In the onrushing flotsam of our media realities, questions like the death of the “cinematic” might already seem quaint, yet at least partially allied to this are the quizzical boundaries of the screen. At once an archaeology, prognosis, autopsy, and meticulous accounting of where screens have gone, or taken forms other than an internalization, The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie, by Jenna Ng, locates itself in the context of post-truth and fake news, in a realm of post-objecthood where the increasingly virtualized image resides on ghostly inner and outer borders.
The reader may at first feel we have traversed this dissolution of the “real” before, but Ng painstakingly differentiates her perspective from what she admits is the “theoretical mothership” of “replacement and precession” in the “inescapable discussion” of Jean Baudrillard (129). Baudrillard opened his 1981 book Simulation and Simulacra with Jorge Luis...