Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections

Jenna Ng is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Film and Interactive Media at the University of York, UK. She writes on digital media and visual culture. She is also the editor of Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds (2013).

The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections received an Honourable Mention in the category Best First Monograph at the BAFTSS Publication Awards 2023, Jenna Ng's book is an exciting read. The goals are ambitious: to uncover the emerging culture of 'post-screens' that bleed into our lives and environments; to understand their position within the tradition of screen media from early modernity onwards; and to reflect on how they shape our experience and understanding today. Reassessing the concepts of virtuality, illusion, and death, this powerful book constructs its argument with skill, care, and insight, and succeeds to disclose something essential about the contemporary 'human condition.'- Pasi Väliaho, University of Oslo, Jenna Ng presents us with a convincing argument: while traditional frames of the pictorial are vanishing, the screen becomes internalised onto the body of the spectator. The book looks at the future of post-screen media with the best approach I can think of: a strong sense of history and an insightful philosophical toolkit. Warmly recommended for and beyond media and film studies students and scholars.,- Jussi Parikka, FAMU (Prague) and University of Southampton (UK)

• Acknowledgements, Introduction, Post-Screen Media: Meshing the Chain Mail, Eroding Boundaries in the Contemporary Mediascape, Why Boundaries Matter, Chapter Outlines, The Post-what?, 1 Screen Boundaries as Movement, Re-placing the Screen: Play and Display, Appearance and Dis-Appearance, Screen Boundaries: Physical and Virtual, and of the Movement Betwixt, Metaphors for the Screen, Crossing Screen Boundaries: Love, Pleasure, Information, Transformation, Interactivity and the Moveable Window, Screen Boundaries Across Dimensions, 2 Leaking at the Edges, Protections and Partitions, Rupturing Screen Boundaries, Interplay between Fictional and Factual Threat, Leaking at the Edges: The Merging of the Amalgamated Real, Virtual Co-location in Real-time... and in the Era of Covid-19, The Screen Boundary Against the Algorithm, Screen Boundaries in Flux, 3 Virtual Reality: Confinement and Engulfment; Replacement and Re-placement, Multitudes of Amys, On Immersion (Briefly), The Affective Surround: The Two Vectors of Immersion, The Post-Screen Through VR (1): Confinement and Engulfment, The Post-Screen Through VR (2): Replacement and Re-placement, The Danger Paradox, VR as Immersion: Travel, Escape, Fulfilment, VR as Inversion: Witness, Empathy, Subjectivity, Defeated by the Ghosts, 4 Holograms/Holographic Projections : Ghosts Amongst the Living; Ghosts of the Living, How We See Ghosts, or, In Love with the Post-Screen, Ghosts in the Media: Re-inventing the Afterlife, The Post-Screen Through Holograms/Holographic Projections, Holographic Projections (1): Ghosts Amongst the Living, Limbo Between Deadness and Aliveness, Holographic Projections (2): Ghosts of the Living, Vivification of the Virtual Real, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Substitution, 4A (Remix) True Holograms: A Different Kind of Screen; A Different Kind of Ghost, Screens and Ghosts, or, the Window and the Guy in the Basement, True Holograms, A Different Kind of Screen: Brains, Nerves, Thought, A Different Kind of Ghost: A Memory, A Daydream, A Secret, or, Digital Apparitions, 5 Light Projections: On the Matter of Light and the Lightness of Matter, The City Rises, The Light Rises, or, Light as the Matter of Light, Cities of Screens, Light Projections (1): Light that Dissolves and Constructs... and of Latency, Light Projections (2): Walls that Fall Apart... and Re-Form, Light Projections (3): Particles that Gain a Body... and Transform, Projection Mapping (1): The Image that Devours Structure; the Voracity that is a Media History, Projection Mapping (2): The Exterior that Reveals; the Permanence that Fades, The Ground Beneath Our Feet, Conclusion/Coda, Postscripts to the Post-Screen: The Holiday and the Global Pandemic, Twin Obsessions (1): Difference, Twin Obsessions (2): The Gluttony, The Post-Screen in the Time of Covid-19, Index.