Genealogies of the Excessive Screen is a project supported by a Sawyer Seminar grant sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that looks to examine the proliferation and transformation of screens in contemporary culture in a new historical light. The aim is to construct an interdisciplinary genealogical investigation that would recover and rethink an environmental history of screens.

Co-organized by Yale professors Francesco Casetti, Rüdiger Campe, and Craig Buckley, the initiative challenges the idea that the present proliferation of media screens represents an expansion of models derived from the movie screen. Up to the middle of the 19th century, screens denoted a wide range of environmental elements and functions, from furniture that protected against heat, cold, and wind, to spatial partitions, surfaces concealing the presence of observers, legal protections, false architectural facades, the diversionary maneuvers of soldiers, hunting blinds, psychic as well as physical membranes, and more. By the end of the century, screens had primarily come to denote an optical surface associated with projected images. What effect did this consolidation of the optical screen, and the loss of this more diverse environmental gamut of screens, have on our capacity think about screens? The project invites scholars to reconsider the obscured, eccentric, and diverse environmental manifestations of the screen, and asks how recovering this lost environmental history might enable us to rethink the problem of the screen today.

By inviting scholars from different fields,  Genealogies of the Excessive Screen will be an opportunity to bring together work that has engaged the topic from differing, yet complementary, perspectives. The initiative will also develop an important collaboration with the Yale University Art Gallery, with the Center for British Art, and with the Whitney Humanities Center.