Moving Image Installation Research Articles

Indentured archives and speculative futures in Singapore: A conversation with artist Priyageetha Dia

Priyageetha Dia is a Singapore-based transdisciplinary artist whose work brings together South-East Asian plantation histories, postcolonial memory, migration politics, and extractivism as it relates to both labour and data. The conversation focuses on submerged and speculative archives of indentureship in Dia’s work. Dia describes how specific strategies, such as layering archival images, embodying diasporic Tamil ritual, as well as incorporating CGI and 3D animation in her moving image installations create a counter archive of the histories and afterlives of indentureship in present-day Malaysia and Singapore.

Environmentality of Immersive Projection

How does an artwork express an “environmentality?” Can we redefine immersion, in critical terms, as a form of environmental projection? In taking up such questions from my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, my text addresses the relation between projection and environmentality in the visual arts in order to question immersivity. Confronted with the phenomenon of environmentalization, we need to re-imagine the ecology of representation. Positing ecology as an environmental relation, I will consider its artistic imagination both historically and theoretically. I propose that we revisit the environmentality of media archaeology to understand how this impulse is furthered in current moving-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. I will especially address environmentality as it relates to movement and scale, questioning the relation between immersion and magnification. I will advance my argument by presenting the large-scale moving-image installations of the Danish-born, New York artist Jesper Just. Does magnification always, only imply spectatorial immersion? Other forms of experience arise when confronting an ecology of scale in art. What else happens when we scale? Can immersion be understood, more critically, as a form of environmental absorption? In recasting immersion in environmental terms, I propose that we consider absorption as empathic projection with space. In shifting from the human subject’s own immersive identification to this critically aware, enveloping field of empathic projection with the non-human, we can discard the prevalent human-centric position that pervades most immersive discourses. A different ecology of immersivity rises to the surface by relating the empathic “projective imagination” to “atmospheric thinking.”

Rising from the ashes of the film museum: the role of individual habitus and political-economic structures in the shaping of the British Film Institute’s curatorial strategies and the establishment of the BFI Gallery

ABSTRACT 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.

Bodies and Screens: Aspects for a Phenomenology of Moving Image Installations

The article argues for a phenomenology of moving image installations in three steps. First, I present Vivian Sobchack’s central concept of the film’s body in the context of the cinematic apparatus, paying special attention to aspects that concern non-cinematic projection and differences between film projection in the movie theater and the gallery space. Secondly, I develop Juhani Pallasmaa’s ideas about the phenomenology of architecture to bring into focus the spatial and structural aspects of moving image installations. Then I argue for the concept of “embodied self-reflexivity”, which could quite accurately describe the spectators’ experience of a film exhibited in a gallery or museum. Finally, I provide a brief description and interpretation of two panoramic video installations where the embodied self-reflexivity experienced by the viewers seems to be central to understanding the artworks.

Besideness: distance and proximity as queer disorientations to inhabit projective moving image installations

This article explores the experience of disorientation within projective moving image installations through a case study of the artwork Swinguerra (2019) by Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca. The encounter with the case study evoked an experience of disorientation due to the confusing process of deciding which way to look, which room to enter, which side to walk towards in the art gallery. Engaging with music video aesthetics, this case study portrays Brazilian queer dance groups that work with popular music from the northeast of Brazil. Rather than representing these bodies, Wagner and de Burca speak nearby to them through a besideness attitude, allowing the dancers to speak for themselves in the film. Besideness comprehends an attitude that destabilises normative positionalities to challenge binarisms and hierarchies that can privilege the experience of some bodies to the detriment of others. 
 I employ a queer phenomenological and autoethnographic methodology to explore the fleeting disorientated moments that emerged in the live encounter with this artwork. This is to account for an analysis that considers self-narration and autobiographical notes of a queer researcher as queer methods appropriate to approaching disorientation as a queer affective experience. I argue that my physical and affective positionality in relation to the two projective moving images located in the art gallery affected the other bodies I shared the space with, leading to the necessity of also employing a besideness attitude and demonstrating how distance and proximity from objects can only be understood if in relation to each other.

Shot/countershot: Essaying images of war and violence in the work of Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Rabih Mroué

This article examines the work of three artists – Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Rabih Mroué – who in different ways mobilize the cinematic device of ‘shot/countershot’ in two distinct post-cinematic contexts (the moving image installation and the performance lecture) as a tool for scrutinizing images of war and violence from divergent historical, socio-economic, geopolitical and ethical perspectives. In returning to and reworking this classical cinematic device as an experimental and essayistic mode of montage and critical reflection, all three artists, as I argue, variously seek to counter the ideological naturalization and interpretive framing of representations of war and violence under conditions of digitalization and globalization, as well as to interrogate the interconnections between forms of direct, symbolic and systemic violence.

Exhibition as cinema, cinema as exhibition: Philippe Parreno and the moving image in the museum

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.

Expanded Cinema, Recycled Cinema

VALIE EXPORT and Agnès Varda both made moving-image installations about ping pong (EXPORT’s 1968 Ping Pong and Varda’s 2006 “Ping Pong, Tong, et Camping”), a subject each returned to on multiple occasions in subsequent works across different media forms. Apprehending ping pong as a cinematic thing and gesture, this essay considers how EXPORT and Varda, each in her own way, unsettle and expand the rules of the game in ways shaped by their distinct, and distinctly feminist, politics. This essay explores these works and the artists’ repeated returns to ping pong by staging a “volley,” alternating between different scenes and iterations across Europe and the US, from the 1960s to the 2010s. Additional works discussed include EXPORT’s 1980s television documentary on avant-garde film, The Armed Eye, and Varda’s final two documentaries, Faces Places (2017) and Varda by Agnès (2019).

Angelica Mesiti's World Citizens

Abstract In this essay, I review a 2019 exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo entitled When Saying Is Doing, which featured work by Angelica Mesiti, a contemporary Australian artist who works on questions of performance, immigration, and non-verbal communication in multi-screen moving image installations. On the contemporary global stage, if we do not share the same linguistic community or communities, how is human interrelatedness expressed through other forms of ordinary language, where “language” is now considered not as speech but rather as human expressiveness in its most diverse and complex manifestations? What happens when shared language is neither “speech” nor conversation in the linguistic sense? Needed here is a newly imagined vision of the communicability of human community that I refer to as “neighboring.” Putting Mesiti's work in productive dialogue with Stanley Cavell and other critics, I examine how skeptical problems of isolation, privacy, and unknownness are potentially addressed and responded to in contemporary art.

‘And then again, I draw myself to the detail’

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.

Displacements: Reading Space and Time in Moving Image Installations, Alison Butler (2019)

Review of: Displacements: Reading Space and Time in Moving Image Installations, Alison Butler (2019) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 178 pp., ISBN 978-3-03030-461-4, h/bk, €62.39; eBook, €49.99

Between the Screen-Sediment and the Shattered Window: The Deconstruction of the Screens Limits and Frames in Moving Image Installations

In the view of the continuous transformations in the structures of production, distribution and consumption of images, concepts such as expanded cinema or cinema of exhibition enlarged the spectrum of cinema to the contemporary art, which has also become a space to meditate about the fate of the cinematographic device. From a trans-historical and interdisciplinary approach – going from the pictorial perspectiva artificiallis to the pre-cinematographic instruments, cinema, and contemporary art – this paper seeks to reflect, by using the historical metaphor of the window, on the volatility and multiplicity of contemporary screens and their influence on today’s modes of vision. The paper also addresses the changes undergone in the image’s frames and the consequent paradigm shift in how the viewer physically relates with these images, summoning the work of the Portuguese artist Alexandre Estrela to consider the perceptive, cognitive and topological reconfigurations in the moving-image exhibition formats in museums and art galleries.

Moving Image Installation, Dance, and Resistance at the 2019 Venice Biennale

IMAGE 1. Installation view of Moving Backwards (2019) by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz in the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2019; courtesy the artists; photograph by Annik Wetter. Can dancing be a survival strategy? Such is the question posed by artist Mirkan Deniz in her examination of a Kurdish “guerrilla dance” as a site of resistance. Deniz's query was included in the series of letters to the visitor distributed along with Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz's film installation Moving Backwards (2019) in the Swiss Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale (May 11–November 24, 2019). The urgency of our present moment permeated much of the sprawling biennial, grouped loosely under the apocryphal proverb and curse “May You Live In Interesting Times.” Artists tackled climate catastrophe, rising right-wing nationalism and authoritarianism, refugee crises, and other pressing social and political issues in a range of media and with a variety of attitudes. Moving image installation invites surrender to a different temporality amid the fast-paced tempo of both these “interesting times” and the packed itinerary of biennale tourists, and it figured prominently in the group show curated by Ralph Rugoff at the Giardini and Arsenale locations as well as in numerous pavilions and collateral events scattered throughout the city. Of the twenty-nine national pavilions of the Giardini—the Biennale's original location and where national pavilions first emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century—eleven prominently featured moving image artworks, and these ranged widely in both quality and tone. Laure Prouvost's beautiful, frenetic, and surreal journey film Deep See Blue Surrounding You (2019) and Larissa Sansour's tense two-channel take on the psychological sci-fi thriller in Heirloom …

Wildly Oscillating Molecules: Technological mediation of the atomic force microscope

Abstract The human sensory experience of submolecular phenomena is only possible through complex technological mediations that include not just magnifications, but also manipulations of time and translations from one sense to another. In my creative moving image project Wildly Oscillating Molecules, I develop strategies for using an atomic force microscope (AFM) as a cinematographic instrument, specifically using its tactile mechanisms to generate video. Using the AFM over four years to generate experimental moving image installations, I examine my physical and psychological experiences of this nanoscientific instrumentation. Although referred to by the philosopher of technology Don Ihde, the AFM's style of technological mediation has not been subjectively explored. Working to engage with an infinitesimal scale, the AFM has a unique style of spatial and temporal mediation that can be manipulated through the post-production and exhibition practices of the moving image. Wildly Oscillating Molecules provides insight into how the AFM influences human spatial and temporal perception of nanoscale phenomena and provides a new framework with which to analyse nanoscientific imaging practices. Understanding the nuances of technological mediation encourages science artists working with submolecular phenomena to adopt, evolve or transform properties of technological mediation when presenting their work to an audience.

Passages of Light: Analogue and Digital Moving Image Installation.

Within a rapidly changing media landscape, light remains an intrinsic and potentially expressive aspect of moving imagery, regardless of the shape, form and resolution that specific capture and display devices might take. The practice of light in moving imagery is typically considered through an arrangement of sources, filters and modifiers that sculpt the aesthetic appearance of a two-dimensional frame and is often studied in relation to mainstream Hollywood films. This practice-research investigation seeks to compliment such discourse by extending the consideration of lighting practices beyond conventional cinematography to an installation context. Through the presentation of several artworks, this exposition reveals a distinction between the light ‘of’ an image and the light ‘within’ an image. It also explores the material considerations of a practitioner’s control of projected light. Each artwork seeks to create an interoperation between analogue and digital moving imagery, weaving together various technologies in order to reveal an array of textures and qualities of light. Drawing primarily on autoethnographic notation captured during the creation of these artworks, as well as discussion of a range of film and video texts, this exposition investigates material tensions of mediated illumination.

CASTING: Site-Specific Projection Mapping Installation

This paper investigates CASTING, Yiyun Kang’s site-specific projection mapping installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, U.K., and the acquisition of the piece by the V&A in the following year. It identifies how CASTING developed distinctive properties in the field of projected moving-image installation artworks and how these novel characteristics were reflected in the acquisition by the V&A.

Invisibility adores and abhors a photograph: Jane and Louise Wilson’s moving image installations

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.

Contemporary Māori and Pacific artists exploring place

Abstract 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.

Projective art and the ‘staging’ of empathic projection

Abstract Michael Fried’s unexpected contribution to defining the ontological status of video art includes an intriguing claim that projective art is particularly suited to the ‘staging’ of empathic projection. Fried applies Stanley Cavell’s notion of empathic projection, developed in relation to skepticism of ‘other minds’, to moving image installations that not only exploit the beholder’s capacity for empathically projecting, but do so in such a way as to reveal the mechanism at play. In developing this claim, I compare Fried’s key example of Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time (2003) with Bill Viola and Kira Perov’s Martyrs (2014), a work that likewise elicits an emotional response but without a compensatory (and hence critical) foregrounding of the underlying structuring mechanism. However, the comparison suggests that the staging of empathic projection should not be interpreted as an anti-theatrical strategy (as Fried contends), but rather as an exemplary manifestation of what I am calling the configurational encounter – a revealing of the artwork’s conditions of existence. I reference Paul Sharits’s Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976), an important (and unacknowledged) precursor to Gordon’s staging of empathic projection. Finally, I consider Chris Welsby’s landscape films in the light of the capacity of technology to reveal psychological mechanisms of projection, tracing such processes of projection to early childhood experiences of differentiating the human from the non-human.

Transactional Seeing and Becoming Flesh

This article looks at the relationship between militarised vision and cinematic aesthetics in Jordan Crandall's moving image installation, Heatseeking (2000–2001), commissioned for InSITE, a series of site-specific art exhibitions at the US–Mexico border. Repurposing border surveillance technologies, Crandall's project interrogates the domestication of militarised vision and the production of racialised bodies as conditions of legality in the post-NAFTA borderlands. Drawing on theories of flesh and embodiment to theorise Crandall's moving image poetics, the author demonstrates that Crandall’s project offers insights not only into the logics of militarised vision, but also modes by which visualisation at the border can become fugitive. Disrupting militarised vision through interventions into moving image grammars afforded by performance, spatialised montage, kinesthetics and sound, Heatseeking produces a mode of transactional seeing that emphasises spectatorial embodiment rather than visual legibility. Bringing kinesthetic embodiment to bear on repurposed military technologies Heatseeking produces sensations that make visible the flesh of movement, rather than racialised bodies.