Beyond digital screens – media ecological perspectives on artistic practices in the digital media culture

This chapter explores the term screen itself, i.e., its multiple levels of meaning against the background of digital media culture. It provides a media-ecological perspective and thematise screens as ‘nodes’ of a globally networked digital media culture, and, at the same time, shift the theoretical view from the individual to the dividual, i.e., a multiple distributed and divided/shared subjectivity. The ‘glitch aesthetic’ of digital video is based on datamoshing. The term datamoshing has become an idiom of artistic expression, an abbreviation for hacking into the compression algorithms of digital video. When digital videos are compressed, the compression and transformation program analyzes the video material and determines frames in which a lot of movement takes place. Identity in digital media culture is the result of recorded events, but it is also a node in the network of different attributes and search queries.