Monitor’s Matters

On my last transatlantic flight from Europe to the US I was, like the rest of the cabin, staring half-consciously at the monitors presenting a colorful set of images right above our heads. Yet instead of watching the movies, my attention was directed to the box itself, the gray casing bordering the image—to the mere objecthood of the screen, as it were. Their elegant cubic forms looked different than the light, flat screens that popped out from the ceiling of my earlier connecting flight in Europe. The cubes were somewhat more present, drawing attention, dominant; not only were they a means of display, but each one seemed like a kind of sculpture in itself. I was thinking that soon they would inevitably disappear, giving place to newer technology, and that probably up there no one would pay attention to that change. In many museum institutions, however, the situation may become severe considering the significance of old TV screens, not only as medium transmitting an image in an installation or a video work, but also as a visually significant part of an aesthetic whole.