the

54 Also see Struppek, 2006 and Slaatta, 2008 for additional readings of the significance of the urban screen, including its aesthetic potential. 55 See video of 2008 US Open Advertisement in Times Square, NY at . 137 picnic tables set along the edges of the pavilion offered spectators the best position to sit and watch the match. Several patrons sitting in this section were watching this particular video board while eating or resting with drinks in hand. Trying to pay attention to what was going on, however, was quite frustrating since a steady stream of people were crossing in front of the screen on their way to anther section of the venue. A passerby would stop and stand in front of the screen for several minutes; their silhouettes blocked a good portion of the view. The positioning of the portable screen created a traffic flow problem as it attracted “mobile” spectators like the proverbial insect moving towards the light. Yet, in the span of time that I observed the situation, the few people watching the tennis match were not angry or upset at these roaming viewers. The audience expectations about watching this kind of video clearly corresponds with the notion of the distracted viewer (Ellis 272) often associated with the consumption of television texts. In opposition to the type of viewer so enthralled with the onscreen action that he or she melts away into the virtual world of the film, a distracted viewer completes multiple activities simultaneously as the medium of television enables. This spectatorial mode corresponds to the type of “text” common for American commercial networks where the standard form introduces elements, like the summary of the plot midway through an episode, that cater to distraction. However, the content on the video board in the Food Village does not match this reading of distraction. The raw feed is essentially an unedited and uncommentated unfolding of the tennis match playing out on the adjacent court, with no additional information except for the score. Yet, admission to court eleven is open, meaning that anybody with a groundʼs pass could attend the match save that seating in the venue is at capacity which, during the high attendance during Labor Day weekend, was possible. Outside of this exception, the portable video board provides an additional viewing option for attendees of the US Open where spectators can choose their level of engagement with the onscreen tennis action. Like the woman moving upwards toward the screen to see better, this display offers

138 another option. The screenscape at the US Open presents a variety of sites where spectators can enter into and immerse themselves in simultaneously the game of tennis and the corporate screenscape of the US Open. A second portable video board located outside of the Grandstand court in Lexus booth adjacent to the East Plaza Gate offers a similar kind of collective experience. The East Plaza Gate is the primary entrance into the Tennis Center as it connects to the Shea Stadium subway line running directly into the venue, taxis drop off and pickup stations and the main parking lots. This display is, quite often, the first glimpse of live tennis a spectator experiences as he or she enters the venue. The onscreen content is, like the other portable video board, a live feed from any one of the courts other than Arthur Ashe, with the only accompanying audio as the “court sounds” from within the match. This also serves as a prime location for player signings, directly in front of the video board. In between the day and night sessions on Sunday afternoon while no tennis players were signing autographs underneath the pavilion, my attempt to watch this portable display was met with several obstacles. Unlike the video board in the Food Village, there was no seating in relative proximity to the screen. The only place a spectator could sit for an extended time was across the wide, entranceway to the Tennis Center on a narrow brick wall belonging to the unfinished indoor facility. The lack of seating surrounding this second portable display, as opposed to the one located in the Food Village, indicates that it is not meant to be viewed leisurely, instead only allowing a momentary glimpse into what awaits the spectators entering the gates. After waiting to enter the venue for the night session on August 29, the placement of the screen had a calming effect to the collection of ticketholders waiting in line. When I entered with this crowd, many people briefly turned their heads towards the broadcast and slowed their pace, walking more leisurely to Arthur Ashe Stadium. While the absence of seating prevented a proper “audience” to form at this screen site, its presence seemed to help the mass disperse and fragment into the veins of the thoroughfare. By showing the impatient scramble of night session ticketholders

139 this video, the video board provides a key element that enables the process of this dispersal to run smoothly. The presence of the portable video board also called attention to the space itself as a promotional display for the Lexus brand. Coincidently, the portable display in the Food Village is sponsored by Lexus, with its logo located at the video boardʼs base. Similar to the Food Villageʼs screen display that sat adjacent to the Lexus-sponsored giant tennis ball, to the right of the video board in the East Plaza was a Lexus automobile car painted yellow like a tennis ball, a free photo opportunity for ticket holders. The screen provides a background for the Lexus pavilion, layering the entire display against the movement of the screen. The dynamism of this area is constructed through the contrasting design values between the moving imagery of the raw feed of a live tennis match on the video board, and the car, tennis players on display signing autographs, people waiting in line – the “real time” elements that enter into the environment Lexus creates in one of the spaces where nearly every spectator must pass. At the same time, seeing the live tennis match onscreen, unedited, made me anticipate the upcoming action on court that I had been looking forward to for hours, well, years. I was close, and the entire Lexus display brought me closer still. The Lexus display represented a layer in the progression toward the “real” event, a screened tease that sutured the brand of Lexus into its becoming at the point of entry, the time and space where my journey into the theme park of tennis began. A third portable display was located outside of the Tennis Center in Madison Square Park. “US Open Live at Madison Square Park” sponsored by American Express brought the experience of US Open tennis into the public venue at no cost. The video board was installed in the back of an open area in the park, flanked by two sets of bleachers, monitoring stations that looked like umpire chairs used on court, and US Open information and souvenir booths. To the left of the set up was a miniature “food court” where a variety of restaurants offered a small selection of catered goods for lunch. On Monday, September 1, I visited the park and mulled around the crowd that had gathered at lunchtime.

140 Ironically, the “US Open Live at Madison Square Park” promotional event offered a more comfortable viewing experience of the US Open than offered at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center. For one, there were fewer people in a bigger space. The shady park offered a pleasing contrast to the extremely hot temperatures of the Tennis Center made more unbearable by the cement landscape. Most importantly, the catered food in the park was far superior (in taste and price) to the generic pizza and Evian water sold for $7.00 each. Really, the only thing missing was the in person tennis action as the display offered live, commentated feed of the premiere matches aired through the USA network.

Figure 8. US Open Live at Madison Square Park, picture by author.

While the video boards within the stadium brought aspects of the televisual into the live experience of US Open tennis, the set-up in Madison Square Park

141 interrupts or “shocks” the daily activities of workers and tourists by inserting key features of the US Open experience, specifically the branding of hyper-mediated spaces, into the routines of the city of New York. The installation and monitoring of the portable video board and additional seating by the USTA provided the key elements around which that shock was structured. Projection Screen. The only conventional projection or “movie” screen in the Billie Jean King Tennis Center was located in the US Open Gallery.56 The US Open Gallery is nestled along the southwest edge of the Louis Armstrong Stadium, adjacent to the Collections Store that sells Nike apparel and underneath the giant drawboard that tracks the tournamentʼs brackets. The gallery featured an exhibition at no additional cost entitled Home Court: The Family Draw open from August 23 – September 7, 2008 and sponsored by the International Tennis Hall of Fame and Museum located in Newport, Rhode Island. According to the promotional materials, “Home Court: The Family Draw provides a heartwarming and entertaining look at the timeless relationship of tennis and family” (onsite promotional material). Some of the artifacts in the exhibit included dresses worn by US Open womenʼs champion Chris Evert made by her mother, clothing of Venus and Serena Williams, and other memorabilia and images from over fifty families in tennis. On the afternoon of Sunday, August 31 I explored the exhibit. Those entering were asked to sign the registry by an attendant, much like a conventional gallery visit and were given a promotional postcard. Almost directly behind the attendant monitoring the exhibit was a projection screen installed along the back wall of the gallery. The space featured several cushioned benches arranged so that attendees could sit and watch. The screen featured interviews with and about tennis families, including archival footage, running on a continuous loop throughout the hours of operation. I was surprised that so few people were in this space, given that is was one of the most comfortable indoor spots in the predominantly outdoor setting,

56 See Walker, 2006 for a reading of the use of screens in a museum setting. 142 essentially the only area where people could explore without expecting to buy some sort of souvenir. The gallery was also quiet, intimate, and cut off from the noise and chaos that filled the crowded Billie Jean King Tennis Center. The lights were dim, the coolness against the heat of the day, the artifacts enclosed in glass, the absence of corporate sponsorships – these features set the US Open Gallery apart from other locations onsite. Yet, the differences between this space tucked underneath Louis Armstrong Stadium and the atmosphere in the rest of the venue made my time in the US Open Gallery somewhat awkward and unsettling. Even though every ticket holder had free access to the exhibition, it somehow seemed rarefied. This difference was, at least in part, the result of the social and cultural expectations embedded into the practice of museum or gallery attendance. A museum or gallery denotes a space of a priori significance, a place for measured contemplation. The elements of the exhibition at the US Open were placed so that an attendee could break away from his or her group and wander through a chronology of tennis, reading about its history on cardboard placards either hung to the side or placed under the glass next to the artifacts. While the distribution of screens across the Tennis Center could be compared to each display in the museum, arranged so that groups would disperse and flow through the entirety of space, the museum offered an experience distinctly crafted to the individual. The aisles were only big enough for one person, or at the most two, to stand, look, and read about an artifact. The video boards either promoted group viewing or, in the case of the portable video board in the Lexus display at the entrance to the park, constituted a real time, virtual, moving background for the tennis event as a whole. The US Open Gallery did neither – it spoke to individuals who, when entering the exhibition space, left the event to learn about the history of tennis as a sport. The gallery initiated a process of individuation that contrasted the group viewing experience that the projection screen offered. The experience of watching the projection screen in the gallery as opposed to the permanent and

143 portable video boards installed around the Tennis Center and New York was unsettling. For one, I was by myself. The moment when I sat down on one of the benches, the man already watching the documentary looked at me, nodded, stood up and left the gallery. While trying to watch the movie onscreen, I caught myself shifting around to look at the few others roaming around the gallery instead of paying attention to the documentary on the history of tennis families. Tennis players like the Williams sisters that were historicized in the exhibition and accompanying film were in stark contrast to my “present” watching their matches on Arthur Ashe the days prior. Also, my attempt to watch the movie in the gallery was quite dissimilar to watching the video boards in Arthur Ashe or in Madison Square Park in part because of the documentary itself. Where the content on the video boards emphasized a kind of “presentness” of the tennis experience within the gated walls of the Tennis Center, the movie in the gallery focused on tennisʼ history. Ironically, the only example of cinematic spectatorship occurs in a gallery space physically set apart from the unfolding event. Ultimately, the projection screen and how it was embedded in the exhibition space didnʼt seem like an extension of the sporting event as a whole, but a counterpoint to it. It was a space for individuals, even as the exhibition space surrounding the projection screen was set up for a group viewing. This claim is accentuated by the fact that, when trying to find clips from the documentary to embed in this section online, all I found were brief descriptions of it using the copy from the promotional materials I received upon entering the gallery. There was only one mention of the exhibit on the 2008 US Open website in a news feed, while a vast amount of video footage from the event was available. This history, the experience of the only projection screen at the US Open, was set apart from the event as a whole with its video boards, televisions, computer monitors, and interactive displays. The body was ejected from the current tournament, where history was being made, to a more static rendering of history already made, a memorialized past rather than a collective or collected memory.

144 Television Monitors. Besides the video boards and projection screen, televisions monitors were also placed around the Billie Jean King Tennis Center. In Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, Anna McCarthy analyzes how the use of television monitors in locations including sports bars, waiting rooms, and restaurants shapes the everyday politics of these and other public spaces. By blurring the distinction between leisure and work, “television shapes time flexibly, in concert with other institutional elements, and according to site-specific cultural norms and protocols” (McCarthy 2: 495). Put another way, the placement and use of television monitors shape the temporal expression of social space. Sporting venues like the Billie Jean King Tennis Center use television monitors to broadcast the “event” in spaces outside of the physical space of the arena, telecommuting the primary attraction across its grounds. During the 2008 US Open, televisions were peppered throughout the venue. As opposed to the projection screen in the US Open Gallery, these television monitors, a combination of cathode ray and flat screen models, occupied the “open air” or “exposed” spaces in the venue. The television monitors had four primary purposes, the first being the approximating of leisure spaces like the sports bar at the food court called the Heineken Red Star Café. In the bulletin “Today at the US Open” published everyday and sold onsite, a section on the food options highlights Café: Located in the South Plaza near Court 7, the Heineken Red Star Café has a sports bar atmosphere complete with television monitors, light snacks, specialty beers featuring Heineken and Heineken Premium Light, frozen cocktails and a full bar –all set outdoors in the middle of the action. (onsite promotional materials) The first element of the atmosphere that the advertisement mentions is the presence of television monitors, distinguishing this “drinking” experience from others one might encounter in the food court or small restaurants onsite. These television monitors at the Café were tuned into the television coverage of the US Open on either the CBS or USA networks. This was unique in the sense that all

145 of the other onscreen coverage of tennis around the venue were live, raw feeds from the various courts. Around the open-air café were upwards of twelve cathode ray tube television monitors positioned along the upper frame of the bar and approximately eight flat screen monitors on the its outside corners. These television monitors were visible primarily to the patrons sitting along the bar. The edge of the roof partially concealed the monitors from spectators outside the Café. Rather than catering specifically to the patrons, the flat screen monitors located on the corners of the Café were visible only to those outside of the actual bar. These flat screen televisions caught the attention of spectators passing through the centrally located area, often with small groups of people forming around the perimeter of the Café. As such, the arrangement of the television monitors connected the people gathering around the space. Those on the interior were fairly isolated, sitting down and drinking their Heineken beers. Deeper inside the bar, however, was fairly calming and restful – quite a strange experience for anyone who has ever ventured into a sports bar during a televised sporting event. Those along the exterior of the open-air bar were much more vocal and active. There was a sense of activity and movement, and it was quite easy to walk up to some of the spectators crowding around the outside of the Café and talk about the match they were watching. This layered arrangement of television monitors provides a means through which patrons are brought into the Red Star Café beyond the product that is being offered, a noteworthy endeavor given the number of choices any ticket holder has once they enter the Tennis Center (including seeing the tennis matches that they paid to see). The flat screen TVs attracted viewers and created a sense of energy and excitement around the entire bar. However, the row of television monitors privy only to the patrons sitting at the bar enabled a discernable distance to form between paying customers, those enjoying both the coolness of an alcoholic beverage and the shade of the roof during the hot midday hours, and those merely passing by. This slight separation kept the hustle of the outside crowds at bay, separating the paying customers and those

146 on the “outside” who were only using the media without “financially contributing” to Heineken. In producing these layers, the placement of the television monitors provided, at least in part, the means through which the population of spectators crossing across one of the main thoroughfares at the Tennis Center could be directed. With its series of television monitors, the Heineken Red Star Café became a central location into which the crowd could be drawn by the flat screens at the corners of the building. At the same time, the crowd would be dispersed by the inner layer of television monitors that pulled paying customers away from the congregation of bodies and into the sports bar atmosphere, an atmosphere generated by the loudness of the people on the outer layer of the Café. A second use of television monitors at the Tennis Center corresponds with the idea of “television while you wait” (McCarthy 195). As a place-based media, “television and TV images interweave with the habitual atmospheres of social space” (2: 494). While television monitors are also contained in the concession booths at Arthur Ashe Stadium, they are mainly located in the tunnel surrounding Louis Armstrong Stadium. Similar to sports like golf, the social conventions of tennis dictate that the crowd must remain quiet during points, as movement or noise could distract players on court. Spectators, especially those located on the lower levels, are only allowed to enter the stadium during changeovers (when the players switch sides of the court) and commercial breaks. This leaves people waiting for the next opportunity to enter, and the television monitors lining the Louis Armstrong Stadium tunnel playing a live feed of the on court match occupies them. They also inform spectators about whoʼs playing and the score. Walking through the tunnel during a popular match, a majority of the spectators in line hover around the televisions forming pockets that others must dodge in order to precede. The cheer of crowd noises from inside the stadium release people from the monitor, signaling the appropriate time to enter (with the help of a steward). In my experience walking through the tunnel and watching along with them, the spectators who wait in these lines were bubbling and excited about

147 entering the lower levels of Louis Armstrong Stadium. Unlike Arthur Ashe Stadium, seating is not assigned so it is possible to get extremely close to the on court action for grounds pass ticket holders. The expectation about being close and hoping to find a good seat combined with the “preview” of proximity offered by the television monitors lining the stadiumʼs tunnels keep spectators from getting agitated at having to wait just outside the stadium. The sets counteract the spectatorʼs focus from waiting in line to the tension of the match. Thirdly, television monitors where used in advertising products. The USTA bookstore primarily pushed one title, The Open Book celebrating the 40th anniversary of the US Open, and the DVD accompanying it played on a mini- television in the booth. The television provided a dynamic backdrop for the booth committed solely to sale of the souvenir book, even as the product was available at other stands throughout the venue. While nobody gathered around the monitor to watch clips from forty years of tennis, it grabbed my attention, if only briefly enough for me to consider what was being sold. Without thinking, when I went to purchase the book on my last day of attending the event I went back to this booth to buy it rather than using one of the other stands where it was also available. The Olympus Store located on the east side of the Stadium Entry to Arthur Ashe also used televisions to help sell products, displaying slide shows of fan and player photos that were available for sale. Between matches proved the busiest time for this booth, but I never saw more than two or three people looking at the onscreen images. In order to access the monitors, the body had to completely enter the booth and pass the hard sell of several Olympus booth workers to see the slideshow that, actually, only provided a random sampling of what was being offered. Personally, this form of marketing made me physically uncomfortable and I never interacted with these particular screens for more than a few minutes of obligatory “research” time. Television monitors were also at the US Open Sports Desk to the west of the Stadium Entry adjacent to the Olympus Store. Player interviews, commentary before and after matches, and news updates about the US Open were recorded

148 for both live and time-delayed television broadcast against a backdrop of fans. Amidst the recording equipment, television monitors were used as teleprompters and video display. Although fans were not privy to their content, the backs of the monitors along with the cameras were in plain view providing a kind of “behind the scenes” experience of the booth as you walked pass. I was surprised the sports desk was so open and available to spectators, especially since they could not clearly hear what was being said. More of a visual than auditory experience, it helped to signal that something of significance was happening, much like seeing a news crew standing outside the gates of your neighborhood or school. However, the “behind the scenes” open view of monitors, cameras, producers and commentators on set seemed simultaneously more permanent and more exposed than the news crew working out of a van. This exposed the process through which sports news is created, implicating fans at the venue within that process as the backdrop or context to the tennis action. Handheld Televisions. A unique feature of the screenscape of the US Open, one that drew me to the event as a site of analysis in the first place, is the free distribution of handheld video devices to American Express cardholders attending the event. Alongside the electronic line-calling system “Hawk Eye” and “Radio Live at the US Open” also sponsored by American Express, the distribution of handheld televisions to fans help shape the image of the US Open as a state-of-the-art sporting attraction. From the time of their introduction, the regular television broadcast features the handheld televisions in a special segment and commentators often mention the devices during match coverage. Additionally, the online video coverage of “fans” at the 2008 US Open devoted an entire episode to the technology and The Open Book chronicled their inclusion as a pivotal moment in the technological history of the US Open. The American Express Vision Live at the Open! booth was located at the corner of Court 11 adjacent to the Stadium Entry and South Plaza. Here, fans must leave a $350.00 deposit on their American Express card that would be cleared with its safe return.

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Figure 9. A fan watching live tennis on a handheld television, picture by author.

The handheld televisions are available for free to ticket holders with American Express cards. They were first made available for free in 2007 (2,000 devices were available to rent), while spectators without a card cannot rent the device even if they apply for one onsite. The handheld video devices are an extension from the American Express promotion entitled Radio Live! offering radios featuring live audio commentary coverage from several courts and broadcast and cable commentary feed. In 2006, American Express distributed 10,000 radios to cardholders. According to the chief executive of the United States Tennis Association (USTA), Arlen Kantarian, the USTA and American Expressʼs use of the handheld television speaks to cultural trends towards handheld devices and cellular phones (Kaplan par. 3 - 5). Similar devices have been used for NASCAR races for fans to watch TV coverage, and NFL fans can rent them to watch Direct TVʼs Sunday Ticket featuring out-of-market games as they sit in the stadium. Kangaroo Media Inc. develops the handheld televisions used by both NASCAR and the NFL, while the US Open turned to WiseDV whose only test run prior to the US Open was a hockey playoff game earlier in

150 2007. The USTA working in conjunction with American Express offered their alternative distribution model that used the devices to promote the integration of the US Open with the American Express brands, especially since renting the devices have not been entirely profitable. The USTA paid to install on-court cameras and radio antennae to support the use of the devices made available by the credit card company. For the US Open, fans with the device have the option of watching one of six different feeds of matches, with one of those options being network or cable feed. Users also have access to player bios and information on the grounds, as well as the Live at the Open! videos featured on the official US Open website that documented the fan experience of the event. Because I do not have an American Express card, I could not rent the device while I was onsite at the 2008 US Open. For me, those with televisions hanging around their necks stood out in part because I really wanted access to one. Instead, I became of the many people who looked over the shoulder of those that did have portable televisions. As such, and in combination with the multiple American Express promotional campaigns and commercials onsite, the televisions seamlessly entered into the visual landscape of the event, extending the possibilities for leisure onsite. In an open, park-like area between Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong Stadiums patrons would lie down or lean against a tree with their televisions in hand watching tennis.

Figure 10. Spectator enjoying tennis on her handheld television, picture by author.

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The portable television set offers a more personal means to view the event as it unfolded in real time, and while this intimacy appealed to this particular spectator, it was one of several viewing options made available. Even though these handheld televisions sometimes sat in spectatorʼs laps while they were at a live match, what American Express offered were viewing options. The American Express, onsite ticket holders at the US Open had the most choices from what perspective the wanted to watch the event, be it live or experienced through the handheld television, radio, or the permanent and portable video boards located around the venue. Outside the Billie Jean King Tennis Center, the handheld televisions help construct a discourse about the US Open as technologically progressive and state-of-the-art through commentary and features about the device available online and through the regular television broadcast. The handheld television brought cardholders, specifically, into this narrative. Mobile Phones. While handheld televisions were technologies only available to a select group of onsite participants, the USTA developed applications specific to mobile phone technology to be used by spectators on- and offsite. Onsite, spectators used their mobile phone to record video of the live event and, of course, to communicate with the “outside” world. As a spectator and researcher, I used my mobile phone to take still and moving images, also making brief notes about my observations of the event. For both on- and off-site fans (although the service was only valid for United States mobile numbers), the USTA offered instant text messaging to those who signed up using the instructions found on under the heading “Mobile”. To sign up, users entered their number and chose what types of SMS alerts they wanted to receive including general information (breaking news and TV tune-in alerts), a daily recap (menʼs, womenʼs, doubles and mixed doubles draws), and live scores for selected players. Those visiting this page were also informed about the “2009 Mobile Marketing Sweepstakes” where users could send a text message with “win” in the body to a 5-digit number [45748] or enter via postal mail in order to

152 win a 3 day/2 night trip to the 2009 US Open as the grand prize or tickets for a second place winner from a drawing. Besides text messaging and the individuated uses like video and telecommunication, an advertisement about the US Open featured the screen interface of the mobile phone. An online commercial for Ralph Lauren Polo, a major sponsor, proclaimed “A New Era in Mobile Video Technology” illustrated by video of a tennis player on the screen of the mobile phone. From the image, the advertisement asked users to “Shop. Read. Watch” and to visit on your mobile phone. The final shot displayed the US Open logo with image links to the Ralph Lauren website. The online commercial highlighted the mobile phone not only as an interpersonal communication device, but a screen technology capable of capturing moments like a professional tennis player in action. Ironically, this action mimics one of the primary ways people used their mobile phones onsite at the event. Computer Monitors. Although the handheld television extends the viewing options of select ticket holders to include the networks and cable feeds as well as additional live feeds of select matches across the venue, the USTA prohibits regular ticket holders to bring laptops into the venue limiting Internet accessibility to those with PDAs or similar devices. While done in the name of security, this limited accessibility appears to counter the commitment of the USTA to sell the US Open as cutting-edge, technologically speaking. It creates a type of “digital enclosure” unique only to Flushing Meadows, especially since usopen.org plays a pivotal role in selling the US Open. Digital enclosure is “the creation of an interactive realm wherein every action and transaction generates information about itself” (Andrejevic 2). For Mark Andrejevic, the idea of enclosure recalls the land enclosure movement where boundaries where drawn land became subject to private control in Europe, bringing about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In a similar vein, digital enclosure draws boundaries of accessibility with the terms of entry including “submission to always-on, location-based monitoring” (2) and, like capital, initiates the formation of two “classes” – those

153 who control virtual spaces and those whose participation is monitored in those spaces. While the Internet is a prime example of a digitally enclosed space, the USTA attempts to create an information barrier surrounding the event. Every piece of information tethers back to the event, and getting outside of it while on the premises of the Billie Jean King Tennis Center seemed almost impossible save for those with PDAs. In order to gain admission to what is seemingly the most “sacred” element of the US Open, the live experience of tennis, spectators must surrender their ability to “leave” the event on their personal computers. The USTA offers only one highly monitored site in prominent display where people can go online.

Figure 11. Surfing the web at the Polo store, picture by author.

In the Polo store, users can log on to the Polo website to browse and/or order products at one of the two relatively large and “public” computer monitors at the front of the store flanking the registers. While in the store, however, I observed two children trying to go “off-site” presumably to other websites while their guardians shopped. This stolen moment in the Polo store was brief, as they

154 navigated back to the approved Polo site as an employee clad in Polo attire approached the register. Advertisement Displays. Staff members monitor all other computer stations, including those used for advertisement displays. These displays or “booths” functioned much like carnival games at a circus or fair, but instead of winning a stuffed animal after paying to play, participation was “free” while the prize was simultaneously an advertisement for Lexus, Evian, or Valspar. They integrated several types of screen technologies in order to offer an immersive experience for fans where advertisements attempted to make spectators into participants. Peter Lunenfeld distinguishes between “extractive” as gaining access to information, and “immersive” as navigating through simulated space; “instead of a text-based experience aimed at finding and connecting bits of information, the goals of the immersed user will include the visual and sensory pleasures of spatial exploration” (Lister 22). While the notion of interactivity in new media studies refers to users taking a hands-on role in the production and consumption of texts (as opposed to a more passive specatorial position as with the cinema or other forms of mass media), immersion speaks to the degree to which a spectator or user is implicated in a screenscape whether that screenscape is entirely onscreen as is the case of a video game or at a shopping mall or downtown NYC. Several advertisement displays offer varying degrees of immersion so as to enable attendees to navigate through the physical and virtual spaces of the US Open as a form of “branded entertainment” (Lotz 173 - 179). At two Lexus photo stations, attendees could have their picture taken at no cost in front of either a giant tennis ball with the Lexus insignia or a Lexus car painted like a tennis ball. The “camera” included an Internet-enabled large touch screen display and scanner where the photographer could take the image, scan the card to associate a particular photo identification number with the image, and upload the image online to be accessed. After the picture was taken and processed online, participants received a branded plastic card that could be worn around the neck with instructions on how to reach the website using the photo

155 identification code. Users could then visit the website and surrender personal and demographic information in order to be able to view the digital image. This photo acted as evidence that, yes, I was there at Flushing Meadows as opposed to watching on television or online and, yes, Lexus sponsored the event. For me, the actual experience of waiting in line to have your picture taken by a giant tennis ball or painted car seemed awkward because it transformed the US Open into something generic and crass. The fact I had to wait to access this souvenir photograph created even more of a distance between me and the Lexus sponsored digital image to the extent that I waited several weeks after I returned home from the US Open to actually download my image and, by that point, the digital photograph had been removed. While the Lexus photo stations captured the participant immersed in the onsite branded entertainment experience of the US Open, the temporal distance required between the actual photo and its digital form as well as the generic background of the images interrupted my individuated experience of the US Open by reminding me that I was one of thousands that had the same card, the same digital image, the same memory of the US Open. Evian, a major sponsor and sole bottled water provider, sponsored an advertisement display enabling participants to make their own Evian commercial. To bring people into the booth, one attendant misted those passing by with Evian water after asking permission to do so. Likewise, the Evian spray was the primary product people “sold” in their commercials. Once in the booth, participants could choose one of three different commercial scripts. The attendants ushered the participant(s) onto a green screen set where they read off lines from a teleprompter while holding a giant tennis racket and/or an Evian water misting device. The background was keyed in before the video was uploaded to the website, but spectators outside of the booth could see what the final product would look like on monitors outside of the participants view. Similar to the Lexus photo stations, participants were given a card with a video code so they could download the file at after surrendering personal and demographic information. Several times I passed

156 by this booth located in the South Plaza behind Court 13 and, unlike the photo stations, saw only a few participants. As I made my own commercial on Labor Day, notably the busiest day of the entire two weeks, I asked the booth workers about the number of people who made their own Evian commercials. After looking strangely at each other, they said they had made a hundred or so videos over the course of the entire week, not a particularly large amount of participants given the number of spectators. This lack of activity could be contributed to a number of factors including the time it took for people to make their own commercial and the marked strangeness (at least this was the case for me) of speaking on behalf of a product I was really not emotionally invested in save for my generalized irritation at the cost of water at $7.00 a bottle. Although each of the three versions of the commercial featured a slightly different script, they all referred to James Blake (a male American tennis star) needing hydration or cooling off during the US Open. Rather than immersing spectators into a navigable environment, the green screen and teleprompter created a space away from the crowd and seemed to single individual bodies out as “spokespersons” from the population of tennis fans. Ironically, the advertisement display asked participants to take on the role of a tennis player like James Blake who make their money promoting brands in conjunction with monetary prizes and in doing so, briefly interrupted the sense of connection to other fans as opposed to the players who remain spatially separated from a majority of the ticket holders.57 The advertisement display by Valspar Paint featured a Wii-like interactive game onsite at the US Open and online version available at a micro-website attached to the Valspar Paint website. The content of these onsite and online games echoed the “Valspar Paint Performance Challenge”. In each city where a

57 See the following videos made by fans in the Evian booth and posted online: “Brianne and Heather Promote Evian” ; “Simoneʼs Evian Commercial” ; and, “SpoonEllenʼs Evian Commercial” . 157 US Open Series tournament was held leading up to the US Open, fans signed up to try and hit as many targets as possible on court. The top winner in each major market won a trip to New York where they competed against each other on Arthur Ashe Kidsʼ Day preceding the start of the US Open. The winner of this round advanced into Arthur Ashe Stadium where she competed against Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Rafael Nadal and Lindsey Davenport on national television. The online version had the same objective, the difference being the “racket” was controlled by arrow keys rather than a physical racket as game controller. For the Wii-like interactive video game, participants could swing a tennis racket to hit virtual targets on a flat screen monitor and rate themselves against others. The advertisement display seamed together the online game with the “Valspar Paint Performance Challenge”. The video game offered players the opportunity to actually swing a racket at the US Open through the screen at the Valspar Paint Booth. The booth was located adjacent to the ATP Booth at the corner where the South Plaza Gate, where the stadium seating for courts 10 and 13 creates a corridor where the Davis Cup Trophy and Court of Champions Display are located for public view, becomes the South Plaza. The famous statue of Arthur Ashe is also located at the same intersection as the Valspar Paint Booth, visually connecting key figures in the history of tennis like Arthur Ashe to the line of people waiting to play the game at the advertisement display. Interestingly, the only product a participant received was the experience of playing the interactive video game – of playing tennis (at least in a virtual form) at the US Open. This somewhat unique experience, as opposed to a photograph or commercial, is what Valspar Paint brands and sells in its onsite booth. Taken in its entirety, the US Open as experienced in Flushing Meadows and through the variety of spectators can use to experience to the event creates an immersive environment where spectators seem to be pulled into the world of tennis. These advertisement displays seem more like interruptions to that experience, briefly making spectators into participants. Yet, the content of the displays reinforce the US Open as a form of branded entertainment. As the line

158 between spectators and participants becomes ever more slippery in these examples, especially the Evian “Make Your Own Commercial” promotion, the bodies of participants likewise form a site where the US Open can brand not only players, but fans. The variety of screens utilized in these advertisement displays facilitates the formation of the screenscape where such a transformation may occur. Screens Onscreen. Extending beyond the monitored gates of Flushing Meadows, a majority of spectators experience the US Open through the television coverage on CBS and USA. Before the start of the 2008 US Open, the USTA announced that NBC, ESPN and the Tennis Channel would cover the event starting in 2009, making the 40th anniversary of the US Open the final year CBS and USA would cover the event. In 2008, the Tennis Channel featured a documentary series “Only at the Open” discussing the careers of John McEnroe, Steffi Graph, Jimmy Connors, and Chris Evert to name a few as well as key matches like the legendary meeting between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi where each of the four sets ended in a tie break. The hundreds of hours of television coverage over the course of two weeks represent millions of screens tuning into view the US Open with the screenscape of the event onsite continuing to take center stage. Throughout these many hours of coverage, the broadcast on both CBS and USA featured the screen technologies including the permanent video boards and handheld televisions. Most notably, the introduction and conclusion of the broadcast featured an iconic shot of Arthur Ashe Stadium with the permanent video board in full view. The camera would zoom towards the video board and transition to the on-air introductory segment also featured onsite on the video board. Handheld televisions were featured in its own documentary segment and also in cut-away shots during matches. The coverage included a discussion and live views of the screen installation at Madison Square Park as well as the US Open advertisement in Times Square. These moments of screens onscreen highlight the depth of the screenscape as it unfolds through the event in formation.

159 Like the television coverage, the official website of the US Open 58 extends the event to those with access to the Internet and a computer monitor, laptop, or device like a PDA capable of web browsing. The website featured applications that enabled those offsite to immerse themselves in the event including the Slamtracker, Pulse, and the two online series, “Explore the Open” and “Live at the Open”. Slamtracker updates scores during the match using IBMʼs virtualization technology that syncs the score as recorded by the official umpire of the match to the website, television, and scoreboards located throughout the venue. This technology disperses data to various sources seemingly instantaneously, and the quickness of the score updates through the Slamtracker makes the event seem more immediate to those accessing it through the website. Developed in conjunction with IBM, Pulse is an online game offering users the opportunity to make “live predictions on matches as they unfold”. Integrated with the USA network, the “Pulse Pundit” allows users to answer questions about the current match with television commentators responding to user opinions on-air and “Pulse Commentator” featured live text updates from on-air commentators. “Explore the Open” is a documentary series hosted by Murphy Jensen providing a behind the scenes and around the grounds look at the US Open, with an episode airing online each of the fourteen days of the tournament. Most segments focused on fan experiences and sponsor promotions, like the best view from the court or Evianʼs recycling campaign. Day 10ʼs episode entitled “Anything But Ordinary” featured a segment about shot spot. As Jensen checks out the seating availability, he turns around to get the “replay action” and the camera tilts to the video board on Louis Armstrong showing a computer-generated replay. The next segment included an interview with a computer technician, wearing Polo attire, who helps to run shot spot. During the interview, he sits in front of several computer monitors. “Live at the Open” combined interviews from tennis

58 <2008.usopen.org> is the archived content from the 2008 US Open. 160 players, officials, and fans as well as commentary and match previews.59 A new edition aired live at the top of every hour while the grounds were open up until the start of the night matches, from 11am to 7pm. Additionally, website users could listen to live commentary, watch live streaming of matches not featured on the television broadcast, and download podcasts. The live streaming of matches became especially significant when, as a result of a rain delay, the USTA streamed the menʼs singles final between Roger Federer and Andy Murray on Monday as opposed to Sunday afternoon rather than broadcasting it on television. Watching the final match online was far different than watching it on television, simultaneously less grand and more intimate. I watched alone in my office, archiving it using a video camera positioned in front of my computer screen. Although the actual match was difficult to view given the low resolution of the live streaming, this blending of television and online coverage of the US Open culminating in the live streaming of the menʼs final – typically the most watched match of the entire event – recognized the loosening of media boundaries between television and the Internet. Instead, the final match typified the interplay between screens and environments that characterizes the screenscape. The actual content of these texts attempted to capture the fanʼs experience of the US Open as a mixture of the actual and virtual. The results of this mixture depend on the orientation of the spectator in relation to the unfolding of the event. Implied Screens. The US Open also had screens that were implied but not actually present. For one, a featured souvenir at the US Open was a DVD trivia game about US Open tennis. Players watched DVD clips on their screen of choice (connected to a DVD player, of course) in order to answer questions and advance. Olympus handed out fans in the shape of tennis rackets with the message to “get screened”. In this example, the implied screen is the physical body as it is being tested for medical conditions. A commercial airing on the USA

59 See Berland, 2008. 161 network during its US Open coverage featuring one of its major sponsors, Valspar Paint, positioned the natural world as a series of mutable surfaces. As part of the “Colors of Nature” campaign, the advertisement featured pieces of squares cut out from mountains, lily pads, the ocean. While these squares represented Valspar paint chips, they approximated the visual appearance of the image plane both interrupting and contributing to the continuity of the landscape. The variety of screens at the US Open, from video boards to handheld televisions, did just this, break up physical space while simultaneously contributing to the overall screenscape of the 2008 US Open.

Biopolitical Consequences As outlined in the above discussion of my ethnographic approach, I observed the variety of screens available for general consumption. The differences in size, location, and medium specificity of the screen interfaces resulted in a variety of bodily interactions for myself and for those I encountered both on- and offscreen during the course of my research. The geographical arrangement of screens in space anticipates how people are supposed to move and interact, and the political economic infrastructure that financially supports the US Open invests in this type of virtuality. Spatially, screens formed a type of traffic control for bodies moving throughout the venue. As such, they offered a type of interval training for the population. The variety of screens at the US Open affected the movement of bodies almost like traffic signals, the flash of color triggering habituated responses at the scale of the affective body. The collective affect modulation of the sense of connection folded into the experience of tennis experience as a whole, defined not only by the sport but by the United States Tennis Associationʼs use of screens both onsite (like the permanent video board at Arthur Ashe Stadium and American Express sponsored portable televisions for cardholders), offsite (like the portable video board in Madison Square Park or the computer monitor used to view the menʼs final event), and a combination of the two (offered through the portably of mobile phones) as critical points or

162 thresholds where the event transforms into simultaneously an entertainment spectacle and corporate sponsored screenscape. The aggressive branding of both sponsors like Lexus and Evian and the US Open filtered through this screenscape, providing the space through which bodies connected to the event in its entirety. Through the screenscape, the brand enfolds into the formation of the population as an affective intensity. The brand becomes part of the new continuity created by the screenscape as it evolves across space and through time. The construction of this screenscape anticipates the movements, interactions, and the narrative expectations of spectators attending the event. While these reactions are not all the same, while the perceptions of the onsite spectator who is also an American Express cardholder, for example, is much different from the grounds pass holder not allowed to enter Arthur Ashe stadium, the collective affect modulations experienced by the variety of bodies resonate from within the population. The American Express cardholder has the opportunity to watch the same broadcast of the event as those at home through the distribution of the technologically and promotionally innovative handheld television that becomes a narrative component of the US Open, watching the coverage in one of the several leisure areas around the Billie Jean King Tennis Center. The grounds pass holder without a handheld television sees another version of the event, perhaps participating in any one of the advertisement displays during a lull in the tennis action or looking at the updates on the permanent video board outside of Arthur Ashe Stadium. Through the consumption of its screenscape, the US Open offers any number of personalized experiences of American tennis in action, its history and its future as directed through the USTA. The type of the screen crafts the embodied experience, and the “choice” on how to enter is what counts as self-expression. In the corporate sponsored screenscape of the US Open, everyone who attends agrees to the terms of entry. People come to watch tennis, but to do so means to simultaneously consume the screenscape. The screenscape enfolds

163 bodies within the constitution of the biopolitical population of control, but it also enables the body to interact with technology in politically and ethically productive ways. Most significantly, the screenscape asserts a materiality of the screen. This study is not one of ideology, of a hidden materialism masked by imaginary relations. Instead, the screenscape manages, distributes, disperses, and displays biopower simultaneously at the scales of the body and the population. It situates the screen as something other than either a technological Savior as Satan of modern progress, a dialectic that commentators on new media and popular culture so often fall into. The screenscape recognizes itself as a cultural form in constant formation that shapes the spatial relations of the virtual. The variety of interactions that this chapter outlines, modulations within the unfolding of the event, anticipate connections between bodies with the materiality of the screen. Through the permanent and portable video boards, the handheld televisions, the screen of my laptop – I felt a connection to them just as much as the people displayed on them. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, Walter Benjamin asserts that art is the interplay between nature and humanity; “The function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily” (108). Film, rather than debasing culture, offers the opportunity for humans to confront the power of the apparatus and adapt to the “new productive forces” that technology has unleashed. To be a cinematic spectator means to witness the capitalist formation of the mass. The screenscape offers a similar opportunity, but by other means. To be a part of the screenscape means to move past the humanness of humanity and enter into a political ecology where humans and technology evolve together (Latour 9 - 52). The human does not control the evolution of the screenscape, nor can the screenscape impose its will on humanity. Rather, it creates an opportunity for human beings to recognize the expanding role the screen plays in their lives, at simultaneously the scales of the affective body and the biopolitical population – to be connected to the screen because it connects the bodies together and hails

164 them as a collective. The screenscape makes visible the mechanics of biopower, even if only temporarily. It acknowledges the transformation of body to screen, the impossible struggle of the artist seduced by the screenscape, or the corporate influence in its unfolding. This is the threshold, the horizon of possibility that the screenscape presents.

165 CONCLUSION

NEXT TIME ON

This dissertation identifies a paradox embedded in the screen as a cultural form: to enter into the screenscape means to affect and be affected by the biopolitical population as it weaves into and informs the logic of cultural production and consumption. In order to make this claim, I begin by defining the screen as a cultural form and offer my reading of the threshold. After tracing the conceptual meanings of affect and the population and their connections to the study of biopower, I present three primary examples where I explore the interactions between bodies and screens. The first focuses on the onscreen screenscape of the television series Dollhouse, the second on the onstage screenscape envisioned by Trent Reznor for the Lights in the Sky tour, and the final example of the US Open approaches the screenscape as an event unfolding onsite, on television, and online. To clarify, screens are not just spaces where change happens. They enable change. The screen has the capacity, as both a technology and cultural form, to transform geographies – to influence the dynamic connections between affects, populations, and social spaces that unfold temporally as well as spatially. The screenscape is a concept that represents this transformation in its becoming, signaling a shift in the perception of time and space. The screenscape is a collection of discourses about the screen as a cultural form, but the interplay of screens also serves as an ever-evolving map that traces the affective resonances of the biopolitical population in formation. Methodologically, for these case studies I implement a combination of interpretive textual analysis and ethnography in order to analyze the phenomenological, discursive, and geographic significance of the screen. Interpretive textual analysis offers the opportunity to articulate how texts make meaning through their content and form, while an ethnographic approach enables

166 an exploration of the phenomenology of the screen, the patterns and rhythms of cultural expression. This blending of ethnographic and textual approaches speaks to the scope of the screenscape that appears onscreen and as a part of physical landscapes or built environments, both as a text with content and form and as a component of contemporary culture. The biopolitics of the screen, its production of continuity, occurs on and between screens within the constitution of the actual through the virtual. The combination of approaches also offers a broader and interdisciplinary evaluation of the cultural dimensions of affect because it forces the simultaneous consideration of content and context. This methodology attempts to dig out interpretative textual analysis and ethnography from their structural roots and read them as the means through which affective modalities can be located, even if only temporarily. My analysis of the television series Dollhouse traces the differences between reading the screen as a frame as opposed to a threshold. I begin with Dollhouse because it illustrates how the expansion of the screen as frame into the threshold is being worked through culturally in a televisual text. In other words, the idea of the screen as threshold that acts as the central component of the screenscape can be located in the discourses about the limits and possibilities of biotechnology in American popular culture. As a frame, the screen functions exclusively as a container of onscreen content. In Dollhouse, the doll is likewise a frame for the personas imprinted onto the brains of actives. Their bodies, theoretically at least, act out these personas. Like a screen, their bodies mediate between the actual and the virtual. Yet, the dolls also do more. They retain affective markers from the imprints. The dolls creatively adapt to situations, pushing the parameters of the imprint and taking the engagement in a direction the neither the programmer nor client often intends. They are thresholds. Secondly, this chapter parses through the connection between the body and screen, illustrating how both are implicated in the otherʼs evolution. This connection between the body as screen (or screen as body) is important in order to begin to appreciate the biopolitical underpinnings of the screenscape. The

167 bodies of the dolls are more than blank slates; they are sites of translation and transition – spaces of intensive change. The subtle difference between the doll as blank slate or container of information and the doll as a site of translation or transmission represents the expansion of the definition of the screen to include its capacity to intensively change. As such, the doll (specifically Echo) functions simultaneously as both an affective body and biopolitical population. The screen enables collective affect modulation, both onscreen and through the screen of the television. Dollhouse created a myriad of affective intensities as demonstrated by the intense fan reactions to the series. While the blogs of fans registered a disgust at the themes of the show, their objections also resonated (albeit unconsciously) with the construction of the body as screen implicated in its own exploitation through its capacity to affect and be affected. My discussion of Trent Reznor and the Nine Inch Nailʼs Lights in the Sky tour is an interpretive textual analysis in that it focuses on the formal elements or visual components of a live event, but is auto-ethnographic in that it involves my own responses to it as a spectator of this event. The introduction of three stealth screens as the primary setting for the second half of the concert temporarily transforms the stage into a staged screenscape. Because the audience remains physically separated from this staged screenscape, the concert offers the opportunity where the screenscape can be analyzed at an aesthetic distance similar to the modern art object on display for consideration and critique. At the same time, the audience is also implicated in the screenscape through their engagements with their portable screen technologies that capture the performance and distribute it online “officially” at NIN.com. At the concert and in his politics regarding the open distribution of materials like concert footage and his own recordings of tracks, Reznor positions himself as an artist who mediates between his onstage screenscape and audience. Quite literally, he is a mediator who speaks for the creative rights of his fans and against the powers-that-be, i.e. the music industry, which value profits over artistic creation. Yet, like the body of Echo in Dollhouse, when Reznor enters into the screenscape he transforms into

168 something else. His onstage interactions with the stealth screens, the game of hide-and-seek and play of responsivity, are moments when the physicality of the body and the materiality of the screen merge together as a dynamic threshold. The transformative potential of the screenscape are on display at the concert, just as much as the live performance of Nine Inch Nails. The hope to record such an event by the audience implicates their bodies in this onstage unfolding. As the screenscape expands, Reznor transforms from an individuated onstage screen spectacle to another body in flux caught up in the formation of the population. His specialness as an artist dissipates, or rather modulates, into a collective expression of the fan community and culture. I approached my study of the US Open primarily through an ethnographic lens by collecting as much data as possible (including interviews) during my attendance at the event, participating in activities offered for spectators both onsite and online, recording its live broadcast on three channels during the entire two weeks, and archiving websites like usopen.com and other articles related to the event. Through the amount of information an attraction like this generates is astonishing, I resisted approaching this chapter as a textual analysis of these various components like ethnography often does. Instead, I offer my own experiences with the screenscape at the US Open in order to explore the affective relations between screens and bodies, including my own. I trace the managerial function of biopolitics, recognizing how the real estate of the screen manages both the movement of physical bodies around the venue and the affective capacities of participants. This process enabled through the screenscape is flexible in that it is not a space defined exclusively by the sociality of humans, but also through the screen as threshold. The potentiality of the screen transforms the body into a population ready and waiting to be affectively managed and secured. The interplay between bodies and screens, like the episode with the little boy mimicking the dancing women through the video board in Arthur Ashe stadium, created a sense of anticipation built on the expectation of being seen onscreen. The looming presence of screens throughout the venue

169 served as reminders of this expectation, simultaneously crafting the live experience of tennis through the layers of screens affectively connecting the Billie Jean King Tennis Center and the screens deployed around New York with the version of the event offered online. The screen as threshold enables the corporate branding of the event to transform and expand across a collective and collected viewing audience. While the screenscape in this and the other two case studies might seem a biopolitical tool that saturates and works through bodies as a means of control, and it is, it also asserts the materiality of the screen apart from humanist essentialism. The potential to move beyond the great battle between humanity and technology and enter into a shared constitution, an ecology, is what the screenscape offers for those that can perceive it as a site of and for collective affect modulation. As a whole, what is at stake in these three case studies of the screenscape are the limits of mediation in cultural studies, the biopolitics of the threshold that produces a new continuity between screens and bodies, and the materiality of the screen that asserts a kind of technological agency apart from human intervention. Firstly, I consider what media do other than mediate. This might sound strange, but is significant in that the process of mediation, like the idea of the screen as frame, fractures social space into constitutive dialectical parts. In other words, focusing exclusively on mediation tends to reify the boundaries or “margins” post-structural theories critique. Instead, I start with an object of study that has, at least in its modern context, always been a boundary or “frame” between two qualitatively unique spaces and explore what else the screen does. This shift holds major implications for the study of representation, where the break between the actual and virtual is always already implied methodologically and discursively. Representations stand in for things themselves, creating discourses that circulate culturally. The screenscape is a discourse, as illustrated by the chapter on Dollhouse, but it also modulates and manages affective intensities. These intensities are not discourses, but the virtual web that determines the limits and possibilities of perception and experience.

170 The screen as threshold represents a site of transition where the actual and virtual come together in a biopolitical field of play. As such, the screenscape is an assemblage of screens and series of spatial relations that play out actually and virtually. Here, I imply the emergence of a new continuity built through the collective affect modulations of the screenscape. In Dollhouse, this continuity manifests as editing transitions and the transformation of the body into a screen and the collection of screens into a body. Trent Reznor, representing the contemporary artist, seamlessly enters into a screenscape that he creates but cannot control. The variety of screens at the US Open provide multiple sites where spectators can enter into the event in its unfolding. Yet, the screenscape transforms their collective participation into a means through which the population can be managed and controlled. In each example, the screen exists not only as a discourse or concept but also as a material reality and physical object. At the US Open, screens are the things spectators must circulate through, watch, and hold in order to fully participate at the sporting attraction. Reznor plays a game of hide-and-seek in the hopes that the materiality of the screen responds to his own physical presence, while Dollhouse offers an anamorphic representation of the screen. The screen as threshold encompasses this materiality in relation to a bodyʼs capacity to affect and be affected as a collective, but it derives from the potential of the screen as a technological entity apart that is social and not socially constructed in its entirety. This capacity informs the biopolitics of the population in the context of popular culture. Because this project outlined three specific cases, I want to conclude by mentioning some paths not taken that pertain to this research trajectory. Perhaps the most obvious space where the screenscape has taken root that remains unexamined in this project is in the technological imaginary of video games. For example, the survival horror game Dead Space uses a series of holographic projections to access player information as opposed to the conventional heads- up display. Living paintings, interactive maps on transparent displays, and

171 architectural screen-walls inhabit the recent release of the hybrid role-playing game (RPG) and shooter Mass Effect 2. Another approach to the study of the screenscape in video games would be to look at the relationship between gamer, controller, console, and game as it forms through the screen. Xboxʼs “Project Natal” due out at the end of 2010 introduces a controller-free experience where a player uses his or her bodies to play. In a similar vein, it could be fruitful to trace the representations of the screenscape in a genre like science fiction where the holographic display was commonplace decades ago. These imaginings potentially shape todayʼs technologies of the screen. Or, explore the idea of the interface as it plays out in popular culture. Although I alluded to it in the first chapter, another possible line of inquiry would be the drawing out and defining of a “screen industry” built around the transformative qualities of the screen as threshold. This might entail a return to cinema to look at the return of 3D as one of several viewing options, for example, or the installation of video boards and urban screens for a variety of purposes. I could visit the screenscape of Avatar or the urban screens currently under construction in London for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Additionally, the path of this scholarship might include a more intense focus on advertising or cross- cultural considerations of the screenscape. There is also room in my study for deeper histories and geographies of television, of musical performance, and of sport that I downplayed in favor of capturing the screenscape in its formation. The screen as a cultural form moves through flows of production and consumption; it gains or loses value, acquires meaning or drops out of fashion. The screenscape is pivitol in understanding contemporary culture because through it space and place, global and local, and micro and macro meet; it is a site from where one can consider the cultural formations of the biopolitical population at the scale of affective bodily capacities, pulling large-scale structures into a local experience. My dissertation focused on outlining the conceptual parameters where a critical analysis of the screenscape from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives may occur.

172 APPENDIX A

IRB APPROVAL MEMORANDUM

From: Human Subjects Subject: Use of Human Subjects in Research - Approval Memorandum Date: July 30, 2008 3:27:32 PM EDT To: Katheryn Wright Cc: Amit Rai

Office of the Vice President For Research Human Subjects Committee Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2742 (850) 644-8673 · FAX (850) 644-4392

APPROVAL MEMORANDUM

Date: 7/30/2008

To: Katheryn Wright

Address: 2203 W. Pensacola St, Apt. F5 Tallahassee, FL 32304 Dept.: INTERDISCIPLINARY HUMANITIES

From: Thomas L. Jacobson, Chair

Re: Use of Human Subjects in Research The Screen as Threshold: Critical Approaches to the Media Ecology of Screen Technologies

The application that you submitted to this office in regard to the use of human subjects in the research proposal referenced above has been reviewed by the Human Subjects Committee at its meeting on 07/09/2008. Your project was approved by the Committee.

The Human Subjects Committee has not evaluated your proposal for scientific merit, except to weigh the risk to the human participants and the aspects of the proposal related to potential risk and benefit. This approval does not replace any departmental or other approvals, which may be required.

If you submitted a proposed consent form with your application, the approved stamped consent form is attached to this approval notice. Only the stamped version of the consent form may be used in recruiting research subjects.

173

If the project has not been completed by 7/8/2009 you must request a renewal of approval for continuation of the project. As a courtesy, a renewal notice will be sent to you prior to your expiration date; however, it is your responsibility as the Principal Investigator to timely request renewal of your approval from the Committee.

You are advised that any change in protocol for this project must be reviewed and approved by the Committee prior to implementation of the proposed change in the protocol. A protocol change/amendment form is required to be submitted for approval by the Committee. In addition, federal regulations require that the Principal Investigator promptly report, in writing any unanticipated problems or adverse events involving risks to research subjects or others.

By copy of this memorandum, the Chair of your department and/or your major professor is reminded that he/she is responsible for being informed concerning research projects involving human subjects in the department, and should review protocols as often as needed to insure that the project is being conducted in compliance with our institution and with DHHS regulations.

This institution has an Assurance on file with the Office for Human Research Protection. The Assurance Number is IRB00000446.

Cc: Amit Rai, Advisor HSC No. 2008.1536

174 APPENDIX B

SAMPLE PARENTAL PERMISSION FORM

My name is Katheryn Wright. I am a doctoral candidate from the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Florida State University. Your child is invited to be in a research study about the use of advanced media at the US Open. I ask that you read this form and ask any questions you may have before agreeing to allow your child to take part in this study.

The study: The purpose of this study is to understand if and how people, including children, use the advanced media technologies implemented at the United States Open. If you agree to allow your child to take part, your child will be asked 2-3 questions. As example of these questions include, “do you watch the big screen during the tennis match?” The interview will take no more than five minutes to complete.

Risks and benefits: There are minimal risks and no benefits to you or your child if he or she takes part.

Confidentiality: The records of this study will be kept confidential, to the extent permitted by law.

Voluntary Participation: Your childʼs participation in this study is completely voluntary. Your child may skip any questions he or she doesn't feel comfortable answering. The researcher for this study is Katheryn Wright. You may reach her at (850) 559-5681, or [email protected]. Please feel free to ask any questions you have now, or at any point in the future. If you have any questions or concerns about your child's rights as a research subject, you may contact the FSU Institutional Review Board (IRB) at 850-644-8633 or you may access their website at http://www.fsu.research.edu.

Please enter your child's name and sign below if you give consent for your child to participate in this study.

Your child's name: ______

Your signature______Date ______

FSU Human Subjects Committee approved 7/9/2008. Void after 7/8/2009. HSC#2008.1536.

175 APPENDIX C

SAMPLE CONSENT FORM

You are invited to be in a research study about the use of advanced media technologies at the US Open. You were selected as a possible participant because of your position with the United States Tennis Association. I ask that you read this form and ask any questions you may have before agreeing to be in the study. This study is being conducted by Katheryn Wright, Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Florida State University.

Background Information: The purpose of this study is: to understand how media technologies are used during the US Open.

Procedures: If you agree to be in this study, we would ask you to do the following things: answer several questions discussing the function of media at the US Open.

Risks and benefits: There are minimal risks and no benefits for the participant.

Compensation: There will be no compensation.

Confidentiality: The records of this study will be kept private and confidential to the extent permitted by law. In any sort of report we might publish, we will only include your name and position title with the USTA and not any other personal information about you. If you do not want your name to be included in the final report, please initial below.

Voluntary Nature of the Study: Participation in this study is voluntary. If you decide to participate, you are free to not answer any question or withdraw at any time.

Contacts and Questions: The researcher conducting this study is Katheryn Wright. If you have questions, you are encouraged to contact her at (850) 559- 5681 or [email protected]. The supervising faculty member for the research project is Dr. Amit Rai, who can be reached at (850) 645-1459 or [email protected].

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this study and would like to talk to someone other than the researcher(s), you are encouraged to contact the FSU Institutional Review Board (IRB) at 2010 Levy Street, Research Building B, Suite 276, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2742, or 850-644-8633, or by email at [email protected].

176 Statement of Consent: I have read the above information and have been given the opportunity to ask questions about this research. I consent to participate in the study.

______Signature Please initial here if Date you do NOT want your name to be included in the final report/publication

______Signature of Investigator Date

FSU Human Subjects Committee approved 7/9/2008. Void after 7/8/2009. HSC#2008.1536.

177 APPENDIX D

SAMPLE ASSENT FORM FOR MINORS

My name is Katheryn Wright. I am a student researcher from Florida State University. I am asking if you would like to take part in a research study called “Screen as Threshold”, and is about understanding how media and technology works at the US Open.

If you agree, I will ask you two or three questions about what you like to see on the digital televisions at the US Open, if the movie screens make everything fun for you, and what else you like to do for entertainment here. This study will help me see how different people use technologies.

I have asked your parents to give their permission for you to take part in this study. But even if you parents said “yes” to this study, you can still decide to not take part in the study, and that will be fine.

If you do not want to be in this study, then you do not have to participate. This study is voluntary, which means that you decide whether or not to take part in the study. Being in this study is up to you, and no one will be upset in any way if you do not want to participate or even if you change your mind later and want to stop.

You can ask any questions that you have about this study. If you have a question later that you did not think of now, you can call me at 850-559- 5681, or e-mail me at [email protected].

Signing your name at the bottom means that you agree to be in this study.

______Name of child (please print)

______Signature of Child Date

FSU Human Subjects Committee approved 7/9/2008. Void after 7/8/2009. HSC#2008.1536.

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196 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Katheryn Wright graduated in 2002 from Stetson University (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) with a BA in English and Fine Arts (Ceramics). She attended graduate school at Florida State University, with her primary research and teaching interests in media studies and modern culture. While there, she earned her MA in Humanities (2005) and two graduate certificates in Editing and Publishing and Digital Video Production. Katheryn created courses entitled “New Media in Theory and Practice” and “Television and Culture” offered through Interdisciplinary Humanities at Florida State University. She taught additional classes in multicultural film and core humanities ranging from the medieval period to contemporary culture. She served as the managing editor for the e-journal InterCulture (2007 – 2009), coordinated and co-founded the academic conference InterDisciplines, organizing “Inter-disciplining the Body” (2006) and “Ecologies” (2008), and directed the Association for Interdisciplinary Research (2006 – 2008). Katheryn published an essay entitled “Urban Screen as Virtual Counterpoint” (December 2008) in the peer-reviewed journal Rhizomes and currently has several articles either under consideration or in progress. She presented papers at the National Communication Association, Popular Culture Association, UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium, and the FSU Film and Literature Conference. Additional interests include graphic design, drawing, writing, editing, tennis, television, good books and tasty food. She currently lives in Tallahassee, FL with her husband, Clinton Bryant, and dog, Ella Noel.

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