Historical time in Tony Oursler's media arts

Abstract

Stemming from the 1980s up to the present, the media arts by American artist Tony Oursler have characteristically featured new artistic configurations of spatiotemporal movement, lack of association between audiovisual elements, nonlinear narratives, immersion in emotive images and expansion outside institutional spaces. These decentralized and antihierarchical pictorial experiences have expanded the idealized experiences of the visual regimes of Western traditions in the fashion of new media and installation art. The essay will examine Oursler's adaptation of experimental processes of remediation, which rely on the repetition of different media elements and the subversion of entertainment industry imagery and techniques. The essay will examine how, by the means of experimentation with new media technologies, the artist creates new modes of audience experience, which challenge established notions of temporality and of historical time. The essay will situate these works in the historical and philosophical contexts of avant-garde art. The essay will argue that Oursler's formalizations of temporality in new media offer a new model for reconsidering historical time, which extends historicist accounts of cultural production and their respective politics of spectatorship and audience reception. This artistic reconsidering opens up to a radical rethinking of the sociopolitical significance of contemporary media arts, as formalized by new technologies, within the sphere of public culture.