Affective Immersion in Large-Scale Moving Image Installations

This article concentrates on the establishment and curation of the BFI Gallery at BFI Southbank (2007–2011), where the core, audience-facing cultural offer was extended to include contemporary artists' moving image installations. It considers the conditions that led the British Film Institute to favour commissioning over displaying, and the curatorial model of the temporary gallery commission over that of the collection-based film museum that had previously characterised the institution. The article discusses the critical and practical issues that affect the conceptualisation of the the BFI Gallery, such as the economic and political decisions of the day and the habitus of institutional management. To analyse the underlying mechanisms that triggered the changes of curatorial policies observed, consideration is given to the role of individual curators with a visual art background, who, from the early 2000s, reached the senior and executive levels of the BFI, an organisation previously led by cinema experts. The analysis uses the author's empirical experience as BFI curator to provide insight into the hidden cultural dynamics that generate the meaning of the work of art, with specific attention to curatorial moving image practices.

This short postscript offers some closing thoughts on new directions emerging in moving image installation, particularly in technologies of simulation—computer-generated imagery (CGI), virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). Through a comparison of recent works by Ian Cheng and Hito Steyerl, I explore the question of AI in particular, in its relationship to futurity, and draw out some of the ways that moving image installation might be well-equipped to enable us as viewers in the present, here and now, to think about the future.

This chapter locates the preoccupation with memory in artists’ moving image in relation to digitalization and the ‘memory boom’ of the 1990s. It surveys the role of the moving image as a media of memory and establishes the key concepts of Deleuze’s Bergsonian cinema and the virtual force of memory which inform the theorization of artists’ moving image in five overlapping mnemonic modes: ‘critical nostalgia’, ‘database narrative’, ‘echo-chamber’, ‘documentary fiction’ and ‘mediatized memories’. The chapter defines the intermedial aesthetics in contemporary artists’ moving image installations in terms of the remediation of analogue film and video with digital technology and the absorption of cinema within the gallery. It shows how contemporary moving image practices have reconfigured the diverse genealogies of artist’ film and video.

This article juxtaposes cinema and moving image installation to question the ways cinema studies has understood embodied spectatorship. Through a close study of Amar Kanwar’s moving image installation, The Sovereign Forest, exhibited at ‘documenta 13’, the article draws on an intermedial approach to explore emerging transformations in the phenomenological dynamics of the moving image. The article explores how the concrete, multisensory experience of Kanwar’s installation trains the sensorium of the viewer, opening new possibilities for the moving image. This concrete physicality serves as a point of reference to refocus and sharpen the understanding of the more complex kinaesthetic dimensions of cinema spectatorship.

INSTALLATION OF THE EXOTIC Film and audiovisual installations have increasingly taken place in the art world in recent years extending and renewing the range of activities in the fine art domain. Tracing its origins to expanded cinema and video art in the 1970s, moving image installation is now ubiquitous in public museums and private galleries. This is at a time when access to experimental work via public service versions of television has now all but disappeared.(1) In the two decades since, as television channels have proliferated, choice has actually narrowed. Moving image installations are visible in a diversity of art environments from gallery spaces to site-specific work in urban or industrial pop-ups. Multi-screen configurations are not easily arranged in cinemas or easily watched on television sets, let alone computers. The small portable digital screens may issue a blizzard of information and imagery everyday, but their size and scale...

ABSTRACTThis article will examine Wang Gongxin's and Zhang Peili's moving-image installations, critically reviewing their relationships with spaces they inhabit and are inhabited by as a dominant issue in these works. I argue that both artists are globally engaged and art-historically informed agent, fully aware of the complexity of their living spaces in their transcultural and historical entanglements and therefore that these artworks are constituted by interrogations of art's critical capacities. Wang and Zhang seem to scrutinize and compare the critical potential of a representational understanding of art that places its emphasis on objectification. In doing so, a distanced and analytic spectatorship is challenged in favour of a performative concept that emphasizes the mediating quality of art through a participant viewer. Their artistic interventions implicitly propose the concept of the artist and the viewer as embodied participants and constituents of the artwork, as opposed to a dualistic and distanced relationship.

Moving Image Installations as Prototype Spatial Models of Interaction

Drawing upon the film and video installations of Singaporean artists Ho Tzu Nyen and Ming Wong, this article aims to make a critical enquiry into methodological and theoretical intersections between film and fine art. Drawing from the cultural particularities of Singapore, there are dimensions in these artists’ works that are relevant for the discussion of an imaginative identification with local histories. Contested issues relating to representation, identity, roots, performativity and history are engaged and negotiated in their works. Ho and Wong foreground the significance of the Malay heritage in the Singaporean identity, notwithstanding being Chinese. The artists are careful to underline the notion that identities are constructed and fluid, and their works reveal a resistance against a singular, constructed definition or an essentialist interpretation of the Singapore national identity, in favour of one that is able to reflect pluralities of diverse societies and the multiplicity of culture. The endeavours to devise alternative modes of exhibition in the art gallery are directed in part at transforming the exhibition environment and how viewers relate to the artwork. In their moving image installations, Ho Tzu Nyen and Ming Wong have developed various visual strategies that explore the dynamic relation between filmic space and time. Proposing a more fluid approach in the understanding of spectatorial positions, both artists have produced a visual and experiential language that enable the audience to develop a new consciousness about their environment and themselves. By engaging the aural-visual, conceptual and physical aspects of the artists’ works, the analysis of the moving image as a series of assertions made within the fields of contemporary art and film seeks to explore new possibilities about what is meant by the ‘cinematic’ in Singapore.

This article situates a number of Philippe Parreno’s moving image installations within the developments that led in the 1990s to the establishment of film as one of the pre-eminent forms of display in the museum of contemporary art. From here, a clear yet unexplored relation is established between cinema’s relocation to the museum and artistic practices promoted under the conceptual label of relational aesthetics, with which Parreno was closely associated throughout the 1990s. Conceived as a part of the structural whole comprising an exhibition and embedded in a specific location, film installation was used by Parreno to raise questions concerning the visibility of the artwork and the duration of the viewing encounter. The fluid interactions between temporal and spatial categories in these installations invite a re-examination of the categories of museum and exhibition, as well as the material limits of the medium of the moving image.

This article explores the notion of ‘place’, extending its scope to include the ocean, history and diaspora, in relation to six contemporary Māori and Pacific artists who were involved in the Pacifique(S) Contemporain exhibitions in Normandy, France in 2015. Structured into three sections, it addresses the three curatorial thematics that provided the overarching frame for the exhibitions. ‘The ocean is a place’ focuses on Angela Tiatia and Rachael Rakena, and acknowledges the importance of Epeli Hau’ofa’s writing in relation to the ocean and Oceania as a crucial marker of identity both within its geographic location and beyond. ‘History is a place’ considers moving image installations by Michel Tuffery and Greg Semu, in particular referencing how they rework and reimagine colonial and art historical representations and conventions. ‘Diaspora is a place’ compares the photographic practices of Ane Tonga and Edith Amituanai, whose work reflects on and captures the dynamics that emerge as Pacific communities draw on and adapt cultural traditions, and negotiate relationships mediated by their migration and diaspora experiences.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the power of invisibility to provoke and unsettle in two of the Wilson’s installations: Stasi City (1997) and A Free and Anonymous Monument (2003). The two installations are distinct, and by no means repeat their claims. Nevertheless, their juxtaposition gives insight into some of the different guises of invisibility threaded through two of the Wilson’s most visible installations. Through an exposure of the invisible, I argue that the Wilson sisters’ experimental images and installations are involved in a complex multi-layered critique of otherwise secret political and ideological structures, structures and systems that are in every way off-limits. The two installations do not just make visible what is invisible – state crimes, personal violation, abandonment, social neglect – they probe this invisibility and find what it is not permissible to visualize.

Creative practice as research in moving image and sound has, since the 1960s, been central to the methodologies and works of many moving image artists in Australia. Peter Kennedy’s conceptual, performance, installation and light works mobilize radical political insight with richly complex formal strategies. Kennedy’s recent The Photographs’ Story (2015), working with a set of still photographs depicting the death of Mohammad Al-Dura in Gaza in June 2000, is examined for the manner in which formal strategies in moving image installation can be understood as a series of propositions regarding creative practice as research, arguing that the ‘poetic dimension’ of a work of art is the heart of its critical knowledge and the image, the vehicle for its transmission.

This paper engages with the concept of ‘elsewhere’ in the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray as a way to theorise the experience of viewing the audio-visual installations of Finnish artist, Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Ahtila’s work traces specific narratives concerning feminine desire and subjectivity across multi-screen apparatus in gallery environment. The space of exhibition and film form initiate a mode of encounter that motivates a different relation of projector, screen and viewer. Ahtila’s multi-screen installations insist that we look to the places of exclusion in discourse and to the silences in representation for meaning elsewhere, in excess and otherwise. The exclusion in discourse is for Luce Irigaray of course the feminine. Irigaray articulates a view that textually and performatively demands we recognise the impossibility of a feminine position. I take up this problematic with specific attention to how Ahtila’s audiovisual installation If 6 Was 9 (Jos 6 olis 9, 1995) produces and disrupts traditional cinematic representation to examine how the space of installation, multi-screen form and the filmic space lend itself to a different encounter with the cinematic. By tracing the concept of ‘elsewhere’ in philosophical and audio-visual texts, the article develops and refines a position from which one might view contemporary cinematic experience. KEYWORDS Luce Irigaray, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, feminism, feminist film, moving image installation, expanded cinema, gallery film

ABSTRACTConventional cinema constructs a strict demarcation between filmic space and the architecture of the auditorium. In acknowledging the constructed nature of the filmic situation, moving image installation has the potential to transgress this metaphysical boundary between “virtual” and “real”: to establish an encounter with a figural presence. Here, our orientation toward the virtual image is brought into play, but in such a way that ambiguities of location problematize the spectator position, revealing the radical nonmateriality of the filmic image. Using examples of my own work and others, I examine how such works address an inherent filmic tension between the moving and still image, drawing upon photography’s spectral indexicality to blur the boundary between life and death.

This article illustrates the creative process and conceptual impetus for the development of the piece Expanded Fields; a moving image installation with live performance, sound and virtual reality which was first presented in the Limerick City Gallery of Art in November 2019. The work highlights multiple filters through which the audience can encounter a piece of choreography, using a range of different media to invite the viewer into various degrees of proximity with the dancers in movement. Co-authors Ruth Gibson and Jenny Roche contextualise this collaboration undertaken with artist Bruno Martelli, composer Mel Mercier and the dancers, Kévin Coquelard, Henry Montes and Ursula Robb and articulate the application of process tools utilised to create the work. They draw on contributions from these collaborators on their experience of the making process as well as through materials produced by all involved in the development of the piece. The process tools included Micro-phenomenological Interviewing (MPI), movement initiated writing, Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), motion capture, filmmaking and audio recordings. These methods were interwoven to reveal the tapestry of experiential layers that can be accessed when dancing or viewing a piece of dance. Placing them together within a gallery installation space and grounding these perspectives through episodic live performance, allowed the material to be encountered through various sensorial frames, from the immersive VR environment where the avatars of the dancers moved close to the viewer’s body, to the foyer space where footage of the dancers from studio rehearsals could be viewed on tv screens. The article situates this creative work in relation to writing by theorists such as Teresa Brennan on affect and André Lepecki on Derrida’s notion of the trace, alongside articulating potential alignments between SRT and MPI.