Review: The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment, by Annie Dell’Aria

Abstract

Book Review| June 01 2022 Review: The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment, by Annie Dell’Aria The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment by Annie Dell’Aria. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 307 pp./$119.99 (hb) ISSN 978-3-030-65903-5, $89.00 (eBook) ISSN 978-3-030-65904-2. Dale Hudson Dale Hudson Dale Hudson is an associate professor of film and new media at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is author of Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods (2017), co-author with Patricia R. Zimmermann of Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (2015), and co-editor with Alia Yunis of a special double issue of the Journal of Middle East Culture and Communication on film and visual media in the Gulf (2021). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2022) 49 (2): 115–119. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2022.49.2.115 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Dale Hudson; Review: The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment, by Annie Dell’Aria. Afterimage 1 June 2022; 49 (2): 115–119. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2022.49.2.115 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search In The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment, Annie Dell’Aria examines moving images as public art in relation to how they engage viewers—not as spectators of spectacle—but as potential participants in unplanned and surprising encounters, involving mediated images, physical infrastructure, and strangers. She defines such encounters as “enchantment,” sometimes transforming public spaces into shared moments of visceral pleasure and other times altering perspectives on these spaces. Dell’Aria uses the term “moving image” to reframe “distinctions of medium,” often formalist (animation, sculpture, video), noting that “the term itself refers to an effect rather than a physical apparatus or process” (11) and is “fundamentally experiential” (12). Viewers approach moving images through “constant negotiation between attention and distraction and between represented and actual space” (31). Moving images in public attract “glances and incidental attention rather than absorption” (33), as theatrical film was theorized in the 1970s. Moving... You do not currently have access to this content.