This essay discusses the orientations of the screen both as work surface
and as display surface by focusing on the shifts from and to the horizontal
and vertical axes of the screenic space. To do so, we have collected a
variety of examples, mainly media art installations but also films and
mixed-media performances, which serve to reconstruct an ‘evolution of
the desk’ and to retrieve a new gesturality. Balancing the producer’s and
the viewer’s perspectives, we argue that it is no longer the function but
the usage of a certain device that determines its position on either the
vertical or the horizontal axis.
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