Abstract

The article is open-access on Media Fields Journal 18.

As the subway train gradually departs and accelerates, a floating screen appears in the metro tunnel and demands the rider’s attention. In no more than 15 seconds, the screen displays a video advertisement with images flashing past rapidly, becoming at once an assault on the rider and a source of immense enchantment and intrigue. The proliferation of urban screens—metro floating screens, LED billboards, digital facades, waiting room televisions—in the everyday life has long been an under-theorized and under-examined dimension in the scholarly field. Inspired by media archaeological perspectives on urban media (Parikka 2012; Casetti 2015; Mattern 2015, 2017), my article is a close examination of the “floating” screen in the Shanghai Metro—a commercial product unique to subway trains in China—with attention to its materiality, historicity, and political-economic implications in contemporary China.

By locating a temporal and ontological linkage between the early cinematic gadget of zoetrope and contemporary Chinese screens, I argue that the floating screen allows us to re-examine and potentially bridge the gaps between the analog and the digital, between capitalist modernity in the 19th century and Chinese post-socialist modernity since 1977. Furthermore, by examining the “floating” screen’s occasional glitches with a black strip between each frame, I argue that the screen’s technical contingency embodies the Simondonian “margin of indeterminacy.” Such indeterminate zones break through the techno-utopian vision of Chinese post-socialist screen culture, through which emergent forms of subjectivities and mutualities can be negotiated.