| Sumario: | As screen forms and functions multiply, images must increasingly adapt. Shaped by touchscreen contact or remote command in conjunction with software settings and hardware design, the image is reimagined at each appearance on screen. The inherent conditionality of this mutable performance – changing with screen type and interface as well as context and use – indicates a fundamental shift in our understanding of the image's properties and purpose. This essay explores the foundations of this transformation by correlating the theory and history of the modern image with understandings of contemporary networked visual practices. Incorporating concepts and claims drawn from film and television studies, art history and aesthetics, in addition to those circulated by technology designers and manufacturers, it demonstrates a rising emphasis on the screen and its frame, often at the risk of the image. Through an examination of competing models of filmic, televisual and digital display, the legacy of twentieth-century minimalist aesthetics, earlier networked image systems, and descriptions of the frame and its role in image production, this essay measures the critical consequences of this contemporary screen-based visuality.
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