Image Beyond the Screen

Foreword

It is a well-worn idea that this century is one of an abundance of images. It is another to say that we live in an era of screens: for a long time, we had two in our lives – cinema and television. We then went from three, with the computer screen that opens up access to the immense resources of the Web and the Internet, to four with mobile tools – smartphones. Some are pursuing inflation by adding five (the intermediate terminal that is the tablet), six (the games console) and seven (the immersive helmet). Little by little, screens are saturating all the dimensions of our private but also public spaces, as we can see with the recent replacement of traditional advertising billboards by screens in our developed cities – this, moreover, without any consideration for the ecological impact that this mutation implies. The screen is everywhere.

This book opens a much less widespread space: the space of the image beyond the screen. From monumental projections on façades to more intimate projections on sets or objects. Is it worth stopping by? Isn’t this just a simple change of media? An additional avatar in the diversification of screens?

Juxtaposing chapters by researchers and testimonies by artists and practitioners experienced in this new form of projection, the texts gathered in this first book on projection mapping show in various ways that, on the contrary, a completely new form of expression, or even an art, is being exhibited.

On the one hand, several chapters remind ...