M.A. Thesis: Revitalizing Cinema Participation Through the Video Installation by Jessica Williams

Revitalizing Cinema Participation through the Video Installation

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Art History Department in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of the Master of Arts in Cinema Studies at The Savannah College of Art and Design Jessica Leigh Williams Savannah ÂŠ November 2016

Tracy Cox-Stanton, Committee Chair Chad Newsom, Committee Member Kristen Galvin, Committee Member

Acknowledgments This research started in a graduate seminar course focused on spectator affect, led by Dr. Tracy Cox-Stanton. I am indebted to Dr. Cox-Stanton for helping me turn a muddled amalgamation of scholarship into a comprehensible study, and for providing me with the insight and resources to make my ideas tangible. I also thank Dr. Charles Newsom and Dr. Kristen Galvin for contributing their diverse areas of expertise in cinema studies and art history, as well as their encouragement throughout this thesis process. Mom and dad, thank you for your continued support in all areas of life, but especially during my time as a student. You all are certainly not required to listen to my rambling ideas, but you do with enthusiasm, and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why I took on an M.A. in the first place. Completing a degree in one year requires a lot of sitting and isolation. Daniel, thank you for reminding me to go outside, and for continuously bringing color to my life. You make me see everything with a fresh perspective. Aimee, thank you for reminding on a daily basis me why I ventured into cinema studies: your resilience as a teacher and individual inspires me to contribute more fervently to a cause much larger than myself.

Table of Contents List of Figures

Abstract

Introduction

Methodology

Literature Review

I. A Theoretical Basis for Affect

II. Cinema Affect Theory

III. Mobilized Spectatorship and Expanded Cinema

IV. Defining Spectator Immersion

Video Installation Studies

I. Single-Channel Video Installations

i. Jepson Center for Art

ii. SCAD Museum of Art: Llano

iii. SCAD Museum of Art: data.tron/data.scan

II. Multi-Channel Video Installations

i. Turbulent

ii. The Widows of Noirmoutier

iii. The Mapping Journey Project

Conclusions

Works Cited

List of Figures Figure 1: Liz Magic Laser, Feel Your Pain, Installation View

Figure 2: Jesper Just, Llano

Figure 3: Ryoji Ikeda, data.tron/data.scan

Figure 4: SCADMOA, Twitter Image

Figure 5: Keiko Miyakoshi, Twitter Image

Figure 6: Shirin Neshat, Turbulent

Figure 7: Shirin Neshat, Turbulent (Altered Image)

Figure 8: Shirin Neshat, Turbulent (Altered Image)

Figure 9: AgnĂ¨s Varda, Les Veuves de Noirmoutier

Figure 10: AgnĂ¨s Varda, Les Veuves de Noirmoutier, Installation View

Figure 11: Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey Project.

Figure 12: Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey Project.

2 Revitalizing Cinema Participation through the Video Installation

Abstract This thesis studies the spatial relationship between screen and subject in museum and gallery exhibitions that require bodily movement through single-channel and multi-channel video installations. Video installation spaces emphasizing the participant’s bodily motion promote the moving image as a critically social practice. In order to problematize certain modes of spectatorship and exhibition, I work with the idea of “cognitive consumerism,” Laura Marks’s phrase, describing a cultural tendency to reduce visual art to a series of facts to be mastered and discarded. In an age saturated with screens and information, the subject’s role as spectator extends to almost every space of contemporary life. One downside to this image influx is a widely accepted passive mode of cinema reception. From its 20th century inception, the moving image has affected spectators physically, intellectually, and sensually. Video installations recall the moving image’s historically affective reverberation by extending beyond the spatial confines of movie theatres and domestic settings, transforming the contemporary subject from passive viewer to cinema participant.

Key Terms: cognitive consumerism, contemporary spectator, passive viewer, video installation, moving image, cinema participant, single-channel, multi-channel

Introduction The filmic screen is also fiber, a material weave that absorbs and reflects. Such is the screen – the fabric – upon which the stories of history are inscribed. – Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy What are the social possibilities for the moving image? Can video installations alter how we perceive and consume digital media in everyday life? How can variations in exhibition space change the moving image’s reception? These questions inform my project’s impetus: to understand how different exhibition spaces engage the moving image spectator, in order to explore how video installations revitalize cinema’s social qualities in the contemporary digital age. “Screens” in this study are synonyms for a larger culture of the moving image – digital advertisements, computer videos, Megaplex movie theatres, experimental film, etc. – and its ubiquitous appearance in everyday spaces. Narrative films remain at cinema’s core. Since the 1960s, video installations within museums, galleries, and other spaces once reserved for still art – paintings, sculpture, and even photography – and have created an important convergence between fine art and cinema. As a result, this junction has altered spectator culture in terms of viewing art and digesting the moving image. In her book Public Intimacy, Bruno likens film screens to a historically reflective material, reminding spectators of collective sociocultural experiences through representation and innovation. Yet screen ubiquity in modern life reduces the traditional cinema house’s potential to meaningfully confront and engage spectators with their own cultural histories. Extending Bruno’s metaphor, screens have come to operate on a disposable, “fast-fashion” system, and the jaded, screen-weary spectator is often a byproduct of an oversaturated digital experience. Interactive video games may contribute to a more participatory visual culture, but many are

4 criticized for simply being procedural experiences where task “A” leads to task “B,” ending when completed. Excessive video game participation may in fact disrupt “school, work, and ‘real life’ social contacts,” calling scholars to question the social responsibility of the gaming industry.1 Studies like this signal screens to be spectacles of isolation, or what Guy Debord laments as “the autonomous movement of the non-living.”2 I argue that the moving image has the potential to enhance other social realms of life, but only if it creates critical, meaningful participation. In order to solidify the importance of both narrative and experimental cinema, participatory screen experiences must possess a socially relevant, yet personally resonating impetus. Passive spectatorship connotes a lack of meaningful exchange between subject and screen, where moving images “wash over” the viewer. This mode of spectatorship weakens moving image culture at large: even in academic settings, for example, cinema’s appeal is often reduced to fandoms, plotlines, and frenetic, fact-based video essays. The spaces in which we normally receive the moving image also create a barrier between the spectator’s body and the content on screen. Films today are generally consumed in front of a personal computer or movie theatre screen. By their nature, movie theatres and personal computers dictate the spectator’s physical placement. While this placement in front of screens does not eliminate the spectator’s affective, participatory potential, the repetition and replication of this viewing arrangement in most common spaces often creates disillusionment toward the moving image viewing experience. Exhibition spaces requiring spectatorial movement can facilitate alternative modes of interaction that inform and improve our complicated relationships to screens and visual culture.

1 See Antonius J. Van Rooij et al., “Video Game Addiction and Social Responsibility,” Addiction 2 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983).

5 This thesis explores the potential the relationship between spectator, screen, and the space mediating the moving image experience. Video installation spaces in museums revive a historically kinetic relationship between spectator and spectacle, allowing viewers the space, time, and context to digest the moving image’s meanings. Due to spatial arrangements requiring physical movement to experience the video installation, spectatorial bodies connect more actively and socially to the moving image. Two video installation categories comprise this study: the one screen, single-channel, and the multi-channel video installation. Whether projected on a wall or displayed on flat screens, all installations in this study reside in black box museum spaces, mimicking and enhancing traditional movie theatre experiences. The subject’s physical and psychological proximities to screens determine their relationship to moving image culture, and video installations reformulate the spectator into an active participant.

Methodology An active, immersive engagement with the moving image elicits affective (sensory) responses in spectators, creating more permanent memories of a film and progressing the importance of visual culture at large. The term “affect” in this project encapsulates a precognitive, corporeal reaction to the moving image in cinema. Since the 1990s, the term affect has taken precedence in the field of cinema spectator studies. Because sensory experiences are fleeting and subjective, scholars have struggled to describe and measure these sensory affects. When we apply theories of spectatorial cinematic affect to the installation participant’s movement through tangible museum spaces, we move onto steadier ground and gain clarity. The difference between sitting as a spectator and moving as a participant renovates how the mind and body “digest” film. Scholarship addressing spectator affect and issues in moving image

6 exhibition lays important groundwork for studying participatory spectatorship. Carl Plantinga, Brian Massumi, Mark B.N. Hansen, and Steven Shaviro highlight the differences between affect and emotion, correlate these distinctions to contemporary spectatorship, and provide theoretical insight as to how best to study the spectator amidst an era saturated with digital information. Through these accounts on spectatorial affect, I highlight the role affect plays in creating a mobilized moving image participant. The next section closes the focus to scholars in the field of cinema studies dealing with spectatorship. Anne Rutherford, Lesley Stern, and Elena del Río problematize traditional representational theories in cinema studies. Proving that active engagement with the moving image can occur through traditional exhibition forms, all three scholars add to spectator studies through their descriptive exchanges between screen and spectator, using screen gestures as mediators. Such an approach to affect theory informs my incorporation of space into the equation, and the tenets of these affect scholars will emerge in my gallery space analysis. Through subjective accounts, space analysis, and observation, I externalize the gestures previously analyzed on screen in the aforementioned scholarship onto the spectator’s gestures in the space of a video installation. Before the modern cinema took shape, public entertainment relied on affective, bodily responses to spectacle. Vanessa Schwartz and Giuliana Bruno recall historical spectatorial mobility through sites of spectacle created the blueprint for cinema culture. Schwartz accounts for the late 19th century “pre-cinematic” spectator’s mobile gaze in sites of public spectacle. Reality, according to Schwartz, was the key determinant of a spectacle’s appeal, as spectators desired to see the news in tangible forms. Via the contemporary public spectacle of the video installation, Bruno theorizes spectatorship as inherently kinetic and embodied, meaning that a

7 physical, sensory relationship between subject and screen informs the moving image in the art museum. Bruno’s work also emphasizes the fundamental exchanges between a museum’s architecture and film, synthesizing the two as a site for preserving and redefining cultural memory. The convergence between museum and cinema recalls the spectator before movie theatres, where his or her gaze was mobilized through the spatial qualities of a spectacle site. With this history in mind, Bruno identifies how the moving image continues to mobilize spectators within installation spaces. Video installations, experimental films, and new media art comprise a historical canon of film scholarship dating back to the 1960s. My study bridges cinematic spectator theories with the history of expanded cinema. I outline the forces propelling cinema into museums and galleries, including scholarship on the changing function of museums as exhibition spaces for films. Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema was one of the first critical studies of cinema in spaces alternative to the traditional movie theatre. Youngblood’s analysis of an emerging reliance on technology and media in the late 20th century reveals issues in spectatorship specific to a society based on capitalist consumerism. Expanded cinema, he claims, reveals the modern spectator’s need to experience visual art in newer, more realistic forms. In current scholarship, Andrew Uroskie, Laura Marks, Erika Balsom, and Matilde Nardelli account for cinema’s continuance through gallery spaces, and consider the economic, sociocultural, and functional implications of this moving image expansion. The final section of literature utilizes scholarship on the discourse surrounding expanded cinema. Jenny Chamarette’s work describes of her own bodily experiences in video installations, and brings to light arguments surrounding the immersive qualities of expanded cinema. Andrew Uroskie speaks to the ostensible diametric opposition between the art gallery and the cinema

8 house, while Laura Marks asserts that the movie theatre’s enclosed setting possesses more immersive qualities than the gallery space. Scholarship in this area cannot completely close the immersion argument to a single set of spatial rules, leaving the topic of moving image installations open for extended theoretical possibilities concerning the contemporary spectator. Grounded in spectator theory, my analysis focuses on the spatial arrangements of specific single or multi-channel video installations. This section considers each installation’s film contents, and largely emphasizes the spectator’s proximity to the screen. I argue that singlechannel and multi-channel installations should counter typical spaces (theatrical and domestic) of moving image consumption, highlighting the affective, immersive qualities of installations by Jesper Just, Ryoji Ikeda, Shirin Neshat, Agnès Varda, and Bouchra Khalili. A portion of my analysis stems from my own experiences with certain installations, while the other relies on exhibit images. In discerning between single and multi-channel video installations, I illustrate the various methods of displaying the moving image outside of the movie theatre, while connecting the two categories in their ability to immerse the participant in a manner enhancing and redefining his or her contemporary relationship to screens.

Literature Review A Theoretical Basis for Affect Affect results from a sensory, personal relationship between participant and video installation, and ultimately produces a collectively humanistic, social experience with the moving image. Reformulating Descartes’ cogito to “I feel before I am,” affect theory prioritizes spectator sensations, emotions, and physical responses to the moving image. Carl Plantinga problematizes traditional film theory’s search “for hidden meanings, as though each work of

9 fiction embodies abstract propositions in the form of messages or themes,” reducing films to a cold analysis.3 A sensory understanding of the moving image participant complicates totalizing theoretical models. Brian Massumi describes this field in terms of the everyday, which comprises “a suspension of affect-reaction circuits and linear temporality in a sink of what might be called passion.”4 Reality is saturated with stimuli and sensations. Mark B.N. Hansen uses affect as “an interface between the domain of information (the digital) and the embodied human experience.”5 Affect buffers between digital information and bodies, connecting individuals to fluctuating streams of information and experiences. Responses to stimuli cause spectator action, completing the process of affect. Steven Shaviro accounts for affect theory’s collective nature, describing affect as “pre-personal and pre-subjective; it is social, or even ontological, before it is strictly individual. Affect isn’t what I feel, so much as it is what forces me to feel.”6 Contrasting spectator gaze theories, Massumi, Hansen, and Shaviro’s accounts push new theoretical possibilities the modern moving image spectator. Video installations can fulfill these possibilities, as their spatial properties require not only the spectator’s visual understanding, but also his/her physical interaction with the video. Through this holistic understanding of the spectator, affect emerges in a tangible form when combined with social exhibition spaces.

3 Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 3. 4 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 29. 5 Mark B.N. Hansen, “Affect as Medium, or the ‘Digital-Facial-Image.’” Journal of Visual Culture 2 (2003), 209. 6 Steven Shaviro, “Affect vs. Emotion.” The Cine-Files 10 (Spring 2016), N.P.

10 Cinema Affect Theory Affect theorists in cinema studies criticize traditional spectator theories for their capacity to disembody the spectator into manageable parts. Anne Rutherford expresses disillusionment with taxonomical studies of the body, which “hinder the development of an aesthetics of embodiment which can address the centrality of the embodied affect to understanding cinema spectatorship.”7 Rutherford invokes imbrication – the literal overlapping of tissue – to convey complex sensory processes between viewer and screen. Describing physical actions or gestures through film performance helps visually define affect. Lesley Stern recounts her inaccurate memory of a performance to introduce the idea of somatic knowledge, or a sensory understanding, in contrast to traditional rhetorical explanations of film. Her “false” memory speaks to cinema’s “propensity for migration,” wherein “gestures migrate from one movie to another, from movies into social milieu and vice versa, they resonate, disappear and reappear – differently, and the differences pertain to cultural and historical context.”8 Migratory gestures support the idea that affect is perpetual and socially collective: one instance of movement on film connects to a larger social context of universal communication. Elena del Río argues that between performance and spectator, “the creative activity of bodily forces…coincides with the generative processes of existence itself.”9 Like Stern, del Río applies an affirmative or procreative model to cinematic performance, linking separate filmic gestures together in one connective gestural chain. The aforementioned uses of “traditional” cinematic space between spectator and theatre screen emphasize the body, wherein the spectator’s movements and

7 Anne Rutherford, “Cinema and Embodied Affect.” Senses of Cinema Vol. 25 (2003), N.P. 8 Lesley Stern, “Putting on a Show, or The Ghostliness of Gesture.” Lola Journal Issue 5 (2014). 9 Elena Del Río, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 3.

11 reactions signal film’s ability to physical mobilize individuals. Considering the moving image in nontraditional spaces continues and clarifies this scholarship on spectator affect theory.

Mobilized Spectatorship and Expanded Cinema In the past…the spectator moved between [a series of] carefully disposed phenomena that he observed sequentially with his visual sense. – Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture” Cinema culture developed through socially oriented, immersive spectacles that required spectators’ movements around a space. Vanessa Schwartz demonstrates the pre-cinematic public's “mobilized gaze” in the late 19th century. The importance of studying the historical spectator lies in exhibition spaces, as they ultimately determine modes for public visual reception: “Cinema’s spectators brought to the cinematic experience modes of viewing which were cultivated in a variety of cultural activities and practices.”10 Schwartz’s “practices” of study involved the precinematic spectator’s mobilized gaze in sites requiring physical movement. Giuliana Bruno also considers the spectator’s movement a key to moving image history, stating cinema “emerged from an interactive geovisual culture.”11 Spectators physically explored visual culture, rather than simply watching it occur. Late nineteenth-century spectacles including the Paris morgue, wax museums, panoramas demonstrate “cinematic spectatorship as a historical practice,” wherein Schwartz asserts “it is not mere coincidence that apart from people’s interest

10 Vanessa Schwartz, “Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, Ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz. Berkeley: (University of California Press, 1995.), 298. 11 Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts. (London: The MIT Press, 2007.), 17.

12 in reality, the activities described here transpired among large groups of people in whose mobility some of the spectacles’ realistic effects resided.”12 Eisenstein witnessed changes in spectator mobility due to cinema’s rise in early 20th century public life. Instead of requiring the body to move around visual displays, he recognized that his camera now moved for the spectator, mimicking her pre-cinematic bodily participation with spectacle. Cinema houses therefore altered and informed both spectator reception and museum functions. Echoing Eisenstein’s discourse on the spectator’s relationship to space, Bruno connects film and architecture (space) together through the spectator’s movement: Film follows a historical course–that is, a museographic way to collect together various fragments of cultural phenomena from diverse geohistorical moments open for spectatorial recollection in space…The consumer of the architectural viewing space is the prototype of the film spectator (19-20). The “ideal” film spectator is activated and affected through literal (museums) and metaphorical (“geohistorical”) space. Rather than simplifying bodily movement as “positive” or “negative” in regards to the moving image and spectator culture, it is imperative to identify the larger exchanges between the cinema and museums, and their resulting contributions to how the subject perceives the moving image. The contemporary video installation amalgamates the spectator’s “historical” movements (consider the pre-cinematic spectator as the starting point for the cinema spectator genealogy) and the cinema house’s isolated appeal. Bruno establishes the museum’s fundamental role as a site preserving collective cultural memories: “the museum’s own agency as a space of cultural memory has been mobilized by the presence of moving images.”13 Without the museum’s promise to preserve and collect, then, there would be no need for the moving image to leave the cinema house or the domestic screen. Films and museums both 12 Schwartz, 316. 13 Bruno, 5.

13 cause spectators to “recollect” on cultural moments, and when combined, cause an experience entirely singular from the movie theatre or home viewing. Video installations are therefore the result of the convergence or “cross-pollination” between film and art history. Film and art convergence yielded a new approach to cinema studies in Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema in the 1970s. In his preliminary text, Youngblood philosophizes cinema’s expansion beyond the movie theatre in terms of human development. Youngblood likens expanded cinema to an evolutionary process: When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness. Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded cinema isn't a movie at all: like life it's a process of becoming, man's ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes.14 A “manifestation of human consciousness” resounds particularly well with cinema affect theory. The “drive” Youngblood emphasizes accounts for the spectator’s sensory reactions to his/her own consciousness on screen. Rather than focusing on the literal components (media forms like computers and phones) of an increasingly digital society, Youngblood turns his focus to the creator and consumer of such technologies, theorizing expanded cinema based on the human motivation to produce, archive, and experience a collective consciousness. The collision between fine art and film, and the resulting video installation, enables this need to expand the film screen to a critically social yet artistically authoritative space like the museum. Youngblood’s expanded cinema theory explains why experimental cinema in the past fifteen years has primarily migrated to the museum. Currently, Andrew Uroskie considers the phenomenon of expanded cinema as “the norm rather than the exception within the

14 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema. (1st ed. New York: Dutton, 1970), 41.

14 contemporary art galleries and museums.”15 This migration from movie theatre to art museum also has practical reasons. Economic changes have also resettled facets of the moving image: experimental filmmakers are increasingly marginal to traditional theatre and festival venues. Laura Marks charts this shift, explaining that “experimental media artists are producing more work at the same time that paying venues are diminishing…many experimental festivals have closed down in recent years.”16 Gallery spaces also facilitate an examination of film’s materiality. Erika Balsom addresses the contemporary use of the obsolescent 16 mm film for the purpose of video installations in gallery spaces: “Re-entry of 16 mm into the gallery in the 1990s as a part of a larger turn towards questions of cinema brings with it a host of concerns very different from those at stake a quarter of a century earlier.” 17 Artists in this context experiment with outmoded film forms to redefine current cinematic practices. Matilde Nardelli asserts, “These artistic practices configure not the death of cinema but its continuation.”18 Like Balsom, Nardelli focuses on the emerging artistic quest for obsolescence in contemporary video art, intersecting that these filmmaking practices interrogate the “very idea and the possibility of [cinema’s] future in the wake of digitality”19 Nostalgic experiments and new digital possibilities also alter exchanges between screen and spectator, creating new methodologies for analyzing contemporary spectatorship. First-person perspectives of moving image installations create a relatively new methodology for spectator studies. For example, Jenny Chamarette describes her interactions with Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman’s respective video installations. As both 15 Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 5. 16 Laura Marks, “Immersed in the Single Channel: Experimental Media from Theater to Gallery.” Millennium Film Journal 55 (2012), 15. 17 Erica Balsom, "A Cinema in the Gallery, a Cinema in Ruins." Screen 50.4. (2009), 413. 18 Matilde Nardelli, "Moving Pictures: Cinema and its Obsolescence in Contemporary Art." Journal of Visual Culture 8.3 (2009), 243. 19 Nardelli, 245.

15 experiment with spatial organization, “these installations foreground embodied relationships to gesture in their spectators, and gestural relationships to meaning.”20 Like Stern and del Río, Chamarette connects spectator and screen through her own kinetic activity around a video installation. Chamarette’s study highlights the fact that bodily sensations (affects) occur beyond film content, through cinema’s spatial practices.

Defining Spectator Immersion Immersive qualities between traditional movie theatres and contemporary film installations cause continuous debate. Uroskie asserts that the “black box” of the traditional theatre “intentionally negates both bodily mobility and environmental perception so as to transport the viewer away from her present time and local space.”21 However, spectator mobility in the gallery often causes what Marks calls “cognitive consumerism,” a phenomenon wherein “installation works allow visitors to come up with a mental shorthand for the work: the shorter the visit, the more cognitive and less experiential it is.”22 “Experiential” stands synonymous to affect, and Marks argues movie theatre spaces instead offer spectators a positive kind of entrapment, where distractions are minimum: “Watching a film…there’s an implicit contract that you’ll spend a certain period of time, and so within that period you are free; time expands and contracts around you according to how you attend to the film.”23 While the cinema theatre, with its screen-facing seating and dark setting, fulfills an immersive quality, a high saturation of digital media in contemporary culture alters or even breaks this supposed time “contract.” 20 Jenny Chamarette, "Between Women: Gesture, Intermediality And Intersubjectivity In The Installations Of Agnès Varda And Chantal Akerman." Studies In European Cinema 10.1 (2013), 55. 21 Uroskie, 5. 22 Marks, 21. 23 Ibid., 19.

16 When we consider the installation space in terms of distraction, we recognize a number of factors – personal cell phones, light, sound from surrounding exhibits docent surveillance, for example – that might deter spectators’ attention. Prior to our contemporary era dominated by screens, the theatrical experience would have sufficed for immersive qualities. However, allowing the spectator mobility contradicts the any threat of a passive viewing experiences caused by spatial arrangements. In these spaces, an important exchange occurs between spectator and screen that the theater cannot supply. The spectator functions as a camera, constructing his or her own perspective and relationship to the film displayed. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener liken cinema to skin, describing how the “skin is more than a ‘neutral wrapping’ for the body; it is a culturally and semantically charged surface of interaction and communication.”24 An affective consideration of the moving image installation mimics this idea of skin’s function. Analyzing the body’s skin – its surface, texture, and function – requires different variables of space and proximity. In the same way, immersive moving image installations allow spectators a range of proximities to create meaning via their own bodies.

Video Installation Studies During a weekend visit last year to NYC’s MoMA, I experienced the ubiquitous cell phone screen’s stronghold in all spaces of life, as it took precedence over the art on the walls. A man and his noisy camera shutter setting stopped long enough to snap each and every work displayed on the wall, but brief enough to cover every gallery room on that particular museum floor. The man’s documentation briefly drew more spectator attention than the displayed art. One 24 Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. (New York City: Routledge, 2010), 109.

17 can only assume the method behind his picture hoarding. Maybe he recreated the museum experience at home, flipping through his gathered images from the small phone screen. Either way, I incorrectly assumed this behavior was idiosyncratic. I observed the same frenetic spectatorial gestures at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art earlier this year. A woman holding a cell phone continuously and audibly snapped images of the art, quickly circling the gallery room until she “obtained” each work on her phone. Such patterns of consumption signal a clash between museums and the digital information age: small, private screens dictate museum visitor movements, rather than the museum space itself. The following analysis demonstrates the moving image’s vital influence in contemporary museums, as a site that decelerates cognitive consumerism. Studying the interaction and exchanges between viewer, cinema, and museum space reveals a transformative process on the contemporary subject, changing him or her from a consumer to an active participant in visual culture. Charting immersive qualities of video installations through spatial arrangements, film content, and audience reactions through social media platforms (when available) and reviews, this portion defines affective elements that render the viewer active and engaged in the moving image. In short, I highlight each video installation’s particular spatial and sensory qualities that encourage spectator immersion.

Single-Channel Video Installations Single-channel video installations spawn from movie theater arrangements: both display moving images on one screen under dimmed lights, and uniformly position the audience in front of the screen. However, museum video installations utilizing physical space create a moving image participant with mobilized vision, recalling the historic, pre-cinematic spectator’s

18 promenade through public sites of spectacle. Single-channel installations can alter normative (“jaded”) spectatorship behaviors and inform the traditional theatrical experience through spatial differentiations from their latter “parent” sites. The following sections contrast two singlechannel installations for their immersive qualities that either recreate or escape traditional theatrical spaces. Focusing on both spatial arrangements and rather video installation content, this section demonstrates how single-channel installations might transform passive spectators into moving image participants.

I. Jepson Center for the Arts In April 2016, a trip to the Jepson Center for Art verified Marks’s problem with the video installation, wherein a looped short film and its surrounding space demonstrated the phrase “cognitive consumerism.” An exhibit titled State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now featured a diverse range of works from contemporary American artists, exhibited through a primarily open floor plan so that most works were grouped together. The exhibit squeezed together a variety of mediums, including a single-channel video installation. In between two walls with one opening to the rest of the exhibit, the video installation Heavy Rotation (2011) by Chris Larson played on loop. Larson’s work is a performance piece, where the artist continuously deconstructs layers of dry wall, opening the floor to new spaces each time. The site of artwork in this video provides the artwork itself. Larson uses a turntable apparatus to draw circles onto paper, eventually puncturing it. He continues circling until he breaks through the floor, creating a disorienting passage into a new space each time.

19 While the artist moves through layers of space, the video installation’s spectator sits in front of a projected wall screen. In the installation space, benches flanked both sides of the room and faced the video projected on the wall, essentially replicating the traditional movie theater space for the gallery. While images of this particular space are not available, the video installation image below loosely mimics the former’s spatial positioning.

Figure 1: Feel Your Pain (A Performa Commission), Liz Magic Laser, 2011, single-channel video, installation view "Bitter Sweet Symphony" (2013), Künstlerhaus Bremen, Germany.

The video content was not the problem; instead the space constructing the experience problematically reduced the moving image into something to quickly view and mentally discard. An affective blockage marred this installation experience due to sound contamination from the installation’s surrounding exhibits. While viewing Heavy Rotation, the shrill creaking and swaying of steel reeds from John Douglas Powers’s sculptural installation lalu (2011) audibly overwhelmed the video installation, resulting in a sensory competition between artists and works.

20 As Marks laments on the “aesthetics of duration,” the video installation runs the risk of “constantly shifting between absorption and distraction,” primarily due to the spectator’s option or freedom to move from one exhibit to the next.25 The spatial arrangement of Heavy Rotation speaks to Marks’s problematizing of video installations. For one, seating in the installation room hindered the immersive quality of the installation. The benches facing one screen attempt to promote a communal quality to the installation space, yet this was cause for more sensory distraction. Other spectators showed awareness of people entering and exiting the room, and of sounds from other artworks close by. Moreover, people entering the room tended to linger in the entryway, causing a museum docent to continually ask that they step inside the installation space. Noises from other exhibitions created a nervous energy, wherein viewers seemed anxious to quickly digest the film and move onto the next visual medium – just like those who let their cell cameras guide their museum experience. Marks critiques this common tendency of the video installation by contrasting a movie theater experience. A traditional cinema offers an “imprisonment that liberates us from usually trivial questions about space and the cognitive pursuit of an ‘idea’ at work.”26 A video installation constructed to promote mental, emotional, and physical participation would primarily rid the spectator of the consumership anxieties that drive museum guests to pick up the film’s meaning, then move on to the next without critical evaluation. Of course, no “ideal” video installation exists – the spectator chooses whether to participate and engage in the space or not. In sum, cognitive consumerism in the video installation results in a cheap replication of the movie theater experience, offering little opportunities for the spectator’s holistic participation in the moving image experience. This form of information consumption remains a potential problem for all video installations. However, 25 Marks, 19 26 Marks, 22

21 certain video installation spatial arrangements can deter the impulse to “figure out” a film’s meaning and move onto the next, instead promoting a sensory, socially engaging experience for the spectator. Underlying the layout of the Jepson Center exhibition is an assumption that the spectator’s attention span cannot fully immerse in one artwork: museum visitors are rendered static and predictable in this curatorial model. This particular video installation setup promotes the same kind of passivity involved in the traditional theater experience. Marks argues that the traditional theater affords the spectator a kind of positive entrapment, making for a more immersive experience. In a gallery like Jepson Center’s, spectators may fail to (not by their own fault) “experience” the work, and instead consume it through quick cognition. For Marks, this space’s lack of experiential regard for the subject results in a watered-down memory of the video installation. The skin of this cultural space is congested, clogged with an excessive amount of stimuli, so that the embodied subject (the viewer) only understands the “gist” of each work. This condensed version of the traditional theater experience renders the body a hollow shell to be filled with information and stimuli. Mark’s spatiotemporal critiques of museum spaces summons important spatiotemporal discourses, yet it tends to override contemporary spectator theory with subjective cinema house nostalgia. To fully understand the potential impact of the video installation, we must take into consideration different methods of curating the moving image and connect these methods to the contemporary spectator’s need for experiential, social, and participatory viewing.

22 II. SCAD Museum of Art: Llano Resting between Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art’s gallery walls, an almost pitch-black room holds video installations and other interactive artworks. Upon entering through the dark hallway of this space, visitors usually pause for a moment, preparing psychologically for some kind of spectacle that shocks or surprises, akin to a theme park ride or a jump-scare movie. At the very least, one feels as if she is late to a movie that’s already started. It’s natural to lose footing in this space, which was previously available in the well-lit galleries next door. One might initially draw comparisons between a theater auditorium and this darkened gallery, but once the eyes adjust, a more immersive process than that of sitting in a movie theater begins – we’re not offered the same comfort of quickly finding a seat in front of a large screen. This space’s ambiguous, dark hallway recalibrates and prepares the spectator’s mind for an experiential video installation. Before coming to terms with the installation’s content, we’re enveloped in a liminal space slightly dislocated from the rest of the museum, but not entirely separate from the rest of the building. The video on display during my visit was Danish filmmaker Jesper Just’s Llano (2012), which examines the ruins of a failed utopia in California. In the film, a woman continually builds a wall under a man-made rainstorm in an isolated desert. Although the primary concern here is the gallery’s space, Just’s film mimicked the room’s open potentiality in its smooth, slow movement of line, its natural soundscape, and its ability to eliminate issues of epistephilia27: instead of creating a desire to “know” the film, it privileges experiential properties of image and sound over narrative and voice over. 27 Defined by Rutherford’s study of spectator affect as “a will to know…which assumes a rational intact subject, wanting to know about a referent, a real, which is already complete, formed and unchanging.” (In “The Poetics of a Potato,” pg. 128)

Figure 2: Jesper Just, Llano. 2015. Single-channel video. Image courtesy of SCAD Museum of Art (SCADMOA).

In the same way, spectator affect theory privileges a film’s ability to create continual sensory “shifts” or changes in participants. This affective, sensory concern reassembles the originally disembodied spectator’s mind into a holistic understanding of the moving image participant. Beyond the film’s content, the spatial properties of this installation render spectators active participants of the moving image. A single screen seemingly floats in the middle of the installation room, allowing participants to walk around it. Such small modifications from the movie theater experience – floating screens, lack of seating – largely change how we physically receive films. The video screen in this setting is more sculptural than it is flat — installation participants experience the screen in the round like sculpture, moving around the apparatus rather than sitting in front of a dominating screen. Content aside, the video in this floating form becomes an object that the participant controls visually. Thanks to this physical change in the moving image’s display, the installation participant gains an authority unprecedented to

24 traditional movie theatre spaces. This sense of authority, whether conscious or not, can inform how we consume and digest the moving image once we leave the immersive installation space. In the installation holding Llano, a visceral experience of contact between installation participant and screen occurred because of a spatial construction considering how the participant moves around a space holding the moving image.

III. SCAD Museum of Art: data.tron/data.scan In creating an affectively charged image, Rutherford states that filmmakers frame the image so that it is “allowed to work its way energetically on the spectator, as mimetic innervation, before it’s [rationally] pinned down,” and that this method of filmmaking “is central to understanding the ability of cinema to generate affect – intense feeling that is experience in a bodily way.”28 The spatial properties of the video installation can also generate a bodily feeling, making spectator affect and immersion an issue of content and exhibition space. However, how can we “prove” the effectiveness of a video installation’s immersive qualities? Considering the social media surrounding SCADmoa’s video installation room provides a place to start. In 2015, Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda’s immersive installation data.tron/data.scan magnetized spectator bodies to a literal screen of data. This work has been exhibited many times in different formats, yet SCADmoa’s display choices in particular mimic the idea of spectator immersion. Although it was mounted on the installation room’s wall like a movie theatre screen, Ikeda’s projected data physically enveloped spectators in a series of changing pixels. Standing in front of the large data screen, the installation participant seemingly becomes one with the infinite projected pixels, as the light shining on the screen causes the image to physically transfer onto 28 Anne Rutherford, “The Poetics of a Potato: Documentary that Gets Under the Skin,” Metro Magazine: Media and Education Magazine No. 137 (2003), 127.

25 the participant’s body. It’s the same effect as walking in front of a projector light, but the screen remains visible. Although this installation is not a film in the traditional sense, data.tron/data.scan epitomizes the contemporary spectator’s relationship to high saturations of information. The moving images onscreen “reveal” invisible undercurrents of the digital information age, transposing data over the spectator’s body.

Figure 3: Ryoji Ikeda, data.tron/data.scan. 2015. Photograph by Marc Newton. Courtesy of SCAD.

Examining various spectators’ social media accounts of the installation proves that spectators desire to experiment with their bodies and screens. A fascination with visual data and the human body informs many of the social media posts from Ikeda’s installation. Such enthusiasm over experiencing the body amidst visual spectacle recalls Schwartz’s pre-cinema spectator study, but also signals to a new era of spectatorship. Rob Horning speaks to the

26 emerging contemporary identity in terms of authenticity, terming the individuals as the “data self:” The capability of social media to document more and more of what a given person does and store that data, make it available for processing and redistribution, makes it harder to sustain the illusion of a unified self. [As a consequence], the activities of different “selves” are forced to cohere, making the body of data incoherent and “inauthentic.”29 A sense of identity control guides the principles behind sharing experiences on social media, and also demonstrates the antithesis of Rutherford and Marks’s concerns with epistephilia. Documenting oneself in front of a projected screen does not prove that the participant “gets” or has “figured out” the video installation, but instead, points to the importance of the participant’s willingness to experiment with his/her identity amidst digital media. Ikeda’s work provides a need for identity control in the digital age, even if only temporarily. One post from @SCADMOA on Twitter highlights the personal relationship viewers have to screens and data, asking museum visitors, “how will you make [the exhibit] your own?” Another user tweeted an image of herself “covered” with data from the installation. This public exhibition of self and screen occurred frequently on the social media surrounding data.tron/data.scan, even if spectators did not entirely focus on the installation’s content. The space between spectator and projected image and the ability to see oneself “within” the image creates a subjectively meaningful yet collectively immersive experience.

29 Rob Horning, “Notes on the ‘Data Self.’” The New Inquiry. 2 February 2012.

Physical interactions between body and screen create the impulse to share and document, recalling a historical taste for reality from Schwartzâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s study of the pre-cinematic audience. Examining spectator reactions to video installations through their own expressive digital channels (mainly Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook) reinforces the power of affect in spectator studies. If a video installation possesses affective, immersive, sensory qualities, the spectator will most likely be moved to share their experience on a social platform. Beyond sharing, these immersive experiences with the moving image help improve our relationship to other screens, as it is more likely that we will remember an affective experience over pure information. Most importantly, space remains at the forefront of immersive viewing. Without the immersive room containing a giant screen of data, spectators would not respond to the installation with such enthusiasm. Analyzing one room and one screen in a museum gallery helps inform the traditional

28 movie theater setting by modifying how viewers interact with a single screen. Because screens are numerous in all spaces of life, however, the video installation also potentially informs other spaces of daily life.

Multi-Channel Video Installations Information bits and bytes in the digital age perpetuate short attention spans, affecting each aspect of life from how we communicate to how we digest knowledge. Horning states that while the “identity is fundamentally multiple, incomplete, provisional…the consciousness or subjectivity is unitary, which can confuse things.” Consumerism, marked by primarily Western Capitalism, exploits an “anxiety about lacking a unified self and offers goods as a means to reveal it.” 30 Digital media and screens function as some of these “goods,” culminating in the contemporary subject’s constant and rapid information consumption. One result of rapid information consumption in the digital age is the phenomenon of multi-tasking, or dividing one’s attention between several different subjects, tasks, or screens. Normal domestic life encapsulates layers of screens: TV screens, smart phone screens, laptop screens and more are all activated at once, reflecting the high saturation of information we encounter on a daily basis. In terms of subject activity, the domestic spectator displays a different level of engagement than that of the cinema spectator. Flipping through TV channels, thumbing through a cell’s screen content, or clicking through different sites on laptop screens cause a more selective experience between subject and screen. All realms of information have never been more accessible from one’s own home, yet this accessibility often limits and stagnates our relationship to film and visual culture. Processing multiple layers of information at unrestrained paces decreases the moving image spectator’s propensity for longer, thoughtful encounters with 30 Horning, n.p.

29 the screen. The multi-channel video installation offers a space alternative to domestic settings, yet recalls the way in which we often use screens in private settings, making us aware of how we use our attention spans to interact with the moving image. The following video installations create a communal, social experience while also individualizing the participantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experience through multiple screens.

I. Turbulent Expanding beyond its single-channel parent, the two-channel installation undergoes screen meiosis, developing from one cell to two distinct moving image sources. As if directly challenging the traditional single-screen, splitting the moving image in two creates more opportunities to study the spectator in terms of space and gesture. A two-channel video installation by Iranian feminist filmmaker Shirin Neshat illuminates the possibilities between the spectator/participant and the multi-channel moving image. Both a commentary on gender relations in Iran and a challenge to the spectatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attention, Turbulent (1998) originally placed spectators in the middle of opposing screens. Sound plays a vital role in changing the participantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attention and gestures between screens.

Figure 6: Shirin Neshat, Turbulent. 1998. Two-channel video. Photo via Wikipedia Commons. Creative Commons License.

On one screen, a male singer performs to an admiring audience. His style is composed and poised, and his audience applauds his talent. After he finishes, intense, otherworldly sounds from the opposing screen cause the man to turn his back to the audience and face the woman in a black chador. Nikhita Mendis describes the affective and political quality of the woman’s performance:

The woman’s primal emotion is contrasted with the man’s orderly and socially acceptable performance. The audience disappears and not a single soul remains to support the woman in her attempt at self-expression. She cannot articulate coherent words. The guttural noises reflect decades of suppression faced by Iranian women.31

31 Nikhita Mendis, “Turbulent: The Normality of Silence,” Brown Political Review, 14 February 2014.

Figures 7 and 8: Images altered to mimic original installation layout. Shirin Neshat, Turbulent. 1998. Two-channel video. Photos courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York.

The male singer directly reacts to the woman’s singular presence: an interaction breaking the physical dichotomy of screens, and implicating the installation participant in the space’s center. Participants must decide which gender to face by turning their bodies entirely to one screen, and this movement alone encourages an immersive, affective interaction with the video installation. Neshat provides her audience with a simple alteration from the single-channel video, yet this simple screen division creates a significant change in moving image reception. Physically turning in between opposing screens of the same film changes the way we digest the installation’s overall meaning. In between both screens, the participant is immersed in Neshat’s themes of gender and society. Rather than simply entertaining, the moving image in this context impacts the participant first socially (in a public setting), then physically (by requiring movement) and lastly cognitively: by the time the installation participant has digested Turbulent’s meaning, he or she has already physically interacted with the moving image.

32 Youngblood asserts that “The mass public insists on entertainment over art in order to escape an unnatural way of life in which interior realities are not compatible with exterior realities… Art is a synergetic attempt at closing the gap between what is and what ought to be.”32 Through its employment of the spectator’s required divided attention span in every day life, Turbulent creates meaningful, complex connections between screens, space, and spectators’ bodies. The center of the installation between screens provides a communal outlet to experience both screens with other participants, yet one’s gestural choices (choosing which screen to face) individualize the installation as well. Neshat’s minimal two-channel arrangement demonstrates the discursive reality and potential between contemporary subjects and moving image, creating socially and politically poignant approaches to film by utilizing the abundance of screens in everyday life.

II. The Widows of Noirmoutier The epoch George Orwell more or less prophesied over six decades ago has come to fruition – the subject’s role as information consumer has expanded to almost every realm of life. One would be hard pressed to find a public space without multiple screens, but Orwell’s premonition has not resulted in a digital totalitarian state. Instead, screen ubiquity in contemporary society creates a new significance for the moving image. Neshat employs multiple screens to convey complex gender representations, yet multi-channel installations render even more personal experiences. In prolific French New Wave director Agnès Varda’s The Widows of Noirmoutier (2004), a fifteen-channel video installation features interviews with widowed women on the island of Noirmoutier. Placed on one wall, fourteen screens featuring individual interviews surround one large screen with a table on a beach. To hear the interviews, visitors must sit in one of fourteen chairs, each connected with headphones to one small screen. Varda’s 32 Youngblood, 42.

33 long history as a filmmaker gives her a nuanced understanding of audience. Speaking of her methodology for arranging the screens, Varda reveals a deep concern for immersing the contemporary audience in film: The videos are looped, so perhaps after listening to one widow, you’ll take another chair and another set of headphones and listen to another. Viewers tend to pass the headphones and switch chairs frequently; you get the sense you’re listening to one woman alone in the room, but you’re really in a group of people the entire time.33

Figure 9: Center Image and surrounding screen grabs: Agnès Varda, Les Veuves de Noirmoutier, 2004, still from 35-mm film, 9 minutes 30 seconds.

Varda recovers and reinterprets the moving image’s social history through this installation’s simultaneously individualized and collective experiential qualities. On one hand, Varda addresses the private manner in which individuals view films in their homes, yet on the other, she employs the gallery’s space to function as a collective, group-oriented process. 33 Agnes Varda, as told to Lauren O’Neill-Butler, ArtForum, March 3, 2009.

34 Bordering between public and private viewing constructs a liminal space that, according to Varda, creates “another way for an audience to watch films.”34 Varda works with the reality of contemporary visual noise and over-stimulated consumers by repurposing screens to reflect a unified, even healing message for installation participants. Such means for reception mimic and enhance the common domestic viewing experience: the installation participant gets an individualized experience with one subject on one screen, yet the surrounding screens work to create thematic cohesion.

Reception of The Widows of Noirmoutier also speaks to the connective qualities of this liminal space – between domestic and public settings – for the moving image. Madeleine Schwartz comments, “It is as if Varda has invited the viewer to the widows’ table, into the secret realities 34 Varda, ArtForum.

35 of their daily lives…and yet one is aware at all times of the other viewers and their widows.”35 Varda’s screen and spatial arrangements perform with the brain’s capacity to place its attention or awareness in multiple channels. Moving from seat to seat in the installation does not signify a progressive climb toward knowledge – what Marks refers to as “mastering” the meaning of a video installation. Each time the participant moves to a new seat in Varda’s installation, he or she develops an entirely new relationship to the collective work. Rather than working against contemporary propensities for large amounts of visual information consumption via screens, then, Varda instead uses our multi-screen environment as a tool to create affective relationships between individuals.

III. The Mapping Journey Project Film’s migration from theater to museum alters the relationship between spectator and moving image because the social setting has changed. Bodies function differently in a gallery than sitting in a movie theater chair. More importantly, such bodily changes between exhibition sites change how we mentally digest visual culture. According to Bruno, the convergence between museum and cinema “signals motion on the grounds of cultural memory and its location.”36 The multi-channel installation disembodies the single screen into dynamic displays of the human experience. Like Varda’s exhibition, Bouchra Khalili depicts individual narratives through multi-channel screens. Highlighting the current global refugee crisis, The Mapping Journey Project personalizes immigration discourses into a series of eight videos of undocumented migrants. Each screen frames one of the migrant’s hands holding a pen while they 35 Madeleine Schwartz, “Exhibition Explores Widowhood, Home,” The Harvard Crimson, March 16, 2009. 36 Bruno, 9.

36 recount their story. Tracing their journey on a map, their hand creates the only onscreen movement. A bench with three headsets allows gallery participants to sit and listen to each individual screen. Viewers do not see the video subject’s face, or anything other than the hand tracing the map. Of Khalili’s restrained approach, Valerie Behiery comments that “by circumventing the media’s generic images of refugees and all the associations therewith, it individualizes the migrants and gives them a voice. It also obliges spectators to listen attentively and fill in the gaps by imagining the journeys themselves.”37 Khalili creates two processes of individualization with the multi-channel installation. Onscreen, the individual subject and his or her singular story traverse a large range of geographical space.

Figure 11: Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey Project. 2008–11. Eight-channel video. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 9–August 28, 2016. © 2016 Bouchra Khalili. Digital image © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar.

37 Valerie Behiery, “Alternative Perspectives: The Mapping Journey Project,” Intense Art Magazine, July 13, 2016.

37 In the installation space, the gallery participant travels with each migrant, and the spaces in between screens. Such processes of travel recall the pre-cinematic spectator’s movements through sites of spectacle, particularly in regards to the news as spectacle. The late 19th century public’s fascination with “experiencing” the news took form via the morgue. In Schwartz’s study, the Paris Morgue “served as a visual auxiliary to the newspaper, staging the recently dead who had been sensationally detailed by the printed word.”38 As spectators moved from staged body to the next, the news took physical form through the exchange between spectator eye and deceased body. While not as morbid, Khalili’s installation provides a greater social and political significance to “spectacularizing” the news. In carrying on the tradition of spectatorship as an embodied or “kinetic affair,”39 Khalili’s installation personalizes the human stories that the media normally generalizes or ignores.

Figure 12: Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey Project. 2008–11. Eight-channel video. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 9–August 28, 2016. © 2016 Bouchra Khalili. Digital image © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar.

38 Schwartz, 300. 39 Schwartz, 297.

38 Spectators focus their gaze not on the migrant’s body, but instead on their tangible, geographical mark on the world. We see the migrant’s journey through his or her own eyes, rather than through impersonal news coverage. Moving from one screen to the next involves spectators in a way that does not dictate the installation’s “meaning,” but instead creates opportunities to affectively experience an individual’s journey. Khalili mobilizes the moving image spectator’s gaze in order to humanize contemporary political events, redrawing the spatial boundaries for the installation participant. In our mobilization, screens in the video installation do not function to distract us from the everyday, but connect and enhance our relationship to an increasingly complex sociopolitical reality.

Conclusions Moving image installations address the spectator’s body as an active participant in visual culture, providing a social, more publicly accessible approach to the field of cinema studies. This research categorizes a number of installation practices to illustrate the theoretical, spatial, and social possibilities for spectatorship studies. Revisiting the 19th century pre-cinematic spectacle and the mobile gaze proves that cinema spectators are not one-dimensional measurements, but active participants seeking affirmation of their life experiences through public art and culture. Video installations both recall this history and look forward to new possibilities for spectatorship through screen placement and spatial arrangements. In order to revitalize, alter, and enhance cinema participation in the 21st century, we must first take the subject out of the everyday spaces – school, home, or theatres – in which he or she has become accustomed to viewing the moving image. Video installations offer alternative spaces for moving image interactions, while still providing public, social opportunities for discourse. In this way, the moving image continues its

39 singular ability to include anyone in its narrative, mobilizing individuals to see the world beyond mere spectacle. This study might also open more introspection within the cinema education realm. The spectator directly enriches contemporary cinema culture and reaffirms the importance of cinema studies as a practice that complicates and enhances other fields of knowledge. Theoretical approaches to spectator affect have already set cinema education in a plethora of new directions. In firsthand accounts of the cinematic experience, the somatic, sensory knowledge of the moving image transcends patriarchal notions of the mind displaced from the body. The educational practice of cinema must expand to contemporary, public spaces in order to locate the spectator in a diverse network of external and internal factors. Considering active participation through spectator movement helps slow the cultural proclivity for fast and passive consumption, instead favoring the moving imageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to magnetize and mobilize audiences.

40 Works Cited Balsom, Erika. "A Cinema in the Gallery, a Cinema in Ruins." Screen 50.4 (2009): 411–27. Behiery, Valerie. “Alternative Perspectives: The Mapping Journey Project.” Intense Art Magazine, July 13, 2016. Bruno, Giuliana. Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts. London: The MIT Press, 2007. Chamarette, Jenny. "Between Women: Gesture, Intermediality And Intersubjectivity In The Installations Of Agnès Varda And Chantal Akerman." Studies In European Cinema 10.1 (2013): 45–57. Communication Source. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983. Del Río, Elena. Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Elsaesser, Thomas and Malte Hagener. Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. New York City: Routledge, 2010. Hansen, Mark B.N. “Affect as Medium, or the ‘Digital-Facial-Image.’” Journal of Visual Culture 2 (2003): 205–228. Horning, Rob. “Notes on the ‘Data Self.’” The New Inquiry. February 2, 2012. Ikeda, Ryoji. data.tron/data.scan. 2015. Single-channel installation. Just, Jesper. Llano. 2015. Single-channel video. Khalili, Bouchra. The Mapping Journey Project. 2008–11. Eight-channel video. Marks, Laura. “Immersed in the Single Channel: Experimental Media from Theater to Gallery.” Millennium Film Journal 55 (2012): 13–23.

41 Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Mendis, Nikhita. “Turbulent: The Normality of Silence.” Brown Political Review, 14 February 2014. Nardelli, Matilde. "Moving Pictures: Cinema and its Obsolescence in Contemporary Art." Journal of Visual Culture 8.3 (2009): 243–64. Neshat, Shirin. Turbulent. 1998. Two-channel video. Plantinga, Carl. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. ProQuest ebrary. Rutherford, Anne. “Cinema and Embodied Affect.” Senses of Cinema 25 (2003): n.p. Rutherford, Anne. “The Poetics of a Potato: Documentary that Gets Under the Skin.” Metro Magazine: Media and Education Magazine 137 (2003): 126-131. Schwartz, Madeleine. “Exhibition Explores Widowhood, Home.” The Harvard Crimson, March 16, 2009. Schwartz, Vanessa. “Cinematic Spectatorship Before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris.” In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, edited by Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, 297-319. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Shaviro, Steven. “Affect vs. Emotion.” The Cine-Files 10 (Spring 2016): n.p. Stern, Lesley. “Putting on a Show, or The Ghostliness of Gesture.” Lola Journal 5 (November 2014): n.p. Uroskie, Andrew V. Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

42 Varda, Agnès, as told to Lauren O’Neill-Butler. “Agnès Varda Speaks about her Exhibition at the Carpenter Arts Center.” ArtForum, March 3, 2009. Varda, Agnès. The Widows of Noirmoutier. 2005. Fifteen-channel video. Youngblood, Gene. Expanded cinema. 1st ed. New York: Dutton, 1970.