Overhead modernity: airplanes, skywriting, and heterotopia in the sky

Abstract

Screenology, or Media Archaeology of the Screen, has occupied me for over twenty years. I am more and more convinced that its investigations must be taken far back in time and also beyond the Western world. Media screens can be understood as dedicated artifacts that are distinct from the forms and contents that keep appearing on them. In brief, they are interfaces that connect the close and the remote, the present and the absent, the material and the discursive. To understand their genealogy from extended spatiotemporal perspectives, it is important to pay attention to “screen-like” things that may not even have been called “screens”, “écrans” or “Leinwands” by their creators and users. One example of such screen-like objects that commands attention are the “screens” produced in East-Asian cultures like Japan and China since times immemorial. They have specific histories, interconnections, forms, iconographies and uses. Although such objects do not seem to match the later Western idea of media screens (their decorations and the pictures they carry are permanent), they deserve attention from a screenological perspective not only as what they are, but also because they became integrated into the cultural, political and economic processes that brought different parts of the world together. We can talk about “traffic in screens”, which has become an extensive phenomenon. Oriental “screens” were transported to different parts of the world, including Europe and Latin America. They became submitted to cultural trends and were given signification by the receiving cultures. Obvious examples are the Western trends Chinoiserie and Japonisme, which saw these “screens” in very different ways compared with those who had conceived and produced them. Western “Orientalist” (E. Said) interpretations influenced how these objects were seen in the environments where they had been produced. In this paper, I will suggest that making sense of such cross-cultural exchanges will add important insights to our efforts to understand the formative developments of media screens from perspectives that go beyond Western views and ideological formations.