Chroma screens is a collective name for the blue and green screens that are commonly used in the process of compositing images in cinema, video and graphics. Taking into account the expanded functions of screens in the postmedia condition, screens are not merely 'container' of images, rather they emphasize, interconnect and constantly rearticulate relationships in a media assemblage. This paper explores the 'intra-active gesturality' of chroma screens, that is, screens as an enactment of material-discursive practices and analyses ways in which they sustain the relations between various parts of the media assemblage. In considering the specific instance of Sondra Perry's artwork, the paper argues that chroma screens are a performance of colour where the practices of imagemaking and racial discrimination converge.

In contemporary artworks of so-called post-media assemblage, screens can be argued to emphasize, interconnect and rearticulate relationships between various parts in various modalities of image-making and display. They can be understood to produce gesturality that maintains conditions of mediality, which is the sustenance of relations between different parts of the media ensemble. This paper is an attempt to understand screens by analysing the gesturality that they propagate and not just facilitate. For this purpose, the paper interrogates the intermediality of screens in contemporary media arts that rely on this gesturality. By closely analysing contemporary media art installations such as Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) (John Gerrard, 2014) and Shadow 3 (Shilpa Gupta, 2007), this paper elaborates a concept of intermediality as an unfixed state and describes in-betweenness as enabling an openness to continuously form, unform and deform relations with different entities, thereby producing a gestural modality.

The essay views the video installation as an apparatus that lightens multiple subjectivities. By illustrating twoworks of Amar Kanwar, the essay elaborates on various positions of the audience, the methodologies used byKanwar in proposing different ways of viewing to generate different subjective experiences. This also offers ananalysis of video installation to re-define post-medium according to engagement with the art object and not inits making.

The interaction in the contemporary media art installations can be viewed as a process of transformation as the parts of the installation engage and respond to each other. This paper considers interactive media art as assemblages and argues screens to be gestures of this assemblage. The screens activate and rearrange the relations between the elements of the assemblage by providing multiple connections between them. By examining two artworks, Breath (1991/92) by Ulrike Gabriel and Shadow 3 (2007) by Shilpa Gupta, the paper extrapolates the aesthetic experiences gestured by the screens. Article received: April 25, 2018; Article accepted: May 10, 2018; Published online: October 15, 2018; Preliminary report – Short CommunicationsHow to cite this article: Maithani, Charu. "Screens as Gestures in Interactive Art Assemblage." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 17 (2018): 147−155. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i17.278

Chroma screens is a term for the green and blue screens used in filmmaking, television, and graphics during image making for the compositing of other images in post-production. Engaging an agential realist framework to deliberate on this mode of screens wherein they are without images, I consider chroma screens in and through material-discursive practices to argue that the green and blue colors of chroma screens can be considered a cultural enactment of racialized media practices. I take the image blankness of chroma screens as the condition for a performance of blackness/race. An analysis of Sondra Perry’s work, Graft and Ash for a Three-Monitor Workstation (2016), opens onto how racial practices and concepts around blackness have functioned in the very blankness of chroma screens. The blan/ckness relationship in Perry’s work is leveraged to become generative of a differencing, a performance that not only sustains blackness, a difference in color, but recognizes and animates it in constructive ways. In this paper I show that neither blackness nor whiteness are pre-given but are caught up with a powerful imaging and medial technique, co-constituted in, with, and through chroma screens.