On Screens, Memory, and Grids

It is no surprise to say that screens are devices that are present in our daily lives and for a couple of years have been a fundamental part of our work and entertainment. As we understand them in contemporary times, they are electronic devices that display digitally processed information and are present in computers, phones or tablets.

Flusser, in his text Screens, Umbrellas and Tents (2002) describes screens from the point of view of their function as a fabric wall in tents. According to Flusser, screens are structured by an interweaving that opens to the wind, that stores experiences and that throughout the cultural history of mankind has taken shape in tapestries, looms, cinematographic films, on television and only now, finally, takes an immaterial form in computer screens. Screens, in Flusser's view, play a central role in contemporary society. He argues that screens mediate our interactions with the world and influence how we perceive and interpret reality. For Flusser, screens are not just physical devices but also symbolic structures that shape our understanding of the world.

Regarding tents, Flusser often used the concept metaphorically to refer to our constructed realities or cultural frameworks. He suggests that human existence is characterized by a tension between the nomadic, tent-like structures of our cultural and social constructions and the potential for freedom and creativity beyond these structures.

He defines the screen as a piece of cloth stretched over a frame, the cloth used in this way composes the structure of a tent, the nomadic heir of what were the stone walls of the cave, the cave walls were the cave paintings that immortalized the experiences and ways of living of the beings of that time. In the cave walls remain the cave paintings that immortalized the experiences and ways of living of the beings of that time. However, when thinking of the tent, this relationship between the subject and the exterior becomes more immaterial and at the same time more direct, since it is possible to experience the exterior through this weave of threads that mediates between the subject and its context. The screen is then a mediating apparatus between two temporalities, between two states of things; one that observes and another that remains in a different spatio-temporal plane. The screen defined by Flusser has the capacity to contain history, memories or archives so that the individual can observe the context of his/her reality. 

For something to materialize in the world, it needs a support to be apprehended and this support changes the way of perceiving the environment by the influence that entails the creation of new conditions of temporality and spatial structure. The support is the materialization of thought. For example, an electronic screen is a technical device that allows us to look through a series of electronic configurations, files, images or text information of some kind that once materialized in this support (the electronic screen).

If the screens-grid object has a memory condition, what type of information could storage?

How the information is represented/shown?

What memory?

Visualize the illkun/Anger explores the limits of the technical devices of memory, through a subjective archival exercise. What is the screen object and what are its relations with the information? HOW THE screen BECOMES A MEMORY DEVICE? 

and then, how a type of memory is represented that is not consensual and that represents a multi-layered problem in (Chilean) society. 

In the essay  "Shelters, caves and bell tents", Vilem Flusser argues that  tents are the nomadic heirs of the first dwellings that human beings had; the caves. The cave walls served as a support for image fixation through what we know as cave painting. Then the wall of the tent, by analogy to its predecessor, would also have these characteristics of containing information. Therefore, he proposes that screens, as a broader concept, have a memory condition.