Conclusion/Coda

Summary

Abstract

This Conclusion/Coda summarizes the book's key argument: the post-screen as a visual phenomenon which, through contemporary instantiations via Virtual Reality, holographic and light projections, blurs boundaries between virtuality and actuality, and re-formulates conditions of media, reality, death, life, matter and history. The Conclusion also points the post-screen towards two further ideas which drive its concept: difference, in terms of screen boundaries demarcating image against surroundings, and on difference without positive terms; and gluttony of visual media, specifically in relation to play between the real and the unreal. Both ideas not only serve the diminished boundaries of the post-screen in terms of the book's analyses, but also render the post-screen a framework for today's politics of post-truth, misinformation and deepfakes as a moment of media history. Finally, the Conclusion extends the post-screen to the (as of writing) current Covid-19 pandemic as a mirror of the internalization that is of both post-screen media and virus – both are in us, and inescapable.

Keywords: screen; media history; difference; gluttony; Covid-19; intern

Postscripts to the Post-Screen: The Holiday and the Global Pandemic

Vignette

In the midst of finishing this book, I took a week-long family holiday to Dubai in late January 2020. Taking our place in the crush of tourists, we visited the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world at 829.8 metres from ground to tip, by taking the elevator – whose trip alone took three minutes – to its 124^th floor observatory deck at 450 meters towards the sky. The deck was an enclosed circular floor covered in wall-to-ceiling glass windows, so that one could walk an orbit to take in a 360-degree view of the city. The ghosts of the nineteenth-century panorama whispered in my ear as I strolled slowly along the circular deck, gazing out at my own twenty-first century panorama, tracing steps in the same kind of round tour as nineteenth-century Londoners did with my panorama's visual forebear, wide-eyed with the same kind of wonder.

At that height, the famous skyscraper-replete vista of the city of Dubai, boasting twelve of the world's tallest seventy buildings, looked like geometrical saplings. In the distance, the Arabian Desert stretched away into dusty and dusky shimmers.