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The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie
Author(s): Jenna Ng (Author)
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: December 1, 2025
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 282 pages
- ISBN-10: 1041188838
- ISBN-13: 9781041188834
Book Description
Screens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the image becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s surroundings, this unsettling prompts re.examination of how screen boundaries demarcate. Through readings of three media forms – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – this book develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed. Interrogating contemporary contestations of reality against illusion, it argues that the disappearance of difference reflects shifted conditions of actuality and virtuality in understanding the human condition. These shifts further connect to the current state of politics by way of their distorted truth values, corrupted terms of information, and internalizations of difference. The Post.Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections thus thinks anew the image’s borders and delineations, evoking the screen boundary as an instrumentation of today’s intense virtualizations which do not tell the truth. In the process, a new imagination for images emerges for a gluttony of the virtual; for new conceptualizations of object and representation, materiality and energies, media and histories, real and unreal; for new understandings of appearances, dis-appearances, replacement and replacement – the post-screen.
Editorial Reviews
Review
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)
About the Author
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).
