Screen Bodies

This issue of Screen Bodies begins with a group of three articles that examine the representation of women in recent horror cinema with an emphasis on the experience of female embodiment in late capitalist society. Megan Kenny's “All I Wanna Do Is Make a Meal of You: Feminist New Wave and the Rise of the Cannibal Woman” is a significant contribution to the growing scholarship on Barbara Creed's theory of the Feminist New Wave and its central figure, the monstrous-feminine. Kenny offers an incisive reading of three films—Trouble Every Day (Denis, 2001), In My Skin (de Van, 2002) and Raw (Ducournau, 2016)—that have also been associated with French Extremity, or what Tim Palmer calls “cinema of the body.” Each film focuses on the awakening of the female protagonist and uses cannibalism as a metaphor for women's transgressive desire, pleasure, and the exploration of identity. Creed argues that Feminist New Wave films feature a heroine's journey of confrontation, revolt, and self-transformation. Kenny shows how these films diversely deploy the figure of cannibalism to represent the lived experience of womanhood in capitalist society and the characters’ revolt against it.

The Feminist New Wave refers to a movement defined by Creed as films directed primarily by women that explore central female characters in revolt against patriarchal values challenging what it means to be a woman under these conditions. Three films are explored in this article; Trouble Every Day (2001), Dans Ma Peau (2002), and Raw (2016), films that can also be classified under the French Extremity movement. All three films focus on a woman's cannibalistic awakening, using cannibalism as a metaphor to explore wider social concerns. This article explores how the cannibal trope is used to interrogate the experience of being a woman under capitalism, the impact of cannibalism on social bonds and the interconnection between sexuality and cannibalism.

In Coralie Fargeat's 2024 film, the titular “substance” is a seductive product that promises Elisabeth Sparkle, a fitness instructor and television icon played by Demi Moore, a “younger, better, more perfect” you. Fargeat's film is the first of its kind to use body horror as a powerful condemnation of the ever-accelerating commodification of women's appearance under late capitalism, and the violence inflicted on its constituents. This article explores a history of feminine expression of violence inscribed on the self through art and film, especially in the New French Extremity. Turning to a discussion of the abject and the monstrous-feminine using the work of Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed, this intervention shows how Fargeat's deployment of body horror graphically brings into sharp focus the violence of the ideal female commodified body, ending in an explosive confrontational indictment of what Laura Mulvey calls “to-be-looked-at-ness.” This article seeks to complicate and elaborate on the accelerated commodification of the female body as demonstrated by Fargeat's mobilization of the body horror genre.

As one of the most notorious franchises in horror history, Saw has been the subject of public discourse since its debut in 2004. While some ponder Jigsaw's morals and appreciate the movies’ emphasis on the necessity to be grateful for one's life, others dismiss the franchise as “torture porn,” simply created to satisfy the wants of a depraved, primarily male audience. Women's presence throughout the films brings up several questions about gender representation: Is the mutilation of women's bodies for the male gaze inherently harmful? How do female figures in the series both play into and subvert stereotypes and tropes in the genre? In what ways have the films influenced societal perception and successive works’ portrayal of women? The Saw movies walk a fine line between creating strong female representation in the horror space and playing into stereotypes and exploiting female suffering for profit, ultimately doing more harm than good.

Claire Denis's 2019 film High Life follows inmates on death row on an interstellar journey tasked with the mission of energy extraction from a black hole. The world of High Life lies at the end of the trajectory that Achille Mbembe might call “becoming Black of the world,” whereby logic of anti-Black dehumanization that manifests in the history of slavery to carceral politics reaches its end, and life itself becomes instrumentalized: every aspect of the prisoners’ life is under exhaustive control, as they head toward certain death with the sole purpose of exhausting another stellar phenomenon of its energy. This article offers a reading of High Life as a film that uses the director's characteristic emphasis on the body to counter the politics of exploitation and control that shapes its narrative. In particular, the article examines the black hole and the imagination of its explosion as facilitating a redistribution of sense and epistemological possibilities in a world becoming Black.

Comparatively analyzing the representation of bodies in atomic bomb films, Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023) and Women in the Mirror (Kagami no onnatachi, Yoshida Yoshishige, 2002), this article examines how the aesthetics of cinema can intensify the spectator's ethical experience. Yoshida argues that the ultimate ethics in cinematic aesthetics lies in how filmmakers formulate cinema as an open text. However, are open texts possible? Can images be autonomous? It is possible to leave an image's meaning undecided and ambiguous, but does that mean this image is open as a text? Can a viewer freely interpret the image? If a film is read beyond or irrelevant to its context, should such freedom be allowed? Even if open texts are possible, is such an action to make open texts ethical, especially when those texts are regarding atomic bombs? This article explores how to answer these questions.

In Black Mirror's episode “Be Right Back” (2013) and Spike Jonze's film Her (2013), protagonists Martha and Theodore suffer the loss of a romantic partner and are therefore prone to seek the company of advanced machines in order to work through their trauma and to alleviate their loneliness. Portraying human–robot relationships as an increasingly accessible, collective experience, “Be Right Back” and Her operate on a dialectic between embodied and digital space, in which performance is key. I demonstrate how this dialectic complicates the human–robot relationships once the machines no longer fulfill the humans’ desires and how both “Be Right Back” and Her use this supposed distinction between the embodied and the digital to self-reflexively discuss the immersive performative qualities of television and film.

Melodrama can be a productive genre for excavating and troubling social categories beholden to white heteropatriarchy, but the genre's disruptive power is not typically extended to trans films. Rather than utilizing melodrama's archetypal emotional spectacle to draw attention to genders’ incoherence, mainstream cinema relies on melodramatic tropes and sentimental pedagogy to engender pity for the preternaturally melancholic trans figure. Anxiety about the trans body, whether personal or cultural, therefore becomes the definitive mode for representing trans experiences on-screen. Given the genre's transnormative history, in particular its ambiguous treatment of trans femininity, how might filmmakers reclaim melodrama's critical social voice in service of a more radical trans agenda? And how might interventions by other spectacle-driven genres, like the musical, facilitate a more productive engagement with trans culture?

In survival horror games, the player is supposed to win by surviving but in Red Barrel's 2013 game Outlast, that is not the case. In building an argument from Frantz Fanon and queer gameplay studies, I propose that Outlast subverts typical gameplay mastery of winning to subject player embodiment to Black memory and Black suffering through playing wretched. I contend that with playing wretched, the player does not become Black but experiences the structural positioning of blackness through the game's restrictions of player agency and the abject violence the player-character undergoes. The game engulfs the player within a narrative that draws from painful histories in the United States, like the 1932 Tuskegee Study, to remake the player into a tool of decolonization. The game and its use of player embodiment upends what it truly means to survive after enduring trauma, after playing and being played as one of the wretched.

Scientia Sexualis Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, California, USA) 5 October 2024 to 2 March 2025

This is the tenth year of Screen Bodies’ publication and I am pleased to introduce a collection of articles that are worthy of this anniversary, as each is an exemplar of the kind of excellent scholarship we feature. The issue opens with a group of articles that examine representations of the self at the intersection of social media, literature, and performance. The first two essays consider social media poetics as a form of life writing that critically engages with concepts of the self—its limitations, possibilities, and social construction.

On social media sites, both digital bodies and user to user experiences continuously destabilize the binaries life/death (or living/dead). The slippage of life/death digital social media members experience is made particularly salient in Sally Wen Mao's poem “Live Feed.” In the poem, the unnamed speaker is a personified piece of uploaded information—a nonliving actant—circulating in a social network's live feed, the place where information is devoured. I define this experience as “zombie hunger” as it applies to digital social network use and develop better language to trace self-representation on Facebook and Instagram and the material, embodied, and laboring human/nonhuman forces that allow for this body of knowledge to be accessible.

This article examines some of the self-portraits that Inès Bouallou, a young, Moroccan autodidact, has posted to Instagram. Bouallou sometimes calls her posts “autopoetry,” arguably one of autotheory's related genres. Through the lens of autotheory, which couples autobiography with theory, this article analyzes three features of Bouallou's autopoetic practice. She often cites literature alongside her self-portraits, thereby creating a dialogue between others’ words and her own life. In addition, Bouallou's self-portraits stage performances that put the self's coherence and stability into question. Finally, her photographs depict provocative instances of self-care, moments when the artist takes care of another incarnation of herself. Ultimately, this article aspires to inform autotheorists and others in the Global North of a comparable practice in North Africa.

The spectacle of war in the US-Mexico border is ubiquitously projected onto the screens that mediate our daily life, so that the screen (and the process of screening) becomes part of the discourses and material conditions of colonial capitalism, structuring our relationships with our and Other bodies. Xandra Ibarra's video performance in La Corrida and Carmen Maria Machado's short story “Difficult at Parties” explore the possibilities opened up by glitches in the screen that expose the violence mediating our collective entanglement. In these stories, illegibility or “undocumenting” becomes a means toward refusing the logic of the border and its role in the production of (the spectacle of) war.

Experiment No. 27 and others are each multiscreen choreographic components of the installation Cinematic Experiments. Comprising projections, floating sculptural doors, frames and mirrors configuring architectural viewing portals, it spanned fourteen rooms in a shopping arcade pop-up. It was presented by The Substation at Altona Gate in Dance Massive, Naarm, Melbourne, Australia (2019). This article presents my research and insights on the process and outcomes of practice-based experiments. The creative practice integrates multiple disciplines, including media theory, film studies, dance studies, philosophy, and phenomenology.

This article explores Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff through Ursula K. Le Guin's The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction emphasizing its subversion of traditional Western genre conventions. Reichardt reimagines the pioneer journey as one of ambiguity and collective struggle, focusing on marginalized perspectives and everyday labor rather than heroic conquest. Employing a slow-cinema aesthetic, the film critiques settler-colonial narratives and amplifies the voices of women and the more-than-human world. Through an interdisciplinary lens, this study examines how Meek's Cutoff functions as a counter-history, interrogating the genre's nationalist and patriarchal underpinnings. The findings highlight the potential of cinematic form to foster feminist and ecological ethics, challenging dominant storytelling paradigms while offering space for alternative narratives and embodied experiences.

Although Westworld (2016–2022), HBO's television series, was from the start about infection and contagion, its approach changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article aims at determining the impact of the coronavirus crisis on the perception of the posthuman body in the fourth season of the show. Symbiosis between man and machine is made more horrifying by the post-COVID reactivation of fear triggered by zombie tropes and by the uncanny effect of machine vision, propelled by the coronavirus crisis. The use of flies even makes the posthuman body abject, its leakage is no longer bearable. As bodies become obsolete, however, the viewer does not feel the joy of transhumanists but is led to mourn the world of the past.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a condition that results in the slow deterioration of a person's memories and eventually their cognitive function. As this condition is so feared, there are several stigmas surrounding the disease. This article focuses on how neurogames, games that focus on neurological conditions where players play as either the patient themselves or alongside them and are developed for educational and entertainment purposes, may help address these stigmas and provide new means for expressing selfhood and consciousness. Before I Forget (2020) by 3-Fold Games, focuses on Sunita, a woman who has AD. The narrative of Before I Forget pushes back against AD stereotypes and re-centers the story to focus on Sunita and her relationships, rather than just her illness. Approaching neuorgames through the medium of hypertext emphasizes the gap-filling required by the player to understand the representation of AD symptoms and complicates the idea of selfhood with AD.

This article examines Timothy Crick's notion of the game body, thinking beyond the visuality that defines cinematic “film body,” an embodied subject–object that mediates the sensation of a film to the viewer. Examining Silent Hill 2, a game that resists legibility and indexicality, this article argues that the “game body” is mediated through substances. Silent Hill 2’s uncanny appeal to place memory demonstrates that there is an ontological distinction between the player's body and the game body, requiring a degree of translation to the experience of sensing virtual space. The player's contact with sensation is modulated according to factors like temporality, interactivity, and memory, all of which vary and alter the player's experience and can imbue the game body with motility. This article demonstrates that a more complex model of the game body is necessary to account for the dynamic created by embodiment games and the game body.

This exhibition review of Kara Walker's Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) interprets how Walker frames the Black body as a literal and figurative entry point to the cultural institutions that form American identity. The exhibition interrogates histories of epistemic violence that marginalize Black people within discourses of Western humanism, situating Black bodies in symbolic opposition to the Human, while simultaneously in conceptual resonance with other nonhuman entities, such as the machine and the automaton. Within her “Immortality Garden,” Walker envisions the possibility of the not-quite-human as a timeless and urgent provocation to reassess the value of the Black body and the uncanny ability to create spaces of freedom amid technologically enhanced and institutionally compromised environs.

Violet Lucca, David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2024). $50.

Welcome, readers, to the final installment of the ninth volume of Screen Bodies. We are pleased to present an issue that features such theoretically rich and diverse approaches to media studies. The first three articles in this issue focus on digital and internet culture, examining the social relations fostered by augmented reality and social media.

This article reimagines discourses around race and gender within collaborative cultural productions by investigating how trauma is computed via visual images and human-computer interactions. I argue the use of digital collaborative formations—particularly that of oppositional writing in socially mediated spaces—provokes modes of encounter that enact a shared distributed experience of different ways of printing new paths in and out of trauma. By analyzing the digital storytelling taking place in “Breonna's Garden,” an augmented reality application that tells the story of Breonna Taylor, I clarify how digital technologies serve as an avenue for transformative recoding of the mechanisms of racialization.

Twitter's 2015 change from the star to the heart button caused many participants to antagonistically respond. This modification was supposed to enable participants’ easy and frictionless engagements. Nevertheless, it caused friction, including journalists’ identification as dismissed super users who were contaminated by the heart's feminine references. I employ close reading to study news stories, posts, and Twitter's narratives about the buttons. I cite academic scholarship on friction, feelings, buttons, and gender scripts as a means of arguing that Twitter's heart button was sometimes understood as frictionless, but it was also refused because of negative connotations. While such scholars as Sebastián Lehuedé and José Medina argue that individuals can employ friction to intervene in intolerance, my humanities study underscores how gender and sexuality norms are reproduced.

This article interrogates how TikTok has become a voice of authority in the self-diagnosis of ADHD and builds on theories of social, cultural, and algorithmic authority, to offer a theoretical framework of “techno-cultural authority”. Through a digital ethnography and analysis of ADHD TikToks and the technological infrastructures and assemblages surrounding the TikTok app, I demonstrate how ADHD TikTok content creators adopt visual and discursive norms from other trending TikTok content and traditional visual media content to generate authority, and to ensure their videos are deemed viewable and relevant by viewers and the algorithm. Contrary to traditional understandings of medical authority, I find that authority on TikTok is not produced by individuals or institutions, but rather by content creators who engage, en masse, with the supporting technologies of the TikTok app to reproduce familiar trends and visual norms.

This article explores women's re-appropriation of the national discourse of history and heritage in contemporary China. Examining women artists’ recreation of Silk Road heritage objects, I demonstrate how they produce a new narrative of women's time that, in turn, generates an alternative form of agency. In remaking the figure of the feitian (apsaras) from the material heritage of the Silk Road, as represented in Dunhuang Buddhist art, Chinese female artists offer new ways to understand the position of women in Chinese historical cultures. The artists tell these stories not in a linear sequence, but rather via the thick surface assembled with objects—the materials of statues and cyborgs—and human flesh. Based on interviews with the artists, a visual analysis of three artworks in relation to critical race theories (Cheng), and queer theories of temporality (Freeman), this article discusses forms of femininity, agency, and time.

In the early 2020s, queer cannibalism rose in significant popularity with films such as Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All (2022). This article investigates this growing phenomenon of queer cannibalism in horror films as a mode of articulating queer desire and isolation. It poses the question, when queer stories are intertwined with cannibalistic tendencies, what does the consuming of human flesh determine about their existence? Through a queer and feminist theoretical lens, I outline the social, cultural, and political influences that construct particular narratives through an analysis of Bones and All (2022). As a result of this analysis, I locate the uses of queer cannibalism in horror media as a means of rejecting oppressive social and cultural constructions of desire as well as its operating as a method of articulating a desire for acceptance and, in many instances, love.

Anxieties generated from the challenges of sustainable and equitable societies and the hopes for transcending routes through uncertain times have often found their paths crossing within the motion sequence of the dystopian car chase on film. Each decade has met this crossing—of frightening futures and fleeting freedoms—with its own set of driving rules and transport-based dimensions. From Mad Max's original release in 1979 to the most recent Death Race installment, Beyond Anarchy, in 2018, the dystopian car chase on film represents vehicles of vision, in which races for the drivers’ survival, personal freedom, community, meaning, and humanization provide the chance to transcend, even if temporarily, the audiences’ existing fears of the future ramifications of their present societies.

This article examines the series Tiger King through a Marxist lens, challenging prevailing capitalist narratives. It explores how the show provides a metanarrative of the present, critiquing capitalist values and exposing their illusory nature. By dethroning the Tiger King and questioning the legitimacy of meritocracy, it reveals the underlying dynamics of capitalist social relations characterized by lies, deception, and savagery. While not immediately leading to class consciousness or Marxism, the show lays the groundwork for this framework. The article also contemplates the potential rise of authentic class consciousness beyond capitalist triumphalism, sparked by widespread dissatisfaction as reflected in social conflicts. Ultimately, it suggests that Tiger King serves as a microcosm of broader power struggles, hinting at the possibility of impending class consciousness and class struggle.

We are pleased to present an excellent collection of articles that represent the newest directions in what Barbara Stafford called “body criticism.” The authors in this issue of Screen Bodies work in diverse fields and employ a wide range of methods, but all share a concern with spectatorship and the ways that the effects of screen-based technology are mediated by the body. This research centers women and offers advancements in feminist film theory, posthumanism, and studies of the horror genre.

In recent years, many scholars of performing arts, cinema, and mass media have been focusing their studies on the body, examining the perception of the physical experience of projection and connecting bodily states with spiritual and ethical constructs. The purpose of this article is to present how cinema and performance can utilize the body in ways that enhance the audience's empathy. The role of cinema is to enable the viewer to liberate their body from its “individual ownership” and to rediscover its potential. Similarly, performances challenge the audience to respond with their bodies to the stimulation of certain emotions, experiencing a pure sensation through participation. However, experiencing empathy, a viewer can impose their ideas or reactions onto the experiences or emotions of others, believing that what they are experiencing is what others experienced.

Building on Paul Schrader's thesis in Transcendental Style in Film that immanence and transcendence clash, this article explores a departure from this binary in Jim Jarmusch's 2016 film, Paterson. Although Paterson follows the formula of transcendental cinema, it lacks Schrader's prerequisite “Decisive Moments” for transcendence. I contend that films can evoke transcendence without distinct release moments, as exemplified by Paterson. To support this, Paterson is contrasted with Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 masterpiece, Tokyo Story, identified by Schrader as quintessentially transcendental and a key influence on Jarmusch. Introducing the concept of “immanent transcendence” to describe Paterson's unique position, I argue that transcendence and immanence can coexist. I challenge traditional notions of transcendental cinema, shedding light on cinematic experiences that bridge immanence and transcendence.

This article examines the inter-subjective touch in Ildikó Enyedi's film On Body and Soul (2017), employing a phenomenological approach by analyzing the aspects of horror, pleasure, dreaming, and breath. This film recontextualizes horror and reaffirms pleasure through the inter-subjective touch. The binary setting between the dreaming world and the waking world, through the perception of touch, is used not to disdain the cruel reality but to arouse inter-subjectivity. The representation of breath illuminates another tactility regarding spatiality and inter-subjectivity. I argue that On Body and Soul constructs layers of tactility and inter-subjectivity between the film and the spectator; the two protagonists (Mária and Endre); human and non-human; dreaming and waking; and mind and body.

French film director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau's sophomore body horror film, Titane (2021), like its predecessors of the same genre, examines the malleability and fragility of human corporeality. The film can be categorized under the New French Extremity, a genre coined by art critic James Quandt, who disapprovingly expressed his concerns with the rampant depictions of blood and violence in film; however, this article contends that Ducournau's film offer much more than mere shock factor and spectacle of taboo objects. Featuring a protagonist who is a manifestation of Donna Haraway's radical cyborg, Titane can be situated alongside recent debates in posthuman concerns, but more importantly, in its intersection and close connection to feminist and queer discourse. Although many have utilized Julia Kristeva's abject/-ion to examine the horror film genre through a feminist lens, this article seeks to expand on such existing literature by pointing to its emancipatory powers and its potential for a more inclusive, posthuman queer mode of being and kinship beyond the symbolic order.

Posthumanism stands as a complex and interdisciplinary intellectual movement that challenges and broadens conventional notions of human identity and existence, particularly in light of advancements in science and technology. It emerged in response to the swift evolution of technology and its profound impact on our understanding of what it means to be human. Embarking on a posthumanist inquiry, this research delves into the rich fabric of Charles Stross’ Singularity Sky (2003), meticulously unraveling the complexities of human transcendence amidst advanced technology. The article's objective is to unveil the nuanced layers of the author's exploration of posthumanist ideas. The analysis explores the dynamic interplay among characters and their technological surroundings, emphasizing moments where the amalgamation of humanity and cutting-edge technology acts as a catalyst for transcendence.

This article looks at how the “anorexic condition” gained public awareness through popular culture, specifically in the United States and Hong Kong, and argues that the 1980s saw the beginning of anorexia awareness-raising in the American public, contributed by the untimely death of Karen Carpenter and the rapid expansion of consumerism. It uses racial, feminist, and disability theories to interrogate how their intersections defined and continued to shape anorexia. It examines the paradox that popular culture could be the very same agency that creates both such oppression and the “redemption” of its problematic consequences. This leads to a critical evaluation of the nature of popular culture, its influence on young people and their body image, and its prevailing influence on global society.

Asian women are often marginalized in global contexts, and they are often disembodied or presented in sexualized images in film and television productions. Even in the Asian region, Asian women have difficulty giving themselves a voice in popular culture. This essay has selected three films and tends to explore the gender connotation, body, and sexuality in the film works of East Asian female directors in recent decades, with the intent to explore the female sexual desire that is expressed and reflected in those female directors’ works.

The main object of study in this research is the cutting of the female body in cinema. In order to simplify and rationalize such a broad and diffuse concept, it is necessary to redesign a methodology of analysis valid for the object of study at hand, which will be called the Triple Cut. This will advance self-referentially, as if it were Russian dolls, from the cut of the real itself, passing through the cut of the plane (or between planes) or the absence of the same, until arriving at the cut of the flesh itself. This is where the bodies end up being dismembered live in front of the camera's lens, pouncing like pieces of meat on the—willing or unwilling—audience.

This issue of Screen Bodies features articles that contribute to a group of closely related critical concerns, namely, the existential and political significance of tacticity, feeling, and the representation of embodied experience. In her article, “Feeling Like Death,” Caitlin Wilson examines the aesthetic strategies Agnes Varda employs in two early films, La Pointe Courte (1955) and Le Bonheur (1965), that emphasize “textures and tactility” in the portrayal of mortality, death, and mourning. Wilson shows how Varda uses haptic imagery and calculated cinematic techniques to convey an experience of grief that is “palpable as well as visible.” Wilson persuasively argues that Varda depicts the embodied feeling of mortality to create a heightened sense of intimacy between the films’ characters. Similarly, in her timely article, “Gut Feelings,” Jennifer Jasmine White argues that Sheena Patel challenges the trend towards emotional indifference or “flatness” in the emerging genre of “internet novels.” In contrast to the affectless, numb, and apathetic heroine characteristic of novels like Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts (2021) and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Patel's I'm a Fan (2022) features a more realistically emotional protagonist. White argues that the novel functions as an intervention that opposes affective indifference and the political apathy it inspires. She writes that most examples of the so-called internet novel, that is, literature that focuses on social media, influencer culture, and characters who are chronically online, suggest highly mediated social experience leads to emotional and political malaise. Patel rejects this trend and instead centers “the feeling body,” the embodied experience of life online, and the political agency it fosters.

Agnès Varda's early narrative films are texturally rich meditations on love and mortality. Each film uses aesthetic strategies that lend a palpability to the heartbreak, grief, and loss explored therein. This article examines how Varda's use of hapticity makes the morbid enticing, luring the viewer closer to the films’ surface. I particularly examine how these films balance narrative storytelling alongside palpable images, investigating whether films are seen, felt, or both simultaneously.

This article reads Sheena Patel's 2022 I'm a Fan as a major intervention into literary representations of women online, particularly within the context of Patel's materialist rendering of the operations of race, gender, and class in platform economies. Patel writes against a tendency toward what this article terms an emergent “flatness” in representations of women online, manifested aesthetically, ideologically, and affectively. Patel's debut offers an alternatively “de-flattened” account of life on the internet, partly through a focus on the hungry body of its narrator: an insistence that the internet is for women in particular “not a still, flat, surface thing” is explored via its effects on the feeling body. This article considers how I'm a Fan employs questions of algorithmic desire, taste and aesthetics, and the concept of autofiction as a “masticated life,” rematerializing, and therefore repoliticizing, gendered encounters with the platform.

Online users devise different strategies and techniques to make up for the absence of physical bodies in online communications, one of which is using emojis. Emojis are a diverse set of small images, symbols, or icons, standardized by the Unicode Consortium for utilization in electronic communication platforms. Their primary role is to effectively convey the emotional attitude of the writer, succinctly provide information, and playfully communicate messages. This article posits that bodily emojis (emojis portraying a body gesture or facial expression) are a form of digital embodiment. Their usage, thus, creates a form of digital performance. Emojis appear as a screen body in a space that lacks the physical one. Furthermore, I suggest that this body could be described as aesthetically Baroque. My proposition is that emojis exhibit Baroque characteristics such as dynamic and exaggerated forms and decorate texts. Emojis share similarities with the appearance and function of the Baroque body both in Baroque visual art and Baroque dance.

Theorist Lauren Berlant defines inconvenience as an affect, one exerted by dominant forces onto subordinate populations. In the same way subordinate populations exert inconvenient affects as well, creating a dynamic of dominant and subordinate inconvenience through which social power relationships may be understood. Following this structure, this article charts the dominant and subordinate affects exerted by capitalism and trans* bodies, respectively, and how capitalist oppression responds to and shapes trans* embodiment. Through an autotheoretical lens, this relationship is here examined in the 2020 film Possessor and the 2015 film Tangerine, highlighting the points of interaction between trans*ness and capitalism's state structures of domination and oppression. Ultimately, I point to trans* joy as an affect that presents a danger to capitalism's domination, providing space for trans* persons to thrive.

The monster-as-queer trope in horror cinema historically implemented the binary of self-versus-other as heterosexual heroine versus queer monster/villain. With the rise of queer creators and spectators within horror, this trope was questioned so that the queer(ed) monster became multifaceted. From its birth, the horror anthology series American Horror Story has questioned this binary thinking, and the 2018 season Apocalypse exemplifies this best. Using camp, the show creates a queer basis that overthrows normative depictions of sexuality and queer bodies in television. In Apocalypse—in which the “normative” is represented as inherently queer—a subversive reimagining of typically “Othered” bodies overturns the regime of representation in horror cinema. By analyzing how the villain of Apocalypse, the Antichrist, is (re)presented with an ambiguously gendered body and sexuality, I argue that the toppling of heteropatriarchy challenges the position of the Othered villain/monster so that their “evil” is made ambiguous in contextualization with queer futurism.

Adventure Time is an animated series and bildungsroman, centered on the primary protagonist, Finn, and the normative prescriptions of identity as represented in his growth. The series evolves to offer nuanced and alternative representations of fluidity and the queer body, and the current research investigates queer potentiality in this speculative fiction/fantasy text. By weaving together extant understandings of bodies and animation with theories of the queer body, this analysis uses fluidity to examine queerness in Adventure Time. Further, it proposes that the body is one site—along with constructs of family, gender, and time—where fluidity may represent queerness.

Categorized by what Michel Foucault called the “biopolitics” of life, the modern human body is reborn into a defamiliarized incarnate social entity that embodies an ecology of different kinds of augmentations. How do the mechanisms of biopolitics create normalized bodies and identities, and what are the real stakes of this new biopolitical power? This article investigates a genealogy toward the contemporary definition of identity and how biopolitics induces and creates a modern milieu of dualities. It then proposes a concept of “fluid identities” as a disruptive, provocative, and whimsical design intervention. It recognizes fluidity to be a presumed agentic human condition and a widely acceptable social factor; it recognizes identities to be “fragmented yet authentic” and “incomplete but sufficient.”

Steffen Hven, Enacting the Worlds of Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). ISBN: 978-0-19-755510-1. pp. 216. $75.

Our summer issue begins with a three-part special section on phenomenologies of perception in screen media. These articles focus on novel technological means of representing embodied, lived experience, as well as ways that visual media can impact embodied spectatorship. Each examines media artworks that attempt to represent the seemingly intangible, such as loss, decay, and temporality. The authors in this section offer nuanced and ethically oriented phenomenologies of vision, motion, and time. In “Projecting the Colors of Vision,” Wendy Haslem discusses how artists working in animation, cinema, and virtual reality use visual media to represent the lived experience of sight loss. Haslem analyzes the “haptic optics” of Yoav Brill's Ishihara (2010), Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), and James Spinney and Peter Middleton's Notes on Blindness (2016) to show how these artists use technological tools and experiments with color to represent diverse, embodied experiences of visual disability, and to encourage “empathic awareness” in viewers. In his article, Yifei Sun critiques the analog-contingent theories of movement put forward by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Sun modifies aspects of Deleuze's Cinema 1: The Movement-Image to offer a theory that accommodates the qualities of digital film. Sun considers the possibilities for software art to produce what he calls “voyeuristic authorship” and applies his “ontology of decay” to Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin's The Battle of Algiers (2006). In “Aesthetics of Slowness, Aesthetics of Boredom,” Giulia Tronconi examines slow cinema's phenomenology of time. Tronconi offers an incisive reading of Tsai Ming-liang's films I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Days (2020) that reveals how the filmmaker uses “felt duration” as a strategy to cultivate “empathic contemplation” and “respectful observation” in viewers. The author engages with the work of Schopenhauer and Heidegger and with Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image to explain the political and ethical potential of delaying movement in film.

“Projecting the Colors of Vision” investigates the role of color in the depiction of changing visual dispositions across four screen texts and the technologies that create them. This article explores the role of color in the depiction of color blindness in the abstract cell animation, Ishihara, directed by Yoav Brill (2010). It examines the role of blue in Derek Jarman's experimental film Blue (1993), and it looks into the ways that both the feature film and the virtual reality version of Notes on Blindness (James Spinney and Peter Middleton, 2016) use color, rain, and sound to sculpt spaces. This article develops an intermedial comparison of each text, focusing on image and sound as dialectical forces that invite an embodied experience of distinct perspectives.

Following Henri Bergson's third thesis of movement in Creative Evolution, Gilles Deleuze devotes a large section of Cinema I to applying the concept of the mobile section and the open whole to the narrative of analog cinema. By adopting a material ontological perspective and taking the disciplines of art-making into consideration, this article criticizes Deleuze's approach and proposes to rethink Bergson's and Deleuze's theories of movement in both analog cinema and digital moving images. In response to its main question, can analog and digital moving images constitute the open whole, this article examines the material degradation of film in the analog, investigates the phenomenon of morphing in the digital, and pays special attention to the real-time creation as well as the voyeuristic authorship of digital artworks.

Within the contemporary discourse on slow cinema and independent arthouse filmmaking, emerges the figure of Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang. His works, situated at a crossing between different forms of expression—film and installation, narrative film and ethnography—have often been deemed tiresome, boring. The following article explores where and how boredom may be identified in his films, and questions whether the languid feeling can be considered an aesthetic achievement. In particular, the article offers close textual analysis of I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Days (2020). Leveraging on the personal quality of felt duration, these films attune the viewer to the possibility of wonder and encourage considerations of the embodied representation of profound emotions such as solitude, alienation, and melancholy.

“Identification and Contagion” asks the question of how film can address the body of its viewer in an ethical dimension. Because contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have insisted that being in public means always being a raced and sexed body, film's ability to address audiences as though they were perspectives divorced of corporeal matter must be considered an ethical problem. The 2016 film The Fits provides a model of how a film can formally and thematically address an embodied audience. At the level of form, characters stare out through the camera at the audience, returning their gaze. Through the use of staging that places the camera (and therefore viewers) between characters, the film's director Anna Rose Holmer suggests an equivalence between the characters which are under observation and the audience. Furthermore, the film's treatment of the theme of conversion disorders implies a form of transmission between bodies that does not require physical contact to take place. Freudian psychoanalysis describes how such symptoms can pass from person to person even through a medium such as film. A recent example of conversion disorder in New York demonstrates how even watching a video of a person suffering hysterical symptoms can cause a viewer thousands of miles away to contract the same symptoms. The Fits therefore provides a model for how film can formally and thematically address an audience ethically at the level of their presence as bodies in social space.

The media theorist Sandy Stone has referred to flattened and digitized modes of communication in terms of “tokens,” using this framework specifically to address the ways in which we employ technology to compress, send, and receive desire. In taking up this thread, this article examines how tokens of desire are compressed and passed through the specific video game genre of dating simulators. While addressing a number of popular titles, the article highlights one offering in particular, the 2017 release Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator. The scope of this analysis extends beyond the game itself to consider the physical responses of its players—as made visible in game tutorials and walkthroughs distributed online. This exploration of the relationship between players and the game highlights how gameplay facilitates desires, how elements like agency and fictionality encourage certain responses from players, and how the genre ultimately functions alongside earlier, predigital objects of affection.

This article examines how continuity is dealt with in fictional feminist texts that depict gender or sexuate transition, via surgical intervention or transmogrification, in terms of naming and pronoun use, self-image, and perceived image. The texts here examined—literary and filmic works by cis artists Angela Carter, Sally Potter, and Octavia Butler, principally—all pastiche the familiar narratological mode of transsexual autobiography, aping the convention of internal focalization, though each elides the wrong-body formula that frequently accompanies such narratives to justify access to medical treatment and care. I situate each alongside scholarly engagements with transsexual embodiment, surgery, and lived experience, with particular focus on flesh as that which both contains and determines gendered and sexed readings, to ground these fictive accounts of becoming.

Implicitly or explicitly, society constantly gives us the imperative never to age, to keep our bodies and minds young in order to be valuable—this is particularly the case for women. However, the ageing body tells a valuable story that is worth tracing and analyzing in more depth. In this article, I explore two groups of films in which the ageing bodies of the characters and actors contribute to understanding the narrative of what I call the time-critical sequel. These are sequels produced several years or even decades since their original story was released, in which the years between one film and the other are incorporated into the narrative. First, I will define the time-critical sequel and how it interacts with its parent film. Following, I will develop how the duality of the ageing body of the character/actor, along with their corporeality and embodiment, becomes the means through which a story is told on our screens. I will do this by analyzing Richard Linklater's Before trilogy (1995–2013) and Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996), and T2 Trainspotting (2017).

This article examines a 2010s wave of US primetime television shows centered around the experiences of mad or distressed characters. Drawing upon research in critical disability and mad studies, the article identifies positive trends in US media surrounding mental disability, distress, and medication. Although the portrayals of madness in the shows discussed are complex and not without issue, this article argues that these series make space for alternative narratives of madness in popular culture that do not rely wholly on stereotypes of crime, genius, or violence.

Steinbock, Eliza. Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 248 pp. Cloth, $102.95; Paperback, $26.95.

Though the authors in this general issue of Screen Bodies engage with a wide array of media, they express a shared group of concerns. Namely, how recent technological advancements and the big data cultures of the Information Age are altering social norms concerning the body, the subject, and intimacy. The first two articles focus on increasingly data-oriented cultures that have given rise to aesthetics derived from quantification and mathematics. In “Qualities Over Quantities: Metric and Narrative Identities in Dataveillant Art Practice,” Amy Christmas examines the “surveillant aesthetic” present in three multimedia art projects—Hasan Elahi's Tracking Transience (2002 to present), Jill Magid's Composite (2005), and Heather Dewey-Hagborg's Stranger Visions (2012–2013). Christmas argues that these artists explore new modes of subject constitution and constraint, and reveal the potential of “dataveillance” to bridge formerly disconnected processes of “quantitative (metric) and qualitative (narrative)” self-formation. Similarly taking up questions of aesthetics, the “quantified self,” and its relation to narrative, Kallie Strode examines the datafication of beauty in “Narrating (Sur)face: The Marquardt Mask and Interdisciplinary Beauty.” Strode reflects on the ethics of quantifying beauty and looks to the plastic surgery method patented by Stephen Marquardt, who has developed a model of facial beauty using the golden ratio. The Marquardt mask, she argues, exemplifies an algorithmic aesthetic that is being applied to the reformation of bodies. Along similar lines, in “Cyborgian Salariats” Stephanie Bender argues that the individual is subordinated and rationalized by modern technology. Bender examines how Sasha Stone's photo essay “Hundred-Horsepower Office” presents an optimistic vision of a new kind of subject, the Weimar-era white-collar worker, a human-machine assemblage that combines the body and modern office technology.

In a society suffused with surveillance technologies and practices, which persist in their extension across and into all dimensions of human experience, members of the contemporary art community have made significant contributions to the ontology of the surveillant self. This article compares recent works by several prominent multimedia artists who have explored the radical potential of dataveillance as a way to bridge the disconnect between quantitative (metric) and qualitative (narrative) representations of self in the Information Age. By considering the questions raised by three recent art projects—Hasan Elahi's Tracking Transience; Jill Magid's Composite; Heather Dewey-Hagborg's Stranger Visions—I explore how each artist employs a surveillant aesthetic to test the extent to which meaningful subjectivities may be constructed out of decontextualized metric data. In this way, these artists are directly engaging with the surveillant assemblage, harnessing the discrete flows of data that normally work to depersonalize and thereby negate individual identities, and instead repurposing these disassembled metrics as a means of examining modern selfhood as it both produces and is produced by surveillance environments. In particular, this article focuses on the tension between metric and narrative representations of self, by drawing on multimedia artistic projects that engage with and combine both aspects and document their efforts in a range of visual and textual media.

As plastic surgery becomes increasingly normalized as an act of self-care, it is essential to consider the ways in which facial beauty has been enacted as data on the surface of the body. Taking seriously the paradox “raw data is an oxymoron,” this article explores how facial beauty has been algorithmized in the recent past as a geometrical proof based on the golden ratio. As an overlay system founded in the late 1990s, the Marquardt Mask claims to beautify any face. Yet, it achieves this universalism via its interdisciplinary exploitation of mathematics and biology. The mask thus participates in a cybernetic paradigm of control by abstracting human faciality as an aesthetic feedback loop evidenced in life and nature.

This article examines Sasha's Stone's photographic constructions of the salaried worker, or die Angestellten, within the rationalized Weimar office as published in his 1926 photo essay “Das 100-Pferdige Büro—keine Utopie” (The hundred-horsepower office—no utopia). I analyze his images of the modern office and the white-collar employee as participating in the public discourse regarding the highly debated phenomenon of rationalization, presenting the Angestellter as a tool of rationalization rather than an individual, creating automata-like employees that fit with the broader trend of depicting such employees as what Matthew Biro describes as cyborgs, or human-machine hybrids. I assert that Stone's essay performs a dialectic role in relation to other, distinct versions of the same photographs, suggesting that technology within the sphere of the modern office, while inevitable and necessary, is possible only through the subjugation of the individual humanity of those at work by such technology.

Artificial intelligence has been a topic of fascination for film and television since the earliest appearances of robots on our screens, bringing with them questions about ethics, sentience, and the long-term fate of humanity. This article explores depictions of artificial intelligence on screen from a thematic rather than chronological viewpoint. Themes explored include the popular sci-fi trope of robot rebellion, androids as worker/slaves, and intimate relationships between humans and AI. The article also raises philosophical questions of why we wish to create robots in our own image, and what AI sentience, in both android bodies and more elusive disembodied forms, could look like. A range of films and television series—from the Terminator franchise to HBO's Westworld—are used to unpack humanity's dreams and nightmares of how AI could shape our future.

Lucrecia Martel is an accomplished film director and creative. Her 2019 short film AI blends fiction and reality, imagining what a humanoid artificial intelligence might look like in our world. But her use of a psychiatric patient with schizophrenia to portray her vision has problematic ramifications for the present, namely contributing to the existing stigmatization of people with mental illnesses. Art does not exist in a vacuum, and it is important to examine how a piece might be interpreted or misinterpreted and how it may affect people in their everyday lives. Though AI is an effective work of science fiction, I argue that is overshadowed by the negative unintentional impact it may cause for people with schizophrenia and mental illness at large.

Science fiction films about artificial intelligence have often perpetuated anxieties about new technology as a widescale threat to humanity. However, more recently, the genre seems to be moving toward more positive and open-minded representations of technology that envision humans embarking on relationships with AI in varying capacities—perhaps a reflection of technology's increasing value and permeation within all aspects of contemporary wider culture. Thus far, such texts have been given little scholarly attention, yet they offer significant insights into our possible coexistence with advancing technologies of the future. This article analyzes three contemporary science fiction films about artificial intelligence and demonstrates how they are offering unique perspectives that lend support to wider applications of AI, specifically as social companions.

Lu Yang (陆扬, 1984) is a critically acclaimed new media artist and rising star based in Shanghai, China, who works across film, games, performance, and installation. His work has been exhibited at numerous biennales and exhibitions in China and around the world, including the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. He has collaborated on videos with high-profile rock bands like The 1975, and one of his videos featured in a 2020 fashion show of the Chinese sportswear company Li-Ning.¹ Lu Yang has also won prestigious awards, including the BMW Art Journey Culture award in 2019, and Deutsche Bank's Artist of the Year award in 2022, and the artist was anthologized in Barbara London's critical history of video and the digital arts, Video Art: The First Fifty Years (2020), as well as in Dominique Moulon's Chefs d'oeuvre du 21e siècle : l'art à l'ère digitale (Masterworks of the 21st Century: Art in the Digital Era, 2021). In contemporary art and popular culture, Lu Yang is clearly a force to be reckoned with.

Existing studies on Lu Yang have largely sidelined his engagement with Japanese anime, comics, and gaming (ACG) culture, despite the artist having frequently reiterated the significance of ACG to his upbringing and practice. Nor have they extensively explored what, if anything, is particularly Chinese about Lu's work. This article argues that it is precisely Lu's appropriation of ACG's visual aesthetic and symbolic language that firmly positions the artist within twenty-first century Chinese youth culture. Focusing on The Beast (2012)—Lu's tribute to the cult classic anime Neon Genesis Evangelion—I adopt an interdisciplinary approach synthesizing otaku research, fandom studies, Chinese socio-economic analyses and institutional critique to contextualize Lu's practice within the socio-historical nexus of Sino–Japanese transcultural exchange and the global network of contemporary art.

Centering a genealogy of the image 形象 (xingxiang) in China, this article opens up the task of interpreting Lu Yang's (b. 1984) works of animation and sound. To make sense of the artist's scientized preoccupations with disease, neuroscience, and biomedical interventions into brain–body interconnections, I argue that scientific uses of technology become an artistic medium for Lu, inhabiting and encoding his work from the 2010s, in particular Cancer Baby (2014). Framing the digital animation of this piece amid the fraught intellectual history of the image—a concept that carries generations, even millennia, of debate in China—the article offers a set of clues, if not a window direct, to opening up the dynamics of consciousness, materiality, and control in the artist's creative method.

This article argues that the conceptualization of the (un)reality of the phenomenal or material world (qishijie) in Lu Yang's animated short Material World Knight Game Film (MWKGF, 2020) at once follows and departs significantly from the Theravada and Mahayana traditions it references. MWKGF's reconfiguring of Buddhist notions of (un)reality is especially apparent in its representation of samsara (cycle of birth and rebirth) and in its questioning of Buddhist wisdom through the lens of neuroscience, psychotherapy, and (popular versions) of quantum theory. The film further suggests that Buddhist philosophy can be effectively expounded and played, as an “executable thought experiment” in/as a video game. The article shows in conclusion that MWKGF also envisions an “ecological dharma eye manifesto” that seems to call for an epistemic-technoscientific-spiritual revolution.

The Material World Knight is an anime-style superhero from Lu Yang's artwork The Great Adventure of Material World—Game Film (2020) who battles oppressive binary systems on his quest for transcendence. This article uses discourse and visual analysis to study how this short film employs references to Buddhist philosophy and Japanese anime to reconceptualize subjectivity. The study draws on posthuman theory by Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway to show how the artwork produces a post-dualist, posthuman, relational concept of subjectivity while also complicating any straightforward interpretations in favor of maintaining complexity and “staying with the trouble.”

Studying artworks on the human body and the brain, as exemplified by Lu Yang's work, enables a new perspective in the debates over the redefinitions of the human, whether anthropocenic redefinitions of the human (in the scholarships of the Anthropocene, posthumanism, new materialism, and speculative realism) or a technoscientific redefinition of the human (in the scholarships of technological transformations). Not only does Lu Yang question the defining properties of the humanness but the artist also creates an organological form of the human. This organological perspective enables an aesthetics of futurism based on both a nonreproductive kinship between the human and the nonhuman, and a new regime of the future grounded in the habitability of the human as a more-than-human agent in the planetary age.

This article explores the aesthetic of the grotesque in Lu Yang's recent work Delusional Mandala (2015) and Delusional World (2020). I argue that the aesthetic of the grotesque envisioned in these two works becomes a radical tool for the artist's deconstruction and dismantling of the socially and culturally sanctioned boundaries of corporeality and normativity. My approach to Lu Yang's aesthetic of the grotesque is based on Sara Cohen Shabot's theorization of grotesque philosophy and the grotesque body as well on the concept of faciality proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Two questions guide my reflection and readings in this article: What are the characteristics of the grotesque aesthetic in Lu Yang's films? In what ways does this aesthetic deconstruct concepts such as the human and normativity?

This article explores MetaObjects’ ongoing collaboration with Lu Yang to develop a live motion capture performance. As a studio facilitating digital production with artists, the knowledge acquired delves into the worldview of the artist reflected in works and in practice. Lu Yang's work is inherently collaborative and evolves in increasing complexity with each iteration. Similarly, reincarnation and repetition are present in Buddhist conceptions of cyclic existence and the wheel of life. Lu Yang connects an interest in folk beliefs and Chinese medicine to neuroscience presenting a multi-layering of temporalities in contemporary culture. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the performance was transformed into an online experience, deepening Lu Yang's interest in digital reincarnation. The work presents an interest in digital reincarnation where identities are fluid and open to reinvention in the virtual realm.

LuYang's first institutional solo exhibition in Germany took place at Kunstpalais in Erlangen in 2022. LuYang is undoubtedly a global artist, yet at the same time, his art is testimony of his embeddedness into an Asian/Chinese background. In his works, he draws heavily from a mixture of religious tradition, pop and subcultural influences from Asian countries, and global post-internet art trends. The presentation and mediation of his works in a German art institution needs to consider preconceived ideas that the local audience might have about art with Asian aesthetics. To avoid the pitfalls of Othering and the reproduction of stereotypes, a deeper understanding of underlying topics, such as religious tropes, is necessary. Therefore, a collaborative, interdisciplinary curatorial approach is the curator's means of choice.

This article studies Doku, a digital figure created by multimedia artist Lu Yang. Unlike Lu's previous works that celebrate how virtuality makes possible the fashioning of a formless figure free of bodily restraints and thus of various identity makers, Doku betrays a different take on the potentials of the virtual in relation to the corporeal. By closely examining select videos featuring Doku, I highlight Lu's emphasis on Doku's entangled bodily presence and affective intensity. Contextualized against the backdrop of contemporary digital cinema's engagement with corporeality and of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, these features of Doku invite us to reevaluate Lu's figuration of digital bodies.

Climbing, climbing the circular staircase of a decaying art deco apartment house, a throwback to Old Shanghai's grandeur in the 1930s, I felt like I was stepping back in time. It was fall of 2011, and I was accompanied by a twenty-seven-year-old artist named Lu Yang who led me on this upward trek to a studio. As Lu Yang opened the green door to the space, I was immediately thrown forward from the past to the future. The darkened room was packed with computer monitors flickering with the running text of chatrooms. Aquariums, filled with dead frogs floating in formaldehyde, gave off an eerie green light. There were no sketches or paintings or anything like traditional art making. What an awakening! I realized that this was the kind of art I had been searching for on my trips to China since 2004. I was looking for an artist whose work reflected the enormous upheaval of the Reform era, the influx of Western goods, the possibilities of the internet, and the shock to the psyche that these changes had wrought. Lu Yang completely fit the bill.

Where is Lu Yang? Not here nor there; they might well be this new supernatural life form Maupassant could feel invading his everyday when the world became planetary, an invisible entity coming from abroad and unstoppable. Indeed, Lu Yang (LY) is unstoppable, unlocalizable, out of time and space. Planetary being? Asian superhero? Their aesthetics are avowedly Asianesque, with clear references to Japanese otaku culture, Buddhism, Chinese characters. This is 1990s techno-orientalism on speed opening onto what Livia Monnet calls a planetary unconscious.

The final issue of Screen Bodies Volume 6 offers readers an ideal combination of the diverse kinds of work we feature, from a macroscopic theory that proposes a new discipline, to a set of articles that rigorously examine a small number of artworks with respect to a shared topic, to a piece of curatorial criticism on a recent media arts exhibition. The articles collected here offer a fitting cross section of the topics and media we cover, discussing such varied subjects as prehistoric art, Pink Film, artificial intelligence, and video art.

The present relations between screens and the human body invoke a genealogy that should help us to understand their status. However, we suggest that this historical-genealogical work shall be matched with a more comprehensive anthropology of screen experiences. By mobilizing the notion of “arche-screen,” we identify the transhistorical principle underlying such experiences with the showing/concealing and the exposing/protecting function pairs—the latter exceeding the visual dimension and involving our bodily relations with the environment. These function pairs, which are rooted in our body and make it into our proto-screen, can be enhanced via their externalization as appropriate technical objects. By highlighting the prostheticization of skin in some prehistoric artistic techniques and the role of the veil from the Old Testament to Leon Battista Alberti's treatise On Painting, we stress that the interweaving of the above-mentioned screen functions is a constant feature of human experiences and that its thematic variations are traceable in more recent screen forms.

In Haile Gerima's Sankofa (1993), a film that confronts the horrors of slavery, sexual violence is a central and repetitive trope. In this article, I explore how Gerima employs representations of rape as a filmic strategy to expose the brutality of slavery and its aftermath as well as to illustrate the magnitude of Black women's tenacity in the face of subjugation. I argue that, while the visual repetition of the white male slaveholder's sexual violation of the Black female body is a dangerously problematic trope, Gerima's film reenacts the terrible banality of sexual exploitation of the enslaved and significantly performs a conscious objectification to make visible the history of white supremacist violence and Black women's nuanced and complex forms of survival, resistance, and fugitivity.

This article adopts the category of the cinematic baroque not as a marker of the culturally low, but as a tool of film-philosophical analysis to examine how Pascal Laugier's Martyrs (2008) probes limits of representation and spectatorial experience. I approach the ambivalent functions of bodily, architectural, and filmic thresholds that simultaneously mediate containment and transgression. In this vein, I read the excesses of cinematic violence in Martyrs using Saige Walton's phenomenological model of “baroque flesh” in dialogue with theories of enfolded structures of affective intensity that resist “teleological spectatorship.” Drawing these distinct perspectives together, I consider the visual and aural strategies deployed in Martyrs—from the home invasion to the “screaming point”—to examine the formal characteristics of this film's treatment of screened violence.

Oshima Nagisa's international co-productions, which include the pornographic film In the Realm of the Senses and the war drama with homoerotic themes Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, were noted as the emergence of his female audience. How did this reported demographic change of the audience from male-centered to female-oriented relate to sexualized bodies on screen? In their roundtable discussion about sexual liberation, feminists found emancipatory power from patriarchal society in the face of the actor who played Abe Sada. Girls praised queerness that disrupted heteronormativity in David Bowie's performance in their film reviews. Focusing on the reception of the films within feminists’ discourse and girls’ culture, this article argues that the female audience created political significance of the films by interpreting the bodies as embodied liberation.

Frankenstein's existential dilemmas of humanity and science have led the novel to be upheld as a premonition of the dangers of overreaching technological advancements, a theme that seems more relevant than ever in the current age. Out of the “creative progeny” of Mary Shelley's work, Ahmed Saadawi and Jeanette Winterson's invocations of Frankenstein stand out as they reimagine the text through distinctive political turning points, questioning how horrors of the past can be reworked to fit new terrors. Their respective works, Frankenstein in Baghdad and Frankissstein, contemplate the future of the human body as altered by technology whether incited by warfare or by the introduction of artificial intelligence. Although different in terms of geographical setting and genre, both texts are connected in their reinvestigation of Frankenstein's core concerns of otherness as related to gender and race, responsibility, as well as the future of humanity and literature. Within their works, the relationships of creator and creation, as well as the individual and society, transcend the supernatural elements, revealing a core anxiety about the future of humanity.

Constraining aesthetics are central to Laura Paolini's artistic corpus, involving the relationship of her body to everyday objects in confined spaces during the time of the pandemic. Paolini creates a self-reflexive simulacrum of artistic experience of body, objects, and space through the interface of digital screens. This article seeks to elaborate how the elements of body, objects, and space in performance, video, and installation art are part of a screenic embodiment when read through the concepts of habit (Walter Benjamin), proprioception (Brian Massumi), allegory (Craig Owens), mediation (Fredric Jameson), and documentation (Amelia Jones).

The Body Electric was catalyzed by the frustration of seeing a group of artists of roughly the same age exhibited predominantly within the context of their own generation. The majority were working with new technologies (such as 3D printing, motion capture, avatars, computer-generated animations), and many were grouped under the moniker “post-internet art,” which, by the time the exhibition had opened, had become an exhausted term with little currency (see Droitcour 2014). The impetus was to age these emerging and mid-career artists by creating an intergenerational family tree, elevating overlooked voices and demonstrating a healthy skepticism toward the novelty of technology. The through line connecting the artists on view was a shared engagement with the body and its mediated image, raising important questions about representation, especially in terms of identity, embodiment, race, gender, sexuality, class, and belonging. Like Alice disappearing through the mirror, these artists nimbly cross the boundaries separating the physical world and its space on-screen, blurring 2D and 3D, real and virtual, analog and digital. As these distinctions melt away, how are artists questioning the present and warning of what lies around the corner?

The six essays in this in this issue of Screen Bodies explore what we might call the affective modalities of media, that is, each author examines the potential of emerging and traditional media to transform individual and collective relations through the strategic use of embodied affective experience. Three essays in the issue focus on new and emerging technology. In, “The iAnimal Film Series: Activating Empathy Through Virtual Reality,” Holly Cecil examines the potential power of virtual reality to generate empathy in users. In particular, she looks at the way animal advocacy organizations combine documentary film and virtual reality to communicate the embodied experience of living and dying in a factory farm to provoke feeling and widespread opposition to the industry.

The cover of this issue of Screen Bodies features the digital work “Crypto Queen” by restlessperson (Aleksandr Rybin), which the artist has minted as an NFT. We spoke with Rybin about the subject matter of his work, connections between digital and analog art, and the future of NFTs. His work is available on KnownOrigin.

As millions of customers across the world invite digital voice assistants into their homes, the public debate has increasingly centered on security and privacy concerns connected to the use of the device. Drawing on Tania Bucher's work at the intersection between technology and everyday experience, this article proposes an understanding of an algorithmic imaginary of Alexa-enabled devices as explicitly nonthreatening in its ordinariness, positive potential, and gendered presence. As a case study, this article uses commercials for Alexa-enabled devices as a starting point: Instead of foregrounding the functionality and thereby the algorithmic intelligence underlying the voice assistant, these commercials focus on an affective potential as a narrative strategy to address privacy and security concerns. By connecting everyday interactions with emotional and empowering narratives, the way Alexa is portrayed as an embodied object functions as a balance to the equally public and publicized understanding of digital voice assistants as threats.

This article embarks from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's embodied understanding of metaphor in linguistic contexts and proceeds beyond merely an extended notion of “visual” metaphor toward an operational understanding of the term “allegory” in the cinematic context. Specifically, a pattern of Sisyphean landscape allegory in a global array of postwar narrative cinema is identified and explored, in which a psychologically conflicted protagonist struggles against a resistant natural landscape, connoting varying degrees of existential “futility.” The recurrent experiential configuration of this modernist allegory on screen, especially in terms of its haptic dimensions, is explored for its ability to “invoke” social critique—as felt, visceral content.

This article explores the innovative use of virtual reality (VR) technology in nonfiction documentary film formats by animal-advocacy organizations. I examine the potential of the VR medium to communicate the living and dying environments of factory-farmed animals, and to generate viewer empathy with the animal subjects in their short, commodified lives from birth to slaughterhouse. I present a case study of the iAnimal short film series produced by Animal Equality, which made its public debut at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Employing a critical animal studies framework, I engage Kathryn Gillespie's work on witnessing of the nonhuman condition as a method of academic research, and apply to it the embodied experience of virtual witnessing through virtual realty.

This article applies materialist rhetoric to Christopher Nolan's 2000 neo-noir film Memento and positions its protagonist Leonard Shelby, a man with a brain injury that prevents him from making new memories, as a figure of mētis: a classical concept addressing the cunning ability to respond to the contingent, kairotic moment by engaging situations through a reciprocal process of change. As evidence for its assertion, the article examines Leonard's relationship to his shifting bodily archive of tattoos, handwritten notes, and annotated Polaroid pictures. It also aligns him with the ancient hero Odysseus and the sophistic rhetorician Gorgias, two classical exemplars of mētis. Leonard's mētic existence informs how contemporary selves emerge from networks of objects both physical and virtual.

This article examines the temporal and phenomenological philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Paolo Virno, specifically in relation to the transmedia franchises of the Japanese game studio, Type-Moon. Against linear, national, and majoritarian grand narratives of the historical, the otaku artists, writers, and developers responsible for the Fate series postulate whether it is possible to harness the intense and affective forces described by Jay Lampert as “the Joan of Arc effect” in the blink of an eye or in the palm of your hand. Through a philosophical and formal analysis of three spinoff series from the Fate franchise, this article investigates how Type-Moon's deployment of the “anime machine” encourages its viewers and users to see and feel the abundance of flowing “nomadic memories” or counter-historical visions from the perspective of minor populations. Through this highly embodied and tactile experience of transhistorical (un)becomings, Type-Moon's series offer a deterritorialized, post-national world-image of the otaku database which mediates between the overloading affects of becoming-woman and the digitally encoded logic of transversal through the frames, windows, interfaces, devices, platforms, and bodies that constitute Type-Moon's vibrant anime ecology.

The nineteenth-century science of “optography” was based on the idea that an image of the last thing seen at the moment of death would be imprinted on the retina. This idea was inspired by the invention of photography, which reinforced the mechanistic notion of the eye as a camera, and it was frequently criticized in nineteenth-century literary texts, in which eyes more often record images generated from within the mind. Belief in optography began to wane at roughly the same time that cinema became a popular form of entertainment, but it continued to appear in several films in which severed eyes function as cameras or optical implants are used to record visual impressions that can be viewed after the death of the subject. This article examines how these optographic narratives continued to reinforce the mechanistic notion of visual perception on which film technology was thought to depend.

Erin Y. Huang. Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 288 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0809-5 / 978-1-4780-0679-4; (paperback, $26.95; hardback, $99.05)