The Skin-Screen: Embodied Mediation in the Age of Portable Vision

This article investigates how contemporary touch screens trans- form the conditions of perception, affect, and subjectivity by operating as haptic, relational interfaces. Drawing on phenomenology, media archaeol- ogy, and cognitive neuroscience, it advances the concept of the skin-screen to designate the tactile and operational integration of image and body char- acteristic of portable digital media. The article contends that images function today as computational and sensorial processes and that screens constitute ontological thresholds through which embodied mediation is enacted. By tracing a genealogy from corporeal surfaces to the touchscreen, it elucidates how portable vision reorganizes attention, presence, and selfhood within algorithmically structured environments. Screens thus appear as ambivalent dispositifs: instruments of abstraction and modulation, yet also potential sites for reactivating embodied relationality and reconfiguring the parameters of contemporary being-in-the-world.