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Though often taken for granted, everyday objects influence how people experience moving images. Andrea J. Kelley uses bedsheets and inflatables as cultural media tools to explore the powerful ways familiar things shape audience perceptions and reactions.

Kelley expands film history into homes, parks, and outdoor spaces to reveal that ordinary screen materials bring with them long histories tied to labor, race, gender, and industry. As she shows, when people project films onto these surfaces, their histories impact the meaning of the viewing experience. Kelley draws on archival research, film analysis, and examples like backyard movie nights and COVID-era outdoor screenings to focus on how overlooked elements affect our understanding of spectatorship, exhibition, and media culture.

An evocative look at a popular experience, Surface Encounters shows that movie screens matter because of what they are made of and the ways people encounter them in everyday places.

What it is like to be an animal? Ron Broglio wants to know from the inside, from underneath the fur and feathers. In examining this question, he bypasses the perspectives of biology or natural history to explore how one can construct an animal phenomenology, to think and feel as an animal other—or any other.

Until now phenomenology has grappled with how humans are embedded in their world. According to philosophical tradition, animals do not practice the self-reflexive thought that provides humans with depth of being. Without human interiority, philosophers have believed, animals live on the surface of things. But, Broglio argues, the surface can be a site of productive engagement with the world of animals, and as such he turns to humans who work with surfaces: contemporary artists.

Taking on the negative claim of animals living only on the surface and turning the premise into a positive set of possibilities for human–animal engagement, Broglio considers artists—including Damien Hirst, Carolee Schneemann, Olly and Suzi, and Marcus Coates—who take seriously the world of the animal on its own terms. In doing so, these artists develop languages of interspecies expression that both challenge philosophy and fashion new concepts for animal studies.