Enhancing visual engagement: a cognitive analysis of video installations using VR eye tracking

While at first, “video installation” would seem to refer to a particular medium and mode of display, in practice, the term is applied to a range of intersecting media, histories and genres, including but not limited to experimental and expanded cinema, video art, installation art, digital and new media art, and the emergent category of artists’ moving image. In short, “video installation” encompasses an expansive field of moving image practices, formats, and configurations, from multichannel film projection to video sculpture to immersive and interactive media environments. The term can apply to moving images that emanate from or are projected onto screens, monitors, or mobile devices, and are displayed in spaces outside of a conventional cinematic context. In terms of historical periodization, the rise of video installation coincided with the emergence of analog video technology in the mid- to late 1960s and the concomitant emergence of installation art during this same period. Up until the 1980s, video installation took shape predominantly as gallery-based displays of CRT monitors. Often configured into sculptural arrangements that self-reflexively acknowledge their physical support, “video sculptures” invoke and comment upon video’s genetic ties to broadcast television. Yet, other, more feedback-driven modes of installation, such as Nam June Paik’s TV-Buddha (1974) or Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970), emphasize the instantaneity of real-time closed circuit video over the sculptural presence of the monitor, and thus privilege surveillant over the televisual optics. By the 1990s, as video projectors improved in quality and decreased in cost, the bulky CRT gave way to the projected moving image, which in turn has emerged as a dominant mode within contemporary artistic production. Since it can adapt to a variety of spaces and surfaces—wall, ceiling, floor, screen, objects, even viewers’ bodies—projection opens up a multitude of experiential possibilities. Projection can also be sculptural, as in the work of Tony Oursler and Krystof Wodizcko, who generate uncannily embodied video portraits by projecting moving images onto free-standing objects, buildings, and monuments. Video projection can also be immersive or environmental, such as in Anthony McCall’s Solid Light Works (2005–2010), a suite of monumental, linear beams of white light projected into darkened gallery spaces, which act as updated, digital variations of his influential expanded cinema work, Line Describing a Cone (1973). In response to its dominant position within contemporary artistic practice, scholarship and criticism devoted to moving image installation, curation, and distribution have spiked since the 1990s. This bibliography offers a selection of relevant literature on this topic. Beginning with an overview of key scholarship on the history of video art and contemporary artists’ moving image, the bibliography transitions to more focused, thematic investigations of and significant prehistories, including topics like expanded cinema, video aesthetics and ecologies, and installation art. Finally, it includes a selection of key exhibition catalogues, including specialized sections on video projection and video sculpture. In tracing the entwined emergence of video and installation art since the 1960s, this bibliography also limns another historical intersection, that of video art and experimental film. While typically, these practices have been framed as historically distinctive, aesthetically autonomous and driven by medium-specific concerns, this bibliography takes inspiration from and highlights more recent scholarly, critical, and curatorial perspectives that align and cross-reference these traditions, and in doing so, situate themselves at the disciplinary intersection of art history and film and media studies.

The Convergence Effect: Real and Virtual Encounters in Augmented Reality Art

This book explores how installation art developed into an interdisciplinary genre in the 1960s, and how its special intertwinement of the visual and the performative has acted as a catalyst for the generation of new artistic phenomena. It investigates how it became one of todays most widely used art forms, increasingly expanding into consumer, popular and urban cultures, where the installations often spectacular appearances ensure that they fit into contemporary demands for sense-provoking and immersive cultural experiences. Making an important contribution to the development of the critical and theoretical discourse on installation art, Ring Petersen addresses a series of basic questions: What is an installation? What techniques does it employ? How does installation art affect its viewers? How can we explain the rise of installation art in a cultural-historical perspective? Answers to these questions are pursued through analyses of installation arts spatial, temporal and discursive aspects as well as its reception aesthetics and cultural-historical contexts, and through analyses of a large number of works from a variety of sub-genres, including performance installations, video installations, installational exhibitions and recent use of installation in commercial contexts, including by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Pipilotti Rist, Ilya Kabakov, Superflex, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Holler, Terike Haapoja and ART + COM.

Video art emerged as a reaction to television broadcasting policies and as a result of the desire to find new mediums in art. Unlike television and cinema, in video art, the third dimension exists not only through visual illusions but also physically in a space. In this respect, video, which is closely related to sculpture and installation arts, also has the ability to create a virtual third dimension. This study aims to clarify the video genres according to the creation of the third dimension by finding the genre classifications in the literature on video insufficient. In this way, it is aimed to prevent conceptual confusion regarding video genres in academic or artistic studies on video art. For this purpose, the works in the discipline of video art were analyzed by content analysis method on how they create the third dimension during presentation. As a result of this examination, it was determined that three different approaches were preferred by the artists, and in line with this data, three sub-genres were determined as basic video sculpture, video installation and virtual reality within the scope of the problematic of how video art creates the third dimension. This classification is expected to both contribute to the theoretical literature and reduce the uncertainty of genre in art practice.

Title: Site-Specific Art Installation; Entrance of ArtJog “Arts in Common” at Jogja National Museum The art installation serves as an object that fills a space in a building, an imaginary space, or a space in the open air. The installation possesses aesthetic characteristics that defy rigid boundaries in fine art, which are typically considered standard, and it also lacks limitations in the use of media or materials. ArtJog is one of the premier art exhibition events in Yogyakarta, featuring art installations. ArtJog originated from art fairs that always featured a central art installation placed at the entrance, using a concept or theme in line with the ongoing exhibition. ArtJog art installations are non-permanent, so that the exhibition space will be dismantled upon the exhibition's conclusion. The main art installation work at the entrance is essential as an application of the concept and theme that means "there is an ArtJog exhibition" with the function of the workspace in it, as well as being a connecting space between the outside space and the space in the gallery which can be formulated as site-specific art. The elements of site-specific art can be articulated and defined as a special relationship between objects or events and their specific locations. This study will examine the three years of ArtJog to identify the theoretical elements of site-specific art, focusing on the central art installations of ArtJog in 2019, which marked the beginning of the overarching theme "Arts-in-Common", the second year, 2021, and the third year, 2022. The study will conclude by analysing the characteristics of site-specific art.

This article analyzes Christopher Cozier’s multichannel video installation of mixed media contemporary art entitled Blue Soap (1994). The article employs the leitmotif of the artwork, blue soap—a raw soap used in the Caribbean—to construct an aesthetic and socio-political critique of Trinidad and Tobago. Using a selection of visual material from the video installation and drawings of Blue Soap, the article considers reports from national newspapers on the art event, and integrates these reports with analysis of audience comments from its exhibition opening in 1994, in Port of Spain, the capital of the country. This data analysis is supplemented by in-depth ethnographic interviews I conducted with the artist and collaborators on the work, and includes a study of Cozier’s sketches in his art notebook at that time. This article dissects the scenes and symbolism in the artwork, problematizing the soap's metaphorical cleaning/cleansing action in society. It shows the colonial connections related to the use and symbolic values of the soap, which were inherited by Trinidadian society after independence, and it connects them with some of the current critical issues that society is dealing with.Following the structure of the video art, the contribution contextualizes these issues socio-historically, and develops a temporal excursus, linking the same topics to society today. The aim is for the reader to understand the local issues of the time, and allow her/him to relate these issues to other post-colonized societies of the Americas and the world. The article develops its contents in three parts: the first two explain the topics of the video installation and contextualize the issues socio-historically; the third part develops theoretical frameworks for the issues previously described.The first part relates to post-independence social and psychological issues that Trinbagonian citizens were experiencing and questioning. Here the artist is the main protagonist and reflexively explains issues of racial identity from personal experience. Moreover, this part of the paper discusses the broader topics of self-affirmation as an independent nation, but one that still depended upon the variable economic waves of oil and gas incomes. The attempted coup d’état that occurred right before the release of the artwork is also discussed in this part of the text.The second part treats concerns surrounding institutional arrangements and the postcolonial social expectations based on aesthetics, style and class articulated by the protagonists of the video installation. Each of the characters expresses some of the topics highlighted in the video, namely, the borders between institutional nationalized culture and its different existent subcultures, the complexity of gender stereotypes, postcolonial hierarchical structures of colonial colorism and social expectations, and issues of visibility and social representability.The third part of this article assembles postcolonial theoretical frameworks in accordance with the artwork itself, exposing the identity issues of post-colonized, contemporary citizens. It looks at questions of trust and conformity within established group structures, concluding with a discussion of the issue of migratory and diasporic displacement, which many countries like Trinidad and Tobago have faced in their history.

The Contemporary Art Center in Banjarbaru is a place that presents a place to facilitate artists and the general public who are interested in various elements of art that are developing now, such as installation art. This center of contemporary art aims to create an environment that can indicate the behavior of artists and contemporary art, so that it can be used as an art space for artists and the general public to collaborate with each other in various branches of art. By using combined metaphor method and character concept, it is expected to be able to create an art center design with contemporary theme projection that can represent the identity of various art to collaborate, taking into account the elements of contemporary art that are in it and translated into visual architecture.

The Contemporary Art Center in Banjarbaru is a place that presents a place to facilitate artists and the general public who are interested in various elements of art that are developing now, such as installation art. This center of contemporary art aims to create an environment that can indicate the behavior of artists and contemporary art, so that it can be used as an art space for artists and the general public to collaborate with each other in various branches of art. By using combined metaphor method and character concept, it is expected to be able to create an art center design with contemporary theme projection that can represent the identity of various art to collaborate, taking into account the elements of contemporary art that are in it and translated into visual architecture.

Is a Factory a Museum?* Thomas Elsaesser I read Hito Steyerl's essay "Is a Museum a Factory?" with great interest.1 Not only because she quotes me and announces in the most affable—if nonetheless unmistakable—way her doubts about my remarks, but because she touches on subjects I have been thinking about for some time and that are relevant for a broader audience. The basic argument of "Is a Museum a Factory?" could be summed up as follows: Now, because more and more factories are being converted into museums, it is about time to ask what these two seemingly diametrically opposed institutions have in common that makes it so easy to transition from one to the other. And if that is the case, what consequences does this transition have for (a) the concept of production in art and society, (b) the experience of space and time, (c) the relationship of the masses and the individual, and, finally—here I add my own point—(d) the formatting or programming of the human senses and body? All of this is focused on the question of the fate of the socially committed film and political cinema that once was shown in factories as well and now leads a hybrid and conflicted existence as installation art in museums, exhibitions, and galleries. The areas of tension cannot be discussed in detail here, so let me just try and extend Hito Steyerl's essay to include a further thesis: At one time people did [End Page 42] physical labor in factories and sought to relax with viewing pleasures and feasts for the eyes. Today, "to look is to labor"—whether at a monitor in the office, on a screen or at home, in the cinema, or at the museum. We experience leisure, if at all, playing sports, working in the garden, at the fitness studio, or in other activities and performances even more obsessively oriented around the body; that is, at leisure we are still subjects of the "societies of control" described by Gilles Deleuze and the body-oriented self-maximization that became famous in Michel Foucault's writing as the "care of the self" and "biopolitics." The premises of such an argument are, on the one hand, closely linked and focused—political cinema, installation art—and, on the other hand, very far apart: they refer to our postindustrial societies of crisis and their atomized, fragmented subjectivities, experienced and affirmed only as participants in "multitudes." Hito Steyerl puts her finger on a number of sore points and striking paradoxes. The fact is that several of the most-visited museums are either former factories or power stations, such as Tate Modern in London, or they look like factories, as in the case of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. To put it more generally: in recent decades, more and more factories, warehouses, turbine halls, gasometers, harbors, and large market halls have been converted into museums, exhibition spaces, or artists' studios. If Tate Modern can be said to be the most famous case in Europe, there are countless other examples: the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, near Newcastle (a former grain mill), the Santralistanbul Museum of Contemporary Art in Istanbul (a former power station on the Bosporus), the theater and photography museums on Helsinki's harbor (in a former ship cable factory), or the Centre for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe (a former weapons and ammunitions factory). In her essay, Hito Steyerl alludes to Rem Koolhaas's newly designed Contemporary Art Museum in Riga, a coal-fired power plant that was already decommissioned during the Soviet area. On the website of Rem Kohlhaas's firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture, this tendency to transform factories into museums is addressed directly: "It is an open secret that the presentation of art is not the only function of the contemporary Museum. The very success of the institution—a pivotal centre of contemporary society—has accrued additional interests and powers that require their own infrastructure, in addition, but independent from the viewing of art." The infrastructure demanded here includes not only the museum shop, a large cinema, performance spaces, and surrounding greenery but also "educational, media-related and production...

In this study, two channelled and coloured video installation called Ever is Over All dated 1997 by Pipilotti Rist’s being one of the artists who shaped video installations is analysed. In this installation produced by Pipilotti Rist as a woman artist, a woman in an entranced mood is shown smashing the glasses of some of the cars parked on the roadside. There is the vast space of the flower field on the one side and then there is a cheerful woman as the main character crashing the glasses of the parked cars on the roadside with a long stemmed flower just like from the field. The female body is especially important in audio and video installations of Rist. This installation by the artist has been assessed in terms of gender, action (movement), expression, freedom and solidarity. The flower used by the woman to smash the car glasses is considered over themes such as nature, life and woman and the fact that a passing by female police officer does not intervene in the situation and goes on her way just by greeting our heroine and smiling is assessed using concepts such as gender, action/movement, expression and freedom. In this research, the effects created by the medium of expression in art are touched upon in the video installation titled Ever is Over All and it has been concluded that the subjects and objects included in the video inspire the solidarity of woman, community and nature.
 
 
 Keywords: video art, Pipilotti Rist, Gender-Action-Expression

The article analyzes three media technologies for creating an immersive polysensory environment, developed back in 1940–1960s by the Spanish film director and engineer Jose Val del Omar. The technologies are considered in the context of the director’s key concept, which he called “mechanical mysticism”. It was aimed at creating a cinematic analogy of mystical experience by transforming the mysticism of Spanish culture into cinematic technologies. The author reveals how the conversion of the suggestive artistic potential of Spanish mysticism into the immersiveness of film technologies allowed J. Val del Omar to create art spaces that took the system of illusions beyond the visual into special modes of psychological experiences. On the example of his films (Water- Mirror of Granada, 1955, and Fire in Castile, 1961), the author analyzes the originality of the engineering solutions of J. Val del Omar’s technologies, defines the strategies of immersiveness and their rootedness in Spanish mysticism, qualifies the aesthetic impact of these media technologies on viewers. The article demonstrates that immersiveness is achieved by using a shock strategy of interlacing the effects of suggestiveness and defamiliarization (“ostranenie”), as well as through the expansion of the range of the viewer’s sensory perception and the effect of synesthesia. The suggestive impression effect is enhanced by visual poetic metaphors that reveal to the viewers the historically formed sensual imagery of Spanish mysticism. With the help of optical and light technologies, the semantic field of a film is not only visualized, but also illusively materialized as a three-dimensional image. НАУКА ТЕЛЕВИДЕНИЯ № 17.1, 2021 54 THE ART AND SCIENCE OF TELEVISION In general, the strategies reproduce the sensual immersiveness, which is inherent in the Spanish Catholic cultural experience. Such strategies block the viewers’ psychological distancing mechanisms and cause affective states and emotional involvement in the art spaces. Such technological innovations for creation of immersive spectacular audio-visual environments brought the J. Val del Omar’s cinema into the field of multi-media, and therefore he could rightfully be considered the forerunner of media art, the creator of art spaces, which later became known as sound and video installations.

Locate, Combine, Contradict, Iterate: Serial Strategies for PostInternet Art

Filmmaker-artist of Thai origin Apichatpong Weerasethakul is known for crossing the boundaries between cinema and installation art, documentary film and fiction, and the work of memory, myth and fantasy. Weerasethakul’s variations on the character ‘Boonmee’, including a documentary essay, a series of objects and video installations as well as a feature film, are hybrid and reflective aesthetic works that together form a larger imaginary space based on the interplay of image and word. From this space, as Christa Blümlinger argues, a theatre of memory evolves that originates from one singular historical motif but is developed in various ways through different formal and aesthetic means. The three works are linked together by a central motif, namely that of recurrence. Heterogeneous temporalities, however, challenge and disrupt the configuration of a more continuous cultural and political memory, as well as the viewer’s individual perception.

A recontextualisation of Roland Barthes’s concepts of the third meaning and the punctum is presented through an analysis of Bruce Nauman’s installation art and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Nauman’s use of repetition in his Clown Torture video installation creates a trauma to form through looped video footage, which is shown to thwart narrative progression and, in effect, render the moving image static; in this way, it is demonstrated to function like a film still. Through use of a signifier taken out of context, Nauman’s methods are shown to achieve what may be termed a ‘third meaning in motion’. In Nauman’s video, Barthes’s notion of the punctum becomes evident due to the manipulation of time via the looping mechanism. The obstruction of signification that viewers experience is shown to activate a ‘performative punctum’. Furthermore, an examination of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty offers a fitting parallel to Nauman’s work, in terms of subversion of clear meaning formulation along with an attack on the audience’s sensibilities. This analysis represents an expansion of the field of application of Barthesian semiotics from the still image to the moving image.

Video installation art is a collaboration of sound, image, and space, with a closer relationship to music and art than to cinema. Accordingly, those working in this genre are often both artist and musician, a double role that represents a radical departure from the artist/musician divide of many other audio-visual genres. Because it is single authored, video installation can invert many elements of the filmmaking process: while it is common procedure to add a soundtrack to film during post-production, for instance, many video artists use sound as their starting point, often basing whole works on a musical structure. While such an inversion invites reconsideration of musical audibility and film narrative, video work, when installed, also challenges the notions of screen space and realism. An audience is no longer offered the single-point perspective of film, but is instead enveloped within a three-dimensional space. And as image expands beyond the four sides of the cinema screen – a space occupied previously by music alone – important questions are raised: what happens to music when film breaks from the containment of the screen? when it destroys its own boundaries? Focusing on the work of Bill Viola, this paper explores the ways in which video installation art confronts methods of film exhibition and audience engagement, and investigates how such confrontation redefines the roles of music and image in film.