Blan/ck screens: Chroma screens performing race

Maithani, Charu

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117145 Copy

Description

Title

Blan/ck screens: Chroma screens performing race

Author(s)

Maithani, Charu

Issue Date

2022-02

Keyword(s)

• blankness
• blackness
• screens
• chroma keying
• chroma screens

Abstract

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.

Series/Report Name or Number

Media-N, vol. 18, issue 1

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v18i1.844

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2022 Charu Maithani
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

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