Video Installation Research Articles

Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future)

Between 11 September and 8 December 2019, Syrus Marcus Ware’s multi-channel video work Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future) was on view at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto. The video, created with Mishann Lau, features performers Kyisha Williams, Rodney Diverlus, Raven Davis, Janine Carrington, Ravyn Wngz, Gloria Swain, and Jasmyn Fyfe, imagines and stages a dialogue with a future beyond the current epoch of Black social death and insecurity and this time marked by the ever-present capitalist forces of greed and the persistent script of police and state violence. In this piece, written as a companion to the video installation, Ware not only meditates on the precarity of the present but also insists on the necessity for social change through an imagining of the collapse of capitalism and the radical time after with a social restructuring of forms of relations and care. This work draws on the Black speculative, futurist, vision of our ancestor, Octavia Butler, to sketch a radical Black queer imagining of the future—one that queers time, survival, family, and relations to articulate an abolitionist vision as the way forward.

Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile

Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile

Negative optics in vision machines

Can machine vision step beyond the ocularcentric metaphysics of the Western gaze and the reproduction of racial capital? Paul Virilio argued that machine vision requires no perceptual response or recognition of the world. The computer’s series of coded impulses mediate the real autonomously from physical and energetic analogies. This article calls “negative optics” this inhuman mode of machine vision that withdraws from the ocularcentric rules of transparency. Not only negative optics offers an internal critique of ocular metaphysics, but it also defies the equation of value between 0 and 1 s that sustains the universal law of capital. The equation of value needs the nullification of the racialized and gendered body to meet the function of surrogate machines feeding the neo-liberal human subject. Here, however, the negative optics of machine vision withdraws matter from the equation insofar as the AI mismatches of concepts and objects requires the formation of socio-technical assemblages amongst surrogates of all kinds. The intricacies of this surrogacy are discussed in connection to artist Elisa Giardina’s video installation entitled, The Cleaning of Emotional Data (2019). This video presents the background to address a surrogate human–machine alliance that steps beyond the human–machine equation of value. By starting from the negativity of the image, the racialized and gendered conditions of techno-social labor under artificial intelligence capitalism show that the equation of value maintains the condition of the zero of blackness, which like matter without form, has no value (On matter beyond the equation of value 2017). Drawing on Francois Laruelle, the article continues to elaborate the possibilities of a material image without form in terms of what Laruelle calls, the “fractal algorithm of the photo”. The article concludes that the negative optics of machine vision stands for the alien origination of knowledge, values, materialities that overturn the equation of value through the fractal infinities of 0 s.

How to Become Human?

Laura Gustafsson and Terike Haapoja’s three channel video installation Becoming (Gustafsson&Haapoja 2020) explores emergent ways of relating to ourselves, others and the world. In the video 37 interviewees chart the current state of the world and its people. They contemplate phenomena that are in bud at this very moment, and which should be nurtured. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication Bud Book – A Manual for Earthly Living that makes suggestions for how to live as a human being in a world endangered by the old way of being human. In her essay How to Become Human Terike Haapoja discusses the problematic universalism of the anthropocene discourse and what art can contribute to the task of becoming human otherwise.

Serious Dreaming

The following article unpacks the portrayal of digital or screen-based trauma and the gamification of war within contemporary video art. A riff on Harun Farocki's eponymous multi-channel video installation Serious Games (2010), the article questions if the screen has the power to transmit violence and thus affect trauma, or if this focus heightens what Judith Butler termed precarious life. Conversely, for those who experience PTSD, as noted by Freud, the gamification or dreaming following traumatic events brings one to an entirely different game. This repetition, re-play, as I note, is for premonition, mastery or sight, while war in the age of simulation is characterised by a lack of human optics. As information bombs and pop monuments to atrocity flood the public imagination, what other experiences are also covered over? What lies behind the schism between the virtual and the lived?

Obladì Obladà e Immagina: sperimentazioni tra video e computer art in tv

During the Eighties, with the spread of personal computers, the image of the Italian television was revolutionised by computer graphics. Broadcasts like Obladì Obladà (1985) and Immagina (1987-88), both directed by Ranuccio Sodi, made extensive use of computer graphics and combined analogue and digital post-production techniques. These programs were dedicated to contemporary audio-visual production: from videoclips to video installations, from advertising to computer art and, more generally, to artistic forms related to electronics. For Obladì Obladà, Massimo Iosa Ghini designed the graphic line and created a futuristic studio that revealed the style of bolidismo. While in Immagina, Fabrizio Plessi’s scenographies dictated the aesthetics of the transmission, dialoguing with Mario Convertino’s graphics. The article aims to analyse the two programs as products of an aesthetical and technological experimentation in which the collaboration between the director and the artists involved represents an attempt to create a “television art”.

Sights and Sounds of Big Data: Ryoji Ikeda’s Immersive Installations

Abstract The Japanese multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda’s work can be interpreted as a contact between mediums, but also as a contact between disciplines. Most of his video installations are based on concepts borrowed from the field of mathematics, physics or information technology. In this paper I will examine Ikeda’s audiovisual installations by presenting these multimedial installations as possible methods of visualizing digital data in the context of contemporary art. Considering their digital and abstract nature, these works can also be analysed as unique audiovisual environments built from different media based on the same data-sets, offering the possibility of immersion. By unfolding the medial relations within Ikeda’s work I will try to demonstrate how the combination of sight and sound creates the inter-sensual experience of getting in touch with digital data.

From Vertical Roll to .MOV File

In this article, I examine artworks from two periods in the history of media art—the 1970s and the 2010s—to demonstrate how changes in our haptic relationship to screen media shift the site of criticality in contemporary media art from disruption of electronic feedback toward an intensification and embrace of image flows that actively seek the viewer's touch and gesture. I situate video art within the shifting concept of flow in everyday media consumption, reading video art practices within a larger matrix of bodily and cultural engagement with screens. I locate touch and gesture as both themes in the content of single-channel works and components of the structure of video installation. Artists discussed include Camille Henrot, Joan Jonas, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bruce Nauman, and Hito Steyerl. My analysis bridges media theory and art history with close readings of salient works of art, connecting the structure of artworks employing haptic input to shifts in the broader media ecology and the dynamic interplay of touch, image, and power under our fingertips.

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

Mapping the Way: The Use of Maps in Artistic Projects, Working with Migrants and Refugees

This article deals with three art projects which take into account the relationship between maps, migration and memory. We shall analyse how Céline Boyer, Bouchra Khalili and Marie Moreau artistically respond to the diverse waves of migration in Europe. In each of their respective projects, engagement with these themes and with individual participants created opportunities for the transmission of knowledge and experience. The connection between maps and power is explored relative to these artistic projects and related processes. Whether it be photography, writing, video installation or participative ateliers, all three artists seem to pinpoint the importance of the hand when it comes to telling and mapping a story.

Penciptaan Video Seni Instalasi "Narkoba Berbahaya"

This article discusses creating drugs that discuss new types of drugs that are very dangerous, so presenting images of drug victims in this video because it can be a concern that will increase the danger for adolescents in the productive period. Problems with the use of drugs. To discuss this problem, reference theory from (Sp, 2004) and (Murti, 2009) is used. The stages of the announcement process of the installation video of "Dangerous Drugs", discussed the stages of the creation of a television program including pre-production, production, and post-production. The results of the discussion of this article are the work of creating responses to phenomena that occur around social life. This study explains that the presence of a senior video on the installation of 'Dangerous Drugs' can trigger the creation of an anti-narcotics campaign with a form of senior video installation that is easily understood by many people who help everyone can help people who care about drugs, and always be vigilant in the social environment . This video also shows the big problem that is surrounding the future of the young generation in Indonesia.

Lugares da memória na obra de Ayrson Heráclito

O presente artigo tem como objetivo refletir sobre a videoinstalação Os Sacudimentos (2015), composta por dois vídeos denominados O Sacudimento da Casa da Torre (8’32’) e O Sacudimento da Maison des Esclaves em Gorée (8’32’), obra realizada pelo artista brasileiro Ayrson Heráclito (Macaúbas, Bahia, 1968), a partir da versão exibida no Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chate­aubriand (MASP) em 2018. Como abordagem metodológica foi utilizada, para uma discussão sobre a obra, a perspectiva conceitual de lugares da memória (les lieux de mémóire) desenvolvido por Pierre Nora, em 1984. Para Nora, os lugares de memória são aqueles onde a memória se cristaliza e se refugia. Seriam uma espécie de substituto da memória, simbolicamente representam o que resta e o que se perpetua de um outro tempo até o presente.

Safe is a Wonderful Feeling: Atmospheres of Surveillance and Contemporary Art

This paper examines how the combined prism of contemporary art and the notion of atmosphere may offer alternative perspectives on our encounters with places and practices of surveillance. Specifically, this article investigates the atmospheres of surveillance surfacing in the video installation Safe Conduct (2016a) by British contemporary artist Ed Atkins. The artwork recreates the well-known situation of going through an airport security check. Through a combination of visual narrative and a soundscape blending the sounds of the conveyor belt and X-ray machines with heavy breathing and Ravel’s Boléro, the work builds up an uncanny anticipation of something awful. Death and violence linger at its edges, and a disquieting atmosphere fills the exhibition space. The objective of the article is twofold: First, it explores the shifting and ambiguous atmospheres produced by contemporary surveillance practices through an immersive reading of the artwork Safe Conduct. Second, and connected to the first, it offers an experimental methodology of written vignettes responding to the embodied, aesthetic experience of atmospheres of surveillance. The article concludes that being more sensitive to the atmospheres of surveillance in our environment can give us a space to think critically about how these atmospheres affect us, how they are absorbed bodily, and how they attune our being: how surveillance is “in the air.”

Review: List Projects 20: Becca Albee

Book Review| June 01 2020 Review: List Projects 20: Becca Albee List Projects 20: Becca Albee: MIT List Visual Arts Center. Cambridge, MA: December 12, 2019–February 9, 2020. Jeannie Simms Jeannie Simms Jeannie Simms is a media artist working on transnational migration. She is currently working on a video project titled Vivo Qui about a community in Southern Italy. She teaches photography and media at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University where she is director of graduate studies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2020) 47 (2): 88–92. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2020.472016 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 Jeannie Simms; Review: List Projects 20: Becca Albee. Afterimage 1 June 2020; 47 (2): 88–92. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2020.472016 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 Becca Albee's solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center was comprised of photographs, video, and take-away ephemera. The subject of the work itself was the artwork of another artist, the late Robert Blanchon, who died of AIDS in 1999 at the age of thirty-three. Blanchon was Albee's graduate mentor and professor in the late 1990s. The work in the List show was created in 2019 after Albee conducted research in Blanchon's archives, which are housed in the Fales Library at New York University. Works in the show were all titled after verbatim passages from Blanchon's writings that Albee selected from his archives. A three-channel digital video installation, … my work as a premature memorial to myself, others, and perhaps our world. Now that's an ending. (2019) included small video monitors on the floor that emitted dark ultraviolet footage. The imagery on all of the screens, of horseshoe... You do not currently have access to this content.

Investigating the sociocultural models with cultural experiments: A Polish‒English study on {Request → Compliance} in gender relations

The dominant model in cross‐cultural psychology largely disregards culture (Boski, 2018). An alternative theory of sociocultural models (SCMs) has been proposed in this volume. SCMs mould cognitive, affective, and behavioural processes of individual persons, as well as their corrective measures should such processes be sidetracked. Because SCMs are culture‐bound, intercultural contacts are likely to be fraught in misconceptions and conflicts, but they may also give rise to attraction and to culture change. This article compares Polish script of gender roles and its transformations between the ingroup and English (outgroup) contexts. Framed in a {Request → Compliance} format, a cultural experiment was conducted with university students in England and Poland. It was based on four video‐recorded enactments of that script, controlling for gender expressions on the request and on actor‐compliance sides. It was hypothesised that compared to foreign observers from England, Polish participants should provide confirmatory evidence to video installations, reflecting the script and should resist its transformation attempts. Results largely confirmed these expectations. The {Male addressed request → Male compliance} was of the Polish normative and behavioural prototype, but not appealing for English participants, for whom gender neutrality was the preferred cultural arrangement.

Il mio nome vero: sul rapporto tra realtà e finzione nella pentalogia di Mauro Covacich

The article focuses on the relation between fiction, non-fiction and identity in the work of the Italian contemporary writer Mauro Covacich with regard to his «pentalogy», consisting of four novels and a video installation (A perdifiato, Fiona, Prima di sparire, L’umiliazione delle stelle, A nome tuo). Covacich draws a peculiar case within Italian literature of the past twenty years, which expresses thenecessity to discover new narrative solutions, the tendency towards hybridization of genres and the overcoming of the dialectics within actuality and artifice. This paper aims to investigate how the author uses a plurality of voices and forms, factual and fictional elements as a tool for exploring the Self. Acting as a witness to the world through his own experience, he constantly looks for thepossibility to go beyond the limits of derealization and reach «the truest truth of the self, the personally encrypted code hidden in the fibre of writing».

Race Matters in Intersectional Feminisms. Towards a Danish Grammar Book

ABSTRACT In this article, we ask: “how does race matter when working with intersectional feminism in a postcolonial Nordic context?” We take our cue from feminist and postcolonial scholars who have pointed out that minoritisation and majoritisation processes in the Nordic area are entangled in ongoing racialization processes. Working with and around the video installation Black Magic at the White House by the artist Jeanette Ehlers, we hold on to the particularities of racialization processes in the Danish context, as well as their insertion in a global racial ontology. We establish a conversation between Ehlers’ installation and the work of two black American scholars from the humanities: Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers. These scholars have not been influential in the European uptake and further elaboration of intersectionality, but we argue that engaging with their work opens up a perspective that focuses on affect, absence and disappearance rather than only representation, identity and recognition, thereby worlding intersectionality differently than standpoint theory. Experience is also constituted through affective encounters, the ephemeral, forgotten and bypassed qualities and intensities. We conclude the article by drawing a preliminary sketch of elements in what we, paraphrasing Spillers, call a Danish “grammar book” of the racialized and gendered ordering of the human that again complicates the stories we may tell about how race matters and what Nordic intersectional feminism may look like, as well as the interventions this may open up.

Everyday Myth

April 01 2020 Everyday Myth Harun Farocki, Harun Farocki Harun Farocki (1944–2014) studied at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in West Berlin from 1966 to 1968. He realized more than one hundred productions for television, cinema, and radio (documentaries, essay films, fiction, children's television, radio plays) in the following five decades, which he complemented, since 1995, with video installations for exhibition spaces. Farocki's films and installations have been shown widely in solo and group exhibitions, including Documenta 10 in 1997 and Documenta 12 in 2007. A prolific writer, most notably in the journal Filmkritik, which he coedited between 1974 and 1983, he also taught at various institutions, including DFFB, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Ted Fendt Ted Fendt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Harun Farocki Harun Farocki (1944–2014) studied at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in West Berlin from 1966 to 1968. He realized more than one hundred productions for television, cinema, and radio (documentaries, essay films, fiction, children's television, radio plays) in the following five decades, which he complemented, since 1995, with video installations for exhibition spaces. Farocki's films and installations have been shown widely in solo and group exhibitions, including Documenta 10 in 1997 and Documenta 12 in 2007. A prolific writer, most notably in the journal Filmkritik, which he coedited between 1974 and 1983, he also taught at various institutions, including DFFB, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Ted Fendt Translator Online Issn: 1536-0105 Print Issn: 1526-3819 © 2020 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2020Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Grey Room (2020) (79): 90–92. https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00294 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Search Site Citation Harun Farocki, Ted Fendt; Everyday Myth. Grey Room 2020; (79): 90–92. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00294 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsGrey Room Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2020 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2020Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Snowdrops Bloom in September

April 01 2020 Snowdrops Bloom in September Harun Farocki, Harun Farocki Harun Farocki (1944–2014) studied at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in West Berlin from 1966 to 1968. He realized more than one hundred productions for television, cinema, and radio (documentaries, essay films, fiction, children's television, radio plays) in the following five decades, which he complemented, since 1995, with video installations for exhibition spaces. Farocki's films and installations have been shown widely in solo and group exhibitions, including Documenta 10 in 1997 and Documenta 12 in 2007. A prolific writer, most notably in the journal Filmkritik, which he coedited between 1974 and 1983, he also taught at various institutions, including DFFB, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Ted Fendt Ted Fendt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Harun Farocki Harun Farocki (1944–2014) studied at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in West Berlin from 1966 to 1968. He realized more than one hundred productions for television, cinema, and radio (documentaries, essay films, fiction, children's television, radio plays) in the following five decades, which he complemented, since 1995, with video installations for exhibition spaces. Farocki's films and installations have been shown widely in solo and group exhibitions, including Documenta 10 in 1997 and Documenta 12 in 2007. A prolific writer, most notably in the journal Filmkritik, which he coedited between 1974 and 1983, he also taught at various institutions, including DFFB, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Ted Fendt Translator Online Issn: 1536-0105 Print Issn: 1526-3819 © 2020 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2020Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Grey Room (2020) (79): 100–105. https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00297 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Search Site Citation Harun Farocki, Ted Fendt; Snowdrops Bloom in September. Grey Room 2020; (79): 100–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00297 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsGrey Room Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2020 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2020Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Contributors

Contributors