The Sedimented Screen: Media Archaeology and the American Southwest

How screens create spaces of exception and extraction from the conquest of the New World to the frontiers of data colonialism.

What is the ground of the screen? How do screens take place and lay claim to the real? Taking its cue from Edmund Husserl’s model of sedimentation and reactivation, The Sedimented Screen offers an innovative approach to media archaeology by investigating the relationship between screens and sites. Arguing that space needs to be conjured before it can be claimed and controlled, Henrik Gustafsson explores the screen as a medium that actively produces frontier conditions and zones of exception that conform to the demands for expansion and extraction, from settler-colonialism to neurocognitive capitalism.

The book spans a range of locations in the North American Southwest as interrogated through a vast array of aesthetic engagements, drawn from the work of James Benning, Kidlat Tahimik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Cauleen Smith, and Sondra Perry, among many others. Examined through the lens of these artistic research practices, key discursive ramifications in the archeology of media—from perspectival projection and punched-card programming to radar tracking and computer vision—are mapped together with a novel genealogy of the screen that extends from the Middle Passage and the American frontier to contemporary modes of data-driven governance.