Multimedia Installation Research Articles

Shapeshifting fields: Mao Chenyu’s rural media ecology

This paper examines the recent moving image work of artist, researcher, and rice farmer Mao Chenyu, who has spent over a decade making ethnographically inflected documentary work in his village outside of Yueyang in Hunan Province. With his innovative approaches, which combine the visual idioms of the essay film, found footage collage, autodidactic philosophical reflections, and observational cinema, his work provokes a conceptual reevaluation of rural life and agrarian labor among China’s peasantry. Mao is the founder of Paddy Film Farm, a grassroots operation that serves as both an independent film studio, as well as a cottage industry for the production of organic rice and strong liquor. Through his on-the-ground ethnographic research, he self-identifies as a “native anthropologist,” and explores new modes of knowledge production and experimental storytelling that are displayed in contexts ranging from China’s small circuit of underground film screenings to alternative art spaces and state-sponsored museums. In this paper, I draw on close readings of two of Mao’s films, I Have What? Chinese Peasants War: The Rhetoric to Justice (2014) and Cloud Explosion: Dongting Lake and the Death of Its Symbols (2015); multimedia installations at the 2016 Shanghai Biennial and a recent solo exhibition at A + Contemporary in Shanghai’s M50 Art District; and finally, on an analysis of my own ethnographic research (participant-observation field notes, informal interviews, textual analysis, and curated screenings and discussions) conducted with the artist between Shanghai and Yueyang from 2015 to 2017.

The evolution of revolution: Virgil Ortiz’s Pueblo Revolt 1680/2180 as an assertion of Native presence through Indigenous Futurisms

This article analyzes the Pueblo Revolt 1680/2180 metaseries by Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo), which constructs a continuum of historic events spanning five centuries. This metaseries represents 15 years of Ortiz’s work, in which he has created multiple series of pottery figures and vessels, multimedia installations, and consumer products that contribute to his representation of asynchronous Pueblo Revolts. The 1680/2180 body of work functions as a complex interrogation of the dominant historical narrative of European colonization in North America, as well as an exploration of Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. Through a synthesis of science fiction, lived histories, and traditional Cochiti pottery materials and techniques, Ortiz reimagines a cyclical pattern of events in which the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 resurfaces 500 years later, thus asserting Indigenous presence and agency in the past, present, and future of colonial history. This article considers Ortiz’s metaseries through the lens of Indigenous Futurism, examining the ways in which Native artists and writers respond to the use of Indigeneity as a trope in mainstream science fiction, while emphasizing the significance of Native creation stories, cultural narratives, and ways of knowing. By participating in this critical discussion, Ortiz calls into question the means by which Euro-American and Native American histories and relationships are commonly narrated.

Project 0395A.ĐC | Performing disorientation

The end of the Vietnam/American War lead to one of the largest exoduses of the latter part of the twentieth century: more than 3 million people escaped from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos over the course of two decades starting in 1975, many by boat and an estimated 1 million died at sea. How do you witness and retell stories of violence in the aftermath of war and dispossession at sea in the context of U.S. empire and Vietnamese socialist revolution? Project 0395A.ĐC, a multi-media installation by Vietnamese artist, Ly Hoang Ly, intentionally structures and choreographs disorientation to grapple with the condition of being dispossessed at sea, as the Vietnamese refugee is suspended at sea and entangled in histories of French colonialism and caught at the crux of U.S. imperial war and Vietnamese socialist revolution. I argue that disorientation is a performative experience and method that performs an act of refusal to break voyeuristic modes of consuming histories of violence and reorients the body to another theory of Vietnamese refugee subjectivity. I analyze how Ly creates a performative installation and performs with water as the core aesthetic material used to frame, dialogue, and re-narrate a story of Vietnamese refugee subjectivity.

Lo schermo come dispositivo di riscrittura della realtà. Su alcuni lavori di Ferruccio Ascari (1979 - 1983)

Between the end of the seventies and the beginning of the subsequent decade, the postmodern approach to visual art and culture promoted new purposes and expressive languages. Within many modalities that mark this passage, the use of the screen, on the one hand, maked a detachement with reality and with the author’s subjectivity, on the other hand, it stimulated an aesthetic experience in the spectator. In this sense, multimedia installations created by Ferruccio Ascari between 1981 and 1983 represent a significant experience. In these works Ascari combines the performative practice with the videoprojection of photographs and painted images on the walls in order to redesign the perceptive space of the viewer.

Sound, Disability, & Durere amidst Smoke and Smoulder

Abstract Fratila re-thinks and re-imagines how disabled persons have a role to play in the pro-jected ‘future’ using sound as a primary medium. As public and private spaces con-verge and set categories like the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ become more and more inse-parable, the disruption of an exclusionary framework becomes a priority for artists, researchers and curators alike. Rather than merely taking up existing public spaces as a ‘disabled’ sound artist/researcher, she engages her audience in dialogue around the future and potential for ‘disability’. Fratila’s work considers the ways in which our growing use of/growing reliance upon digital technology and media can give way to ‘disability’ being employed towards progress and understood as necessary to our fu-ture, with specific reference to her multimedia installation, Durere (translated from Romanian: Pain), a motion-sensor activated instrument that weaves together interac-tivity and disability against the backdrop of an ever-evolving ‘future’ using sound, video and 3D-printed models of the weights she uses daily for her chronic illness.

The Sound of Spectacle: Xenakis at the Montreal World’s Fair

The Polytope de Montréal, conceived by the architect and composer Iannis Xenakis, was the first in a series of five realized “polytopes,” large-scale multi-media installations performed in Canada, France, Iran and Greece. Drawing upon recent archival and field research conducted at the Fonds Iannis Xenakis, Paris, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montreal, this article argues that Xenakis’ unique conception of sound and space in the Polytope de Montréal indicates a move toward a new typology of audiovisual architecture that emerged after World War II and coincided with developments in sound and lighting technology. Furthermore, the article explores to what extent Xenakis’ audiovisual architectures are only achievable under the aegis of high-profile international expositions. Finally, it offers some brief observations on the wider relevance of Xenakis’ polytope, and the soundscape of spectacle, as a subject of study for architecture.

The ecologies of technological experimentation: Sheba Chhachhi’s multimedia environments

Abstract This article concentrates on the multimedia installations of the feminist artist Sheba Chhachhi. Her art practice is situated in such diverse ecologies of pedagogic and technological experimentation as, first, her own experiences of sharing visual communications skills with urban and rural activists in the women’s movement and presenting her photographs in slums and women’s workshops, and later showing her video installations in a gallery setting, a mall and community centre. Secondly, the historic multimedia environments of the National Institute of Design (Dashrath Patel was the founder-secretary of NID and a mentor figure to Chhachhi) will be investigated; and finally, the discussion encompasses the jugaad-oriented entrepreneurship of artisans in India’s street-markets whose creative improvisations modify the techno-kitsch that washes up on our shores as the flotsam of globalisation.

A Caribbean Hauntology: The Sensorial Art of Joscelyn Gardner and M. Nourbese Philip

This article explores the tension between the senses and the immaterial in Barbadian artist’s Joscelyn Gardner’s multimedia installation White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece (2003), and Omi Ebora (2014) and in the poem Zong! by Trinidadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip (2014). By the immaterial I refer to the traces in contemporary art of the slavery trade and plantation culture. I analyze three aspects: how sensorial art functions, what is the spectral in sensorial art, and what does the specter (based on Derrida’s hauntology) do for the Caribbean in the present. I suggest that the spectral in Caribbean art functions as an injunction to deal with our inherited identities, which I defined elsewhere as membership beyond consent, in such a way that we can still live with moral freedom, defined perhaps as our right and our obligation to act differently. This is what the ghostly does for both Derrida and Gardner: in the intersection between past and present narratives, there is a responsibility; the ghostly is about the obligation to choose from one's inheritance.

2050—An Energetic Odyssey: Understanding ‘Techniques of Futuring’ in the transition towards renewable energy

After the Paris agreement on climate change (2015) climate change politics is no longer about raising awareness but about shaping the sustainability transition itself. It requires us to rethink the role of scientific knowledge, shifting from a tradition of “expected futures” to an approach focusing on “desirable futures” and ways to get there. We argue the sustainability transitions scholarship tends to see constructions of the future (visions, scenarios, predictions etc.) as explanans (that what explains) while constructions of the future are rarely seen as explanandum (that what should be explained). The article introduces the concept of ‘Techniques of Futuring’ defined as practices bringing together actors around one or more imagined futures and through which actors come to share particular orientations for action, to get a grip on the actual acts of ‘futuring’. The empirical focus is on ‘2050—An Energetic Odyssey’, a process centred around an elaborate multimedia installation, introducing large scale exploitation of the North Sea for harvesting off shore wind energy taking place in 2015 and 2016. We examine the Odyssey as example of a Technique of Futuring. We conclude with a reflection what the Odyssey teaches us about effective Techniques of Futuring to further the sustainability transition.

Currency, Art, and Economic Crisis

The condition of a country’s currency is perhaps one of the most effective barometers of its economic state, a topic that has been amply examined by economists. Currency as artistic medium is lesser-explored terrain and yet its study can prove revealing of a country’s economic and historical circumstances while poignantly commenting on the whimsical nature of the art market and the commercial value of works of art. For this study, I will explore the work of artists who employed currency as commentary on their country’s respective economic crises and the political conditions that led to them. I have selected a small sample of artworks with currency focusing specifically on the circulation of the US dollar, or rather it symbolic dominance, in Latin Ameircan economies. In this study, I examine three case studies spanning several decades, among them: a series of banknotes by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles entitled Zero Dollar, created during the late 1970s and 1980s; a multimedia installation Circulante (Circulating) from 1998 by Ecuadorian artist Patricio Palomeque, and the video piece Inversión from 2011 by Cuban artist Glenda León. All three artists used their work to foreground the instability and fragile structures underpinning currency while critiquing the expansion and reach of the US dollar in their countries.

The Nature of Time in Multimedia Installations (With Emphasis on the Works of Doug Aitken and Ilya Kabakov)

The multimedia Installation with the use of two or more different media of art, while creating an atmosphere to remove the audience from its passive mode, has a different way of dealing with the time problem than before. The purpose of this paper is to identify the element of time in multimedia presentations, with emphasis on the works of two artists, Doug Aitken and Ilya Kabakov. In order to achieve this goal, the conceptual framework and methodology of this analysis is based on the Gottfried Boehm and G. E. Lessing approaches. The nature of time in multimedia Installations is the issue of the present study. The results of this study showed that multimedia Installations seek to break the linear narrative of time. Doug Aitken, in his Installation, creates a sense of time-insensitivity using cinematic techniques such as slow motion, fast motion and repetition of sequences. While Ilya Kabakov offers a series of components related to individual life against the lens of time. In the works of both artists, a new understanding of the time is created for the audience to have successive and concurrent readings.

Protest as Polyphony: An Interview with Raqs Media Collective

Protest as Polyphony:An Interview with Raqs Media Collective Melissa Karmen Lee, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (bio) The practice of curation amounts to a gathering of forces. A host unto itself, Raqs Media Collective is already one such gathering. Bringing together the artists JEEBESH BAGCHI, MONICA NARULA, and SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA, Raqs is a Delhi-based collective that has produced contemporary art, edited books, curated exhibitions, and staged situations since making its international debut in 2002. Together, these artists have interrogated totalitarian systems and evaluated epicenters of transformation with an active and relentless questioning. Founded in 1992 in New Delhi—a year after the group had studied documentary filmmaking together—Raqs Media Collective has produced a body of Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Raqs Media Collective (left to right): Shuddhabrata Sengupt, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Monica Narula. Photograph by Amalia Jyran Dasgupta. [End Page 187] artwork that includes multimedia installations, documentary films, edited books of poetry, an online app for invitations to participatory revolt, and numerous curatorial projects and exhibitions. The collective has also collaborated with a wide range of cultural workers, including architects, computer programmers, writers, and theater directors. In 2001, Raqs co-founded Sarai, the interdisciplinary and incubatory space at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. Here, it initiated cultural practices and processes that have left a deep impact on contemporary Southeast Asia. Raqs's dialectical engagement with history interrogates the legacy of colonialism by refusing to limit the story of postcolonial cultural "development" either to patriarchal storytelling or to capitalist, neoliberal socioeconomic models; its institutional work, like its artistic and curatorial projects, draws upon new ways of understanding the past in order to take action in the present. Raqs has always been interested in breaching hegemony and power; its means of doing so often involve gathering together and presenting new genealogies of radical thought. Its 2010 installation, The Capital of Accumulation, a video diptych that "trawls through a haunting, dreamlike landscape straddling Warsaw, Berlin, and Bombay/Mumbai" to critique the contemporary global political economy, features Rosa Luxemburg's 1913 text "The Accumulation of Capital" as its centerpiece, along with Luxemburg's botanical notebooks.1 Raqs discusses its dialectical recourses to such texts in this interview, referring to them as "detours" that derail the constituted power and patriarchal dominance over culture, economy, traditions, and social norms. Another pertinent example of such postcolonial engagement with the dominant historical narrative of "development" is Coronation Park, a suite of nine fiberglass sculptures on coated wooden pedestals that was produced for the 56th Venice Biennale. These were fragments of ceremonial regalia that referenced the Delhi site that hosted the coronation of King George and Queen Mary as emperor and empress of India in 1911. In this interview, Raqs discusses how its work seeks to redefine commonplace notions of both time and space. Its work addresses "threshold time" (which Raqs defines in shorthand as "the future-in-the-present") as well as the space [End Page 188] of art's performance—namely, biennales and national exhibitions increasingly located in Asia but focusing on a polyphony of world voices. Both domains involve intervening in evolving definitions of art within institutional frameworks that are under pressure from new technologies, a pressure that unfolds into protests against colonialism, capitalism, and political systems. An example of artwork that interrogates patriarchal systems as well as racial and historical legacies in the U.S. is Art in the Age of Collective Intelligence, which featured an indoor installation of photographs and books addressing the problematic issue of dealing with the history of wealth displacement in World's Fairs and, in particular, the reductive view of race they have tended to display as capitalist spectacles. Similarly, Raqs's outdoor exhibition, If the World is a Fair Place, Then (2015)—a participatory artwork that gathered and repurposed over five hundred individual responses in Laumeier Sculpture Park—examined the ideas of "fairness" and "unfairness," signifiers most commonly associated with issues of race and class. Its The Great Bare Map App was an immersive artist book project created with a team for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; the project interspersed archival stories...

Art, Knowledge, and Reflexivity

The essay addresses the manifold relationships between art and research under the perspective of the arts’ own way of thinking, separating artistic knowledge-production from science. While in science ‘research’ means a goal-guided action that has the purpose of developing truth, in the arts research is related to an open ‘search’ without being bound to gaining results. Obviously, art works neither with concepts nor with propositions, nor does it need any theory or general model or ways of verifying theses and making them valid. There is also no method to follow, nor does art depend on public justifications through critique. Rather, art is based in practices that let something appear and make it perceivable, and by doing so producing new insights. Hence, artistic cognition and recognition it not based in logic, but in certain non-discursive media-‘languages’ which allow for non-propositional reflections on their own structure and limitations, using actions, performances, images, material objects, compositions and montage or multimedia installations that go against the grain in order to push perceptibility to its limits where contradictions become apparent.

The Firefly Effect: A Contemplative Walking Installation and Exhibition ( breakout presentation )

A multi-media installation was exhibited at Nuit Blanche Toronto 2016 on Bloor Street. It included an immersive sound and light experience about the pauses we take when we walk to think and transform. It is quite beautiful and very site specific. The team developed an app to upload contemplative walks and to walk at paces and with pulses that are associated with the rhythm of this walk. This presentation will provide an insight and overview of the work and the ongoing research in this field.

Exile, Within and Without: New Work in Two Modes from Rithy Panh

Franco-Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh has two new works titled Exil (Exile). His 2016 poetic film is a sepia-toned meditation on time, memory, revolution, and resistance that materializes dreams, fantasies, and nightmares with the mundane realities of his childhood survival of genocide. This survival is juxtaposed with a complex, disembodied narration on being-in-exile. Inspired by this original film, Panh's 2017 immersive multimedia installation embraces the current global refugee crisis, combining photographs, archival film footage, selected objects, and an audio track all designed to elicit understanding and compassion for people fleeing war, oppression, and catastrophe. Both film and installation are intellectually rigorous and aesthetically compelling, and both share visual motifs, but each stakes out a different perspective—the former offers an introspective vision of one man's experience of exile while the latter documents the plight of millions of stateless people. Together they represent the latest achievements of a major artist who is driven to remember and to affirm his own humanity and the humanity of Others.

Dreaming woman: Image, place, and the aesthetics of exile

Translations of summaryLooking closely at an Argentine dream interpretation column published in a popular women's magazine from 1948 to 1951, this article examines the role of the dream image in shaping psychoanalytic discourse on femininity and national identity. The column, ‘Psychoanalysis Will Help You,’ emerged during Juan Domingo Perón's first presidency, featuring verbal interpretations written under the pen name ‘Richard Rest,’ as well as surreal photomontages by Grete Stern, a German‐born, Bauhaus‐trained photographer living in exile since 1936. While the column's Jungian text encourages readers’ adaptation to the external reality of their social situation, Stern's droll images emphasize the disjuncture between subject and environment, exposing tensions between the experience of exile and the Peronist mission to consolidate an Argentine national identity. Experimenting formally with European avant‐garde techniques, Stern presents femininity and nation as conflictive imaginary configurations. This theme resurfaces at the 2013 Venice Biennale, where Nicola Costantino's multimedia installation Eva – Argentina: A Contemporary Metaphor was exhibited alongside Carl Jung's Red Book. Formal contrasts between Stern's use of photomontage, Costantino's projection technique, and Jung's theory of mandala symbolism indicate the divergent ways in which their artwork posits the therapeutic function of the dream image, as well as the role of aesthetic production in psychoanalytic care.

Lights! Race! Gender! Adrian Piper and the Pseudorationality of Data

This article engages with the work of Adrian Piper in order to explore relationships among visuality, data, race, and gender. It specifically pairs Piper's multimedia installation Cornered (1988) with her conception of pseudorationality, which she develops in her philosophical work on Immanuel Kant, and brings this pairing to bear on current discussions in software and critical algorithm studies. Cornered's exposure of the pseudorationality of racist perception and its visual grammar contributes to our understanding of the racist and gendered conditions of data's appearance, particularly in terms of data's reliance on the visual. Ultimately, I argue, Piper's work provokes us to call into question the stability of “data” itself.

VIRTUAL IN REAL. INTERACTIVE SOLUTIONS FOR LEARNING AND COMMUNICATION IN THE NATIONAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM OF MARCHE

Abstract. Today the ICTs are favourable additions to museum exhibitions. This work aims to realize an innovative system of digital exploitation of artefacts in the National Archaeological Museum of Marche (MANaM), in order to create a shared museum that will improve the knowledge of cultural contents through the paradigm "learning by interacting" and “edutainment”. The main novelty is the implementation of stand-alone multimedia installations for digital artefacts that combine real and virtual scenarios in order to enrich the experience, the knowledge and the multi-sensory perception. A Digital Library (DL) is created using Close Range Photogrammetry (CRP) techniques applied to 21 archaeological artefacts belonging to different categories. Enriched with other data (texts, images, multimedia), all 3D models flow into the cloud data server from which are recalled in the individual exhibitions. In particular, we have chosen three types of technological solutions: VISUAL, TACTILE, SPATIAL. All the solutions take into account the possibility of group interaction, allowing the participation of the interaction to an appropriate number of users. Sharing the experience enables greater involvement, generating communicative effectiveness much higher than it would get from a lonely visit. From the “Museum Visitors Behaviour Analysis” we obtain a survey about users’ needs and efficiency of the interactive solutions. The main result of this work is the educational impact in terms of increase in visitors, specially students, learning increase of historical and cultural content, greater user involvement during the visit to the museum.

Image projection as an architectural design tool

ABSTRACTThe modern viewer is familiar with the cinematic paradigm, in which he or she is fixed in a darkened auditorium. However, current audio-visual technologies introduce new viewing modes. This article explores the spatial properties of the projection system (projector, screen surface, projection beam and the viewer), during the transition from analogue to digital technology, with paradigms from the 1960s’ expanded cinema to current multimedia installations, in particular works defined as digitally expanded cinema. Our aim is to explore how the projection space can be combined with architectural space, using expanded cinema design principles.

Performing the Composer – Composing the Performer

The article begins by dealing with four topics: questions of tempo in relation to Beethoven and Wolpe’s Toccata in Three Parts; tempo ranges in the various versions of Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck VI; the colloboration between John Cage, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and the video artist Bill Viola; and David Tudor’s studies on the voice in humans and animals, in particular, the sounds of whales and porpoises on the one hand and phonemes and dialects on the other. The final section then focuses on Sea Tails (1986), a multimedia installation using film, kite sculptures, and electronic music in an unambiguous relationship to new multi-versal and non-euclidian concepts of space, and how it can be compared to compositions by Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono.