Just before Vancouver went into lockdown last year, we conceived this issue from our shared interests. Bodies and screens: how are bodies shown on screen? what kinds of bodies is the screen? what exchanges occur between the screen and the body? This was meant to
take part in the long history of work on bodies and screens in cinema and media scholarship, but it took on new meaning during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. For those who could work from home, living space and working space became indistinguishable. The screens of our laptops and cellphones became, even more than before, points of social contact—even contact with the world full stop. For many others, however, work could not be done remotely. That point of contact with the world was maintained by delivery drivers, factory workers, and service employees who were put in disproportionate danger by our local and federal governments.
Less drastically, movie theatres closed and streaming reigned. One kind of cinematic body—public, bigger than life—was replaced by another—private, small and buffering. The same screens we used for work we used to relax and socialize, often through the Zoom
tile. Our homes became an extension of our bodies because our backgrounds became an image on others’ screens and thus an extension of ourselves, seen. As some places begin to relax pandemic restrictions, how these viewing and living configurations will or will not change remains to be seen.