Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures AMPS | Queen's University Belfast | Cape Peninsula University of Technology | National University of Singapore Page 317 ‘ZOOM-WALKS’ AND CYANOTYPES: MATERIALIZING SCREEN ONTOPHONIES Author: ALYSSA GROSSMAN Affiliation: THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, UK INTRODUCTION Shortly after the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020, as people across the globe were confronting the sudden and all-consuming shift from in-person to screen-based communication, I embarked on a series of lockdown experiments with my long-time artistic collaborator and friend, Selena Kimball. 1 As an anthropologist and lecturer in the University of Liverpool’s Communication and Media department, I was living in the UK, and Selena, an artist and associate professor at Parsons The New School, was based in New York. Having worked together over the course of nearly two decades while living on different continents, we were accustomed to communicating with each other through regular video calls. Following lockdown, however, these types of virtual meetings quickly became the default mode for nearly all our daily forms of social interaction. Our conversations soon turned to the fact that our lives (and those of most people we knew) were now almost entirely mediated by online video-call platforms such as Zoom. We talked about the feelings of dislocation and distance stemming from the new circumstances that had led to the stark absence of in-person contact and our dependence upon screen-based communication. As Selena wrote to me in an email at the time: “I miss the kind of knowing that you can absorb through your skin. I miss the kind of spatial perception that comes from seeing things from multiple angles, from using my peripheral vision. I miss the awareness that comes from the physical agency of crossing my arms or tilting my head. We act as very different kinds of receivers when we communicate through the screen.” 2 Changes in media forms and technologies have continuously impacted how we perceive and dwell in the world. 3 Research on the disembodied nature of the digital image, “digital dualism” and screens as disconnected from lived space and time 4 has been increasingly challenged and complicated by more recent work in the arenas of new media, posthumanism and affect studies. N. Katherine Hayles, for example, writes that concrete technologies are always entangled with abstract ideas, defining the concept of virtuality as the “cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns.” 5 Patricia Tincineto Clough argues that digitization brings about a “profound technical expansion of the senses.” 6 Mark N. B. Hansen similarly writes that in digital regimes, the human body acts to “enframe” digital information in ways that transform it into affective, haptic and “experienceable image-worlds.” 7 Such theorizations, however, can often be difficult to identify and reconcile in practice. Despite our awareness of this literature, Selena and I were still viscerally struggling with the feelings of flatness