Media Installation Research Articles

Understanding the effects of contextual constraints on performative behaviour in interactive media installations

In this article, we describe three interactive media installations, each evaluated in a distinctive environment. By following a research in and through design approach and studying the installation...

Bothering Myself

Bothering Myself

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

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

Pianos: Playing, Value, and Augmentation

Pianos: Playing, Value, and Augmentation

Representing the Microscopic: New Ecological Thinking in Art and Science

An impressive range of competing and complementary visual renditions helps us understand the immaterial and the invisible by assigning a visual appearance to microscopic and submicroscopic substances. However, the sheer variety that dominates visualization of the microscopic suggests that a represented object may be so complex that it cannot be reflected by a single artefact. That is to say, it is not a monolithic given, a pristine entity or a “thing in itself” waiting to be dismembered and represented. I analyse mixed media installations by the bioartists Tagny Duff and Elaine Whittaker, contending that their method constitutes a recent media art trend towards ecological (re)thinking. By examining specific arrangements of objects and artefacts and the scientific processes used to manipulate, prepare and make the microscopic visible and by placing them side by side in the same execution, these artists unveil new alternative economies of nature that may reshape the way we understand the microscopic.

Between infinity and ubiquity: perspectives in/on Rafael Lozano Hemmer's Body Movies

This paper looks into Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's large-scale urban media installation Body Movies (2001) from a perspective of a theory of cinema that, in the face of the advent of ubiquitous computation and real-time surveillance technologies, is itself undergoing some radical transformations. These transformation can be said to take place alongside three conceptual axes, i.e. that of space, time and being. Taking Body Movies as a particularly strong, and therefore, emblematic case in point, I will unpack this triangulation by critically reassessing a number of key concepts stemming from film and media theory, i.e. projection and embodiment, presence and real time, affect and agency.

Characteristics of Multi-User Interface for Children - Focus on hand-on exhibition with interactive media installations -

Characteristics of Multi-User Interface for Children - Focus on hand-on exhibition with interactive media installations -

Posthuman Scenarios and Performative Media

In Scenario,(2011) a new media installation by Dennis del Favero and iCinema, spectators enter a gigantic 3-D screen space and are engaged by the humanoid inhabitants of the world they find there. These humanoids engage the spectators as witnesses and participants in an uncertain scenario. What is it? It looks like the aftermath of some horrific act, not an inadvertent or random act of nature but a deliberate tearing in the social fabric. Some kind of fairy tale gone wrong? The scenario occurs in a variety of interactive spaces and environments, in underground bunkers, empty buildings and on a frozen lake. This essay uses Scenario as a case study to explore the notion of the posthuman in performance and explores the ethical questions it raises.

Memory Theatre in the Digital Age

Forgotten for centuries, they now appear more up-to-date than ever: the Memory Theatres of the 16th and 17th century. Created to revitalize the scholastically stifled memory culture of the Middle Ages and to counteract the sensory deprivation of the dawning age of print, Memory Theatres have been rediscovered by information designers and artists who develop strategies of staging data as an alternative to storing them like dead objects. The lecture will discuss the Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo (1480–1544) and the causes for its manyfold comebacks in the digital era. The most remarkable of these causes is the inventive momentum of performative media installations. The visual strategies by which the historic Memory Theatres stimulated the imagination of their visitors find their echoes in computer art that could point the way for future models of visualising and staging information. They give examples of how to oppose the static model of 'storage and retrieval' with performative ways of knowledge presentation.

Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (review)

Reviewed by: Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art David Sterritt Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art by Kate Mondloch. University of Minnesota Press 2010. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper, 130 pages Guy Debord famously theorized that ours is a society of spectacle, and Michel Foucault mapped a social order in which power, knowledge, subjectivity, and subjection are intimately linked. In her introduction to Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, art historian Kate Mondloch builds on Debord's analysis of alienation and Foucault's insights regarding docile, disciplined bodies, suggesting that contemporary media consumers are subjects in a "society of the screen," wired into a boundless circuit of exchanges—involving television, movies, computers, cell phones, you name it—whereby "screens literally and figuratively stand between us, separating bodies and filtering communications between subjects."1 As persuaders, manipulators, seducers, and commanders of attention, Mondloch contends, screens have turned us into "screen subjects," interpellated without let-up by technologies of the visual and the virtual. But freedom is in the air, she continues. Critically aware viewers can learn to resist the passivity and isolation that these technologies promote, and can discover modalities, configurations, and practices that allow for what media theorist Jonathan Crary calls a "potentially volatile disequilibrium" in interactions between body and screen, thus opening a space for creative and autonomous spectatorship.2 Artworks charged with critical intelligence can help this salutary [End Page 173] process along, and Mondloch finds many such works in the underexplored domain of "screen-reliant" installation art. Screens focuses on varieties of reflexive media art that foreground the "material, psychic, ideological, and institutional" modes of mediation that structure our daily screen-based experiences.3 These works accomplish their critical task by emphasizing the materiality of the screen and the embodied presence of the spectator-participant, thereby demystifying the former and liberating the latter from the passive absorption promoted by conventional uses of screen technology. This demystification/liberation can function either in sophisticated ways or through the simple fact that spectators can enter, leave, and traverse the viewing area as they choose. Ever vigilant to the negative capabilities of screens, Mondloch notes that even progressive installations can fall prey to the coercive tendencies inherent in dominant media, since virtually all screens solicit the attention and affect the actions of the viewer. But her most useful analyses accentuate the positive, outlining ways in which smart, creative installation art illuminates the ever-shifting connections between viewing bodies and screens in their multiple roles as image carriers, material objects, architectural features, and loci of attraction for their beholders. Screens is most valuable for its clear, conscientious descriptions—along with indispensable photographs and diagrams—of artworks that are ephemeral by nature, normally existing in their intended form only as long as a museum or gallery provides the necessary venue. In the first chapter, Mondloch sets forth her rationale for speaking of "screen-reliant" rather than "screen-based" works: basically, she wants to stress the polyvalent nature of screens within installation spaces, where they serve as both material entities and virtual windows on external scenes. She supports her case with lucid accounts of works by two great media artists. Paul Sharits's aptly titled Soundstrip/Filmstrip (1971-1972) is a "locational" work involving four projectors, footage of colored stripes, and a recorded voice, arranged in a gallery through which viewers can move at their own pace. Michael Snow's conceptually intricate Two Sides to Every Story (1974) calls for a dimly lit room in which 16mm sync-sound films are projected on the front and back of an aluminum screen. In both works, the films unspool, the spectators vary their positions, and the screens oscillate between the illusionistic representationalism of painting and the opaque materiality of sculpture. These installations take the viewer-screen relationship as their subject matter, somewhat in the vein of the structural film-making that was in ascendency when they were devised, and Mondoch's analyses give her line of argument an effective start. Subsequent chapters follow suit. Discussions of works by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham support Mondloch's assertion that live closed-circuit imagery can reveal, and thus countervail, some coercive tactics of dominant media-viewing regimes. Case studies of...

From signal to signification in interactive environments

There is no doubt that the shift to real-time interactive and electronic media can benefit from a renewed focus on the signal and a signaletic paradigm in addition to the sign. However, in this article I argue that we must be careful not to simply fall into the idea of one paradigm to simply replace the other. Rather, we should investigate what the fusion between paradigms allows us to say about digital and interactive technologies. This article attempts to do this through a thinking-together of signal and signification as well as affect and emotion based on the work of French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon. Through an analysis of the minimal media installation Touched Echo, I argue that it is necessary to account for the dynamics of a larger experiential continuum to uncover the affective–emotive relations that occur through the transindividual workings of the signal and signification in interactive environments.Jonas Fritsch is Assistant Professor, PhD, in Interaction Design, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University. He works on a multitudinous thinking-together of interaction design and affect theory in conjunction with practical design experiments carried out at the Centre for Digital Urban Living (www.digitalurbanliving.dk) and CAVI (www.CAVI.dk). He holds an MA in Information Studies with a supplementary degree in Aesthetics and Communication from la Nouvelle Sorbonne, Paris, and is a member of the SenseLab, Concordia University.

Editorial: Re-thinking the future of semantic ambient media

The term ‘ambient media’ is new in the field of media research in the context of smart and intelligent systems. As far the term was relating to advertising, but it’s meaning goes far beyond. In ambient media, the natural environment is the media, and media objects are rendered throughout rather than on dedicated devices. Ambient media are ‘intelligent’ and react pro-actively to users—therefore we can refer to them as semantic ambient media. Ambient media underlie five basic principles: manifestation, morphing, intelligence, collaboration, and experience (see e.g. [1, 4, 5] or [3] for further reading). Within this special issue we focus on the investigation of ambient media and their characteristics in one article analyzing the other accepted five articles. Several articles adds either a human, technical, or philosophical viewpoint on ambient media. The paper contributed by A. Scherp et al., entitled “A core ontology on events for representing occurrences in the real world” presents an ontology for the modeling of realworld events, and how they can be mapped to the digital overlay. B. Pogorelc et al. apply ambient media technology in a health care syste, recognizing health problems automatically. The ambient assisted living system shall prolong the autonomous living of the elderly. P. Codognet et al. approach ambient media from a audial viewpoint, and present a media installation, which generate sound spaces generated by self-organized agents. R.D. Vatavu et al. devote their research work to interactive surfaces and how emotional responses and Multimed Tools Appl (2012) 58:289–292 DOI 10.1007/s11042-011-0899-6

Location and Dislocation: The Media Performances of VALIE EXPORT

PAJ 99 (2011), pp. 53–59.  53 How can an artist who became famous for one or two radical performances in the 1960s frame an oeuvre of more than forty years that ranges from live actions to films, media installations, and ultimately monuments? Riding on the subway in urban Vienna, we pass a construction site that gives way to the back side of a residential house: on its grey wall, we see the blown-up photograph of a standing woman with a machine gun, a triangle cut out of her pants around the crotch. It is the defining image of Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT, the image that stands for her infamous action Genital Panic, which Marina Abramovic recently reconstructed at the Guggenheim Museum. The choice of this image as poster for her retrospective at the Austrian Gallery Belvedere, Time and Countertime (Zeit und Gegenzeit) asks us to see EXPORT as aggressive feminist performer, disrupting male hegemony in the most public ways possible. The retrospective stretches across public space, opening simultaneously in two geographically distinct venues: the other part of the show was in the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, a city two hours’ drive west of Vienna, where the artist was born in 1940. In Linz, the poster differs, evoking related but subtler issues. Printed in black and yellow, we see EXPORT in the mid-70s, jumping through the air in a nightgown, mobilizing her own body in space—but not without an awareness of the cultural and erotic implications of making a public appearance in a costume representing the epitome of bourgeois privacy. EXPORT has, all this time, been exploring the constitution of subjects in public and private space. The ongoing nature of this investigation allows the spectator to see EXPORT’s whole oeuvre, with its sharp turns from performance to photography to film to digitally modified imagery, as an intellectually consistent undertaking. Location and disLocation The Media Performances of VaLiE EXPoRt

Debating and framing SPace: Currencies in Contemporary African Art

Mary Sibande. The Reign, 2010. Mixed media installation. 330 × 200 cm. Photograph by John Hodgkiss. In preparation for the project SPace: Currencies in Contemporary African Art,1 I had discussions ...

Technology, Nature, Software and Networks: Materializing the Post-Romantic Landscape

The author began making films and installations in the early 1970s. Although he has worked across a range of media, he has always concentrated on one particular theme that he conceptualizes as a two-sided question: How do we see ourselves in relation to the natural world, and how should we position our selves and our technologies within it? This essay traces some of the threads of these seminal ideas through a selection of works made in the years between 1974 and 2009. The author concludes with a detailed description of Tree Studies, a large-scale new media installation powered by real-time data from weather stations around the planet.

Transmedia Memory of Albanian Migration in Italy: Helidon Gjergji's, Adrian Paci's, and Anri Sala's Moving-Image Installations

In this essay I analyze how, within the space of the museum, recent media installations by Albanian artists Helidon Gjergji, Adrian Paci, and Anri Sala appropriate, and critically engage with, multiple narratives about migration in Italy produced and circulated over the past two decades across various media, with particular attention to the Albanian case. The imaginary and material sites the spectator traverses in Gjergji’s, Paci’s, and Sala’s installations open up space for a new audiovisual discourse, one that is still indebted to, and yet distinct from, the televisual and the cinematographic, as it emerges from the double relationship between on-screen and off-screen space, as well as between collective and personal history. Installation in the museum thus produces a transmedia memory, which simultaneously criticizes the televisual reality effect as well as Italian progressive representations of the Albanian migrant as a screen onto which Italians can project their own history of emigration, as is the case with Oliviero Toscani’s advertising campaign Boat for Benetton (1992) and Gianni Amelio’s feature film Lamerica (1994). Drawing on the scholarship on self-reflexive spectatorship by Elizabeth Cowie and Catherine Fowler, among others, I analyze how these Albanian artists invite the spectator to explore the virtual space on screen, the material space off screen, and the screen itself as an object, in order to prompt a different identification with the migrant figure in Italy.

Ambient sound spaces

We present in this paper a media installation creating in real-time ambient electronic music from a multi-agent simulation by associating agents with sounds. More specifically, we associate various sound parameters with the internal state of an agent at a given time (position, orientation, internal variables, etc.), and therefore the evolution of an agent during the simulation will modify the corresponding soundscape. The sound sources are dynamically spatialized in the actual installation space through several loudspeakers (24 loudspeakers?+?1 subwoofer) and modified in real-time, providing thus an ever-changing ambient soundscape. This generative music installation uses Nature-inspired simulations to drive the musical processes, and in particular the swarm intelligence metaphor.

Review: Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, by Kate Mondloch and Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media, by Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook and foreword by Steve Dietz

Other| November 01 2010 Review: Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, by Kate Mondloch and Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media, by Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook and foreword by Steve Dietz SCREENS: VIEWING MEDIA INSTALLATION ART BY KATE MONDLOCH UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS/130 PP./$25.00 (SB)RETHINKING CURATING: ART AFTER NEW MEDIA BY BERYL GRAHAM AND SARAH COOK; FOREWORD BY STEVE DIETZ. THE MIT PRESS/354 PP./$34.95 (HB) Romy Hosford Romy Hosford ROMY HOSFORD is a multimedia artist, educator, and MFA candidate at Visual Studies Workshop, in Rochester, New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2010) 38 (3): 33. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2010.38.3.33 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Romy Hosford; Review: Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, by Kate Mondloch and Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media, by Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook and foreword by Steve Dietz. Afterimage 1 November 2010; 38 (3): 33. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2010.38.3.33 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 This content is only available via PDF. © 2010 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Screens: viewing media installation art

Screens: viewing media installation art

Residue

Residue is a mixed media installation first created in 2007.