ABSTRACT
John Durham Peters invites a rethinking of the optical and environmental duality of the screen by examining media practices that link projection to protection and showing to shielding. The ontological ambiguity of the screen—at once a site for the representation of a world and a real element embedded in the world—enables one to think of media as a key part of what Peters calls ‘infrastructures of being’. Outlining the historical convergences between cultural practices of targeting and visualizing in Western history, Peters weaves together a rich and unexpected set of voices from the onset of the ‘atomic age’—from James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov to Harold Edgerton and Norbert Wiener—illuminating the connection of detonation to image-making across photographic, filmic, televisual, and celestial screens.
