Screen Bodies

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.