4.
Be Here (and There) Now
The Spatial Dynamics of Spectatorship
The screen is a component piece of architecture, rendering a wall permeable to ventilation in new ways: a “virtual window” that changes the materiality of built space, adding new apertures that dramatically alter our conception of space and (even more radically) of time.
—Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window
As in everyday life, cinematic and electronic screens in gallery-based installations consistently draw our attention, however fleeting, to the light-based imagery presented on their surfaces. Our cultural habit of immediately looking at media screens and our propensity to view them as windows onto other representational or informational spaces—concentrating on the spaces depicted “on” or “inside” the screen—has special consequences for the complex spatial dynamics of screen-reliant installation art spectatorship. This chapter is concerned with the ways in which space was conceived in the environmental media works that flourished in the midst of widespread artistic experimentation with spatial and temporal phenomena in the late 1960s and 1970s and with the novel viewer-screen interfaces that this ambitious experimentation engendered.
Artists in this era were not alone in their devotion to expanding the spatial and temporal possibilities for film and video. Filmmakers’ co-ops in London and New York, as well as certain artists working with structural film and experimental video, shared this generalized ambition toward creating process-based, anti-illusionist media production—although, with a few important exceptions, these media works tended to be less interested in the viewer’s phenomenological engagement with the exhibition space and the material art objects it contained than in investigating the properties of film or video in an otherwise unimportant space.1
The interest in process-based work that developed (accompanied by varying degrees of political urgency) in the 1970s can be largely attributed to the new theoretical attention to the subject, discourse, and textual and ideological analysis, especially under the influence of the writing of Barthes, Lacan, and Althusser. As critics assigned new importance to the process of reading or viewing, how one sees became as relevant as what one sees. Not surprisingly, many media art theorists and practitioners roundly rejected illusionist representation, arguing that dominant forms of mass media spectatorship were bound up in the ideological consequences of Renaissance spatial codes of perspective and therefore shared its presumably immobile, disembodied, and idealist viewer.2
As we have seen in previous chapters, Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss were among the first to introduce the phenomenological and anti-illusionist interpretation of postminimalist media art within a North American context.3 For these critics, media installations (such as those by Michael Snow and Paul Sharits, among others) were especially noteworthy for the way in which they disrupted illusionistic space by calling attention to the “real” space of the projective situation. In the European context, an especially influential (if problematic) political aesthetic developed with the critical discourse surrounding structural-materialist film.4 Typical was the argument made by influential London-based filmmaker and theorist Peter Gidal that media artists should enable an analytical form of viewing that would emphasize how subjects are constructed in ideology. For Gidal, filmmakers should deconstruct and reveal the filmic and ideological apparatus (including its illusionistic appeals) via a series of material interventions, including disrupting conventional spatial codes. This self-reflexive operation was assumed to inevitably produce active, empowered spectators categorically distinct from the passive viewers associated with illusionist cinema.
This decisive shift toward examining the representational codes of cinema was aided in particular by the influence of the British journal Screen and the growth in radical criticism of mainstream film. The writers who articulated these points most clearly in the 1970s were largely associated with film apparatus theory, which marked the first rigorous attempt to combine an analysis of the materiality of cinema with its architectonic and institutional effects. The main proponent of apparatus theory, Jean-Louis Baudry, like Gidal promoted a critical media practice and a distanced, critical mode of viewing that would demonstrate film’s typically concealed ideological operations.5 For these writers, the choice was simple and the implications profound: spectatorship was either complicit and immersed in the dominant ideology or, through critical and formal distance, was aware of and participating in an ideological critique formally and conceptually internal to the media work itself.
In the case of classic Hollywood cinema, apparatus theory seemed to provide a clear lens through which to conceptualize viewership and its ideological ramifications (although apparatus theory itself would come under increasing scrutiny within the discipline of film studies).6 That the case is not so straightforward for screen-reliant installation has posed difficulties for art criticism. On the one hand, the introduction of media screens into sculptural installations in the late 1960s implicitly reintroduced illusionistic and virtual space into a type of art practice that, drawing on the critical ambitions of minimalism, had aimed to eliminate modernist transcendentalism in favor of a present-tense perceptual encounter between the spectator and the art object. On the other hand, in investigating the screen’s material apparatus—even while incorporating virtual spaces into the work—certain projects produced a critical spectatorship characterized by a sort of doubleness that built upon yet differed from that presented by minimalism.7 This mode of viewing was characterized by what art historian Michael Fried famously dubbed “theatricality,” but only in part.8 The hybrid status of screen-reliant installation spectatorship—both active and passive, material and immaterial—strained dominant critical models of the era, the critical prescriptions and political preoccupations of which proved to be unsuitable for addressing the particular critical interventions of this distinctive mode of art practice.9
As we shall see in what follows, by dispersing focus across screen spaces that coexist, and indeed sometimes compete with the actual exhibition space, certain media installations generate a forceful, critical effect that hinges precisely on this tension between illusionist/virtual and material/actual spaces. In a curious amalgamation of gallery-based spatial experimentation and political aesthetics, this model of spectatorship proposes that viewers be both “here” (embodied subjects in the material exhibition space) and “there” (observers looking onto screen spaces) in the here and now. In so doing, this new double spatial dynamic, staged as a bodily encounter in real time, radically reinterprets the conventional ways that technological screen interfaces have been described and experienced.
What a Difference a Screen Makes
Evaluating theories of screen-mediated spectatorship seems a logical starting point in assessing the influence of screens upon the spatial dynamics of media art viewing. Media scholars Anne Friedberg and Lev Manovich (both working outside the boundaries of a strictly art historical context) offer the two most compelling accounts of the screen’s ambiguous material and discursive formations. Specifically focusing on the continuities and distortions enabled by film, video, and computer screens, both writers emphasize our cultural tendency to view flat pictorial surfaces from canvases to computer screens as “windows onto other worlds” and note how the Renaissance model of perspectival illusionism (outlined in Alberti’s 1435 treatise “Della Pittura”) has conditioned Western perceptions of spaces on flat surfaces ever since.
In The Virtual Window, Friedberg explores how the screen’s role as a component piece of architecture has dramatically changed the materiality of built space.10 While her primary focus is on the film screen, Friedberg’s innovation is to recognize how the screen’s immaterial architecture (its virtual space) informs and reflects an architecture of viewing. In the case of cinema, this means that the screen traditionally frames a view of a space that is conceptually, though not literally, distinct from the viewer’s material space. In The Language of New Media, Manovich offers a three-part typology of screen viewing experiences, from the Renaissance to the present, based upon the viewer’s physical and conceptual relationship to representational space, making further distinctions among viewing regimes in terms of temporality, scale, and levels of “interactivity.”11 Manovich’s typology, in establishing the ways in which viewing moving, illuminated images on a media screen (characteristics he associates with “dynamic” and “real time” screen traditions) is qualitatively different from viewing illusionist imagery painted on canvas (what he calls the “classical” screen tradition), implicitly demonstrates that media screen viewing necessitates its own discrete critical framework.
Evaluating the spatial conditions of screen spectatorship in terms of everyday viewing experiences with commercial media technologies, Friedberg and Manovich devote comparatively little attention to alternate modes of engagement, including the ways in which certain media artworks create and reflect atypical viewing experiences. Redeploying mass media screens in art gallery installations, artists have created what one might call “warped” spaces—virtual and actual screen-based spaces that transform the spatial dynamics of art and media spectatorship.12 Possible specifically screen-reliant spaces proposed and presented in media installation are many and complex, including but not limited to the space inside the screen (the screen acts as a window onto a space of representation); the space in front of or before the screen (the screen is used in a way that draws attention to the space between the viewer and the screen); and the real spatial presence of the frequently overlooked screen itself as an object.
Theories of identification and suture from film studies, typically worked out within a psychoanalytic framework, have carefully analyzed the spatialized interchange between the film screen and spectator. Writers such as Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey, for instance, have proposed a sort of spectatorial doubleness in which the space separating subject and screen must be forgotten but also maintained.13 The doubleness I propose in regard to media installation is different in two key respects. First, whereas these film theories arose in relationship to moving images tied to narrative cinema (which privileges time), media installation, crucially, is tied more to space. Whereas cinema viewers are conventionally expected to disregard actual space and time for the duration of the film, the media artworks examined in this chapter insistently push their viewers to be mindful of the material exhibition space (as experienced in “real” time). Second, screen-reliant installations, in contrast to mainstream narrative cinema, privilege the material apparatus: the viewer’s experience with these works foregrounds not only the space between the viewer and screen, but also the space of the (usually overlooked) technological media object itself.14 The screen shifts from being the apex of the viewer’s “cone” of vision (centering the viewer as in perspectival painting) to being a conceptual and literal point of emphasis that the viewer moves around (something closer to minimalist sculpture).
Seeing Double: “A Film to Play, A Film to Be Played”
Among the critical media projects in the late 1960s and early 1970s that emphasized not only the space(s) represented “inside” or “on” the screen, but also, crucially, the space in front of the screen and the space occupied by the material screen object itself, two artworks by VALIE EXPORT and Peter Campus respectively stand out as particularly useful explorations of the excessive and resistant capacities of screen interfaces. As the evocative titles Ping Pong (EXPORT, 1968) and Interface (Campus, 1972) suggest, these projects expressly interrogate screen spaces and screen-reliant visuality as part of the work. Ping Pong and Interface are distinguished by being among the first works to be specifically interested in the spatial dynamics of media spectatorship in relation to art spectatorship, and both provide clear examples of the particular kind of critical spectatorial doubling and displacement made possible with this mode of art practice.
Created in 1968, EXPORT’s film installation Ping Pong consists of a commercial Ping-Pong ball, a paddle, and one-half of a full-sized Ping-Pong table abutted against a white wall. A black-and-white 8 mm film is projected onto the wall/screen from a low position at the back of the dimly lit room, regularly churning out unremarkable images of large black dots, which slowly appear and disappear in an alternating rhythm over the course of the film’s three-minute duration. Merging haptic and optic experience, the work invites viewers to play Ping-Pong against these moving targets. The subtitle EXPORT occasionally uses to describe the piece—“Ein Film zum Spielen, ein Spielfilm” (A Film to [Be] Play[ed])—highlights the spectator’s role in “completing” the work. Further, because the film is projected from the back of the room, the spectator’s shadow appears on the wall/screen, becoming part of the screen space, collapsing any distinction between the viewer and the viewed.
In comparison to the “prepared” Ping-Pong paddles created by Fluxus artist George Maciunas in 1965–66, in which commercial paddles were subjected to a range of humorous modifications (including convex, hinged, or hollow surfaces, some subsequently put to use in a playful Fluxus “Olympics”), EXPORT’s work is significantly more perverse. In a seemingly generous gesture, one conceptually similar to Bruce Nauman’s participatory corridor works realized between 1969 and 1972, EXPORT’s Ping Pong invites its spectator to partake in a game, but the very terms of engagement—a befuddled viewer struggling to hit a predetermined series of flickering projected circles even while his/her shadow interferes with the process—ensure that the viewer/player will emerge neither satisfied nor victorious.15
It is in part the anxiety and frustration central to Ping Pong’s game that triggers the work’s critical effect.16 Urging her spectators to pick up a paddle and play “against” an imaginary screen-based opponent, EXPORT arguably proposes the screen itself as a subject whose action is both represented by projected images and embodied in the materiality of the blank wall. Hitting the screen with the Ping-Pong ball, however, renders the screen a material object and, at least momentarily, cancels any implication of depth. Prefiguring Michael Snow’s influential film installation Two Sides to Every Story (1974), in which two versions of a single film are projected onto opposite sides of a thin, rectangular aluminum screen, EXPORT uses opacity and transparency as conceptual tools to deny entry into the image space. That EXPORT’s projection screen is an impassable gallery wall, and therefore indisputably material, makes it even more clear that the artist intended for her spectator to take note of the physical installation space even while engrossed in the screen’s immaterial, illusionist content.17 Ping Pong’s relentless insistence on depth and surface, immateriality and materiality, productively draws the viewer’s attention to the correlation between these multiple spaces.
VALIE EXPORT, Ping Pong, 1968. 8 mm black-and-white film, silent, solid screen, table tennis rackets, Ping-Pong balls; 3 minutes (loop). Installation view of spectator “playing” Ping-Pong against the screen-based opponent. Archive VALIE EXPORT. Photograph by Werner Mraz. Courtesy of Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.
EXPORT’s imaginary yet actual Ping-Pong game insistently tests the normative spatiality of screen spectatorship, conceptually and literally fusing the spectator and the spectacle. In the single screen of EXPORT’s work, conflicting spaces are mobilized and experienced simultaneously: the spectator’s opponent is imagined “inside” the illusionary screen space and yet the game actually takes place in real space and depends upon the recognition and use of the screen as a physical object. The immaterial dots of projected light that the spectator gamely endeavors to hit look like targets emerging from inside or beyond the screen (the projected image of the ball must be imagined as a quasi-real object for the game to work). At the same time, the actual ball’s automatic return bouncing off the screen and back to the spectator confirms both the screen’s material flatness (rivaling the screen’s other, generally starring role as a window onto a space of illusionist representation) and the actuality of the spectator’s embodied experience in the gallery space.
VALIE EXPORT, Ping Pong Kassette, 1968. Polystyrene object, stamp Imprint, aluminum foil, table tennis racket, ball, 8 mm film, 31 × 48 × 3.5 cm. VALIE EXPORT advertised a do-it-yourself, ready-made version of her Ping Pong installation that included a ball, paddle, and 8 mm film (the consumer presumably supplied projector and screen). Copyright Generali Foundation Collection. Photograph by Werner Kaligofsky.
In this manner, Ping Pong exploits the screen’s duality as material and immaterial to draw attention to the typically neglected space in front of the screen—that is to say, the space between the screen object and its viewer. Put another way, Ping Pong proposes an oppositional viewing space within a space. The movement of the real Ping-Pong ball—its route from the viewer’s space to the screen space and back again—materializes the neglected circuit between body and screen. In this way it serves as a metaphor for the intellectual work EXPORT expects her spectator to perform. The artist has written about her ambitions for this piece vis-à-vis theatrical cinema spectatorship: “Ping Pong explains the relationship of domination between the producer (the director) and the consumer (the spectator). What the eye tells the brain is the cause for motoric [sic] reflexes and reactions. Spectators and screen are the screen for a game with rules that are dictated by the director. Attempt to emancipate the audience!”18
At first read—“Attempt to emancipate the audience!”—it would seem that the artist hopes to free spectators from the constraints of passive media viewing by insisting that they, as Ping-Pong players, become active viewers/participants—a somewhat paradoxical ambition that was nonetheless inspirational for many artists at the time.19 Indeed, a Brechtian influence is unmistakable in EXPORT’s rallying cry. Brecht considered the “apparatus” to be a field of signification including the technical tools, the cultural institutions, and the parties in control of those institutions. Providing a foundation for subsequent developments in film theory, he contended that disruption of the unitary field presented by the apparatus would make spectators inherently self-aware.20
EXPORT’s Ping Pong changes this relationship slightly. As the artist explains, spectators and screen “are the screen” for an additional “game.” The viewers and screen in EXPORT’s game are the site of a further strategic intervention, one whose rules are, tellingly, “dictated by the director.” If the first game is the table tennis match between the viewer and the screen-cum-opponent, the second game is one staged between the omnipotent director and the active yet passive viewer whose participation is entirely prescripted. What would otherwise seem to be the straightforward emancipatory potential of EXPORT’s invitation for viewers to become active participants with her film is thus corrupted from the outset. The organizing logic of Ping Pong is not so much the liberatory potential of revealing the apparatus as it is a pointed critique of cinematic spectatorship via the multiplication and complication of the spatial conditions for experiencing screen interfaces.
By asking viewers to play a “real” game centered on a “virtual” projected image, EXPORT offers spectators the possibility to consider simultaneously the space of the screen’s immaterial representation (the projected ball) and its relationship to the material world (the viewer’s actual Ping Pong game in the exhibition space). Further, by visually incorporating the viewer’s body into the representational screen space in the form of the viewer’s shadow, EXPORT’s installation emphasizes the conventionally obscured connections between viewer, material exhibition space, and immaterial screen space. In its insistent and evident critique of cinematic spectatorship (for the record, it won the award for the “most political film” at the Viennese Film Festival in 1968), Ping Pong exemplifies the way in which on-screen visual information in a media installation may be less significant than the manipulations of the conventional spatial dynamics associated with screen-based spectatorship.
Embodiment at the Interface
Equally unflinching in its attempt to undermine the viewer’s seemingly disembodied relationship to screen-reliant spaces, and sharing Ping Pong’s minimalist aesthetic, Peter Campus’s closed-circuit video installation Interface (1972) nonetheless stages a wholly different experience for its viewer. Entering the darkened gallery, viewers encounter a nearly empty room punctuated by a video projector and camera placed at opposite ends of the gallery, approximately twelve feet apart. A large (six foot by eight foot) transparent glass screen, unobtrusive but immediately identifiable in the relatively empty gallery, divides the exhibition space, separating the ground-level light source and projector from the video camera stationed at the wall opposite.
As viewers move through the gallery and step into the space in front of the glass, two simultaneous, full-length images of themselves appear on it: their reflected mirror image coupled with their live video image (captured by the camera from behind the glass). While negotiating a path between the conspicuous obstacles of the camera, projector, and screen, Campus’s spectator enjoys the ability to influence what is represented on the glass screen. Depending on where one stands in the gallery space, the two near-life-size likenesses can appear spatially superimposed or side by side, presenting viewers with an uncanny dual portrait of simultaneous yet dissimilar self-images. While many artists working with video in the 1970s would exploit the medium’s capacity for depicting parallel time, taking advantage of video’s ability to depict an electronically mediated present concomitant with the viewer’s real-time experience in the gallery space, the particular way in which Interface troubles the representations of its viewers foregrounds the oft-neglected materiality of the body–screen interface. Like the screen-centric and screen-directed Ping-Pong game in EXPORT’s installation, Interface creates an awareness in the viewer of the screen’s role in conceptually and physically mediating (manipulating) relations between itself, the projection, and the viewer.
Peter Campus, Interface, 1972. Installation view of projector, glass screen, and camera, showing a spectator’s dual reflected and projected images. Courtesy of Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Both Interface and Ping Pong call attention to the spatial presence of the material screen object, but in such a way as to underscore that a screen is a performative category: nearly any object can temporarily function as a screen under precisely specified conditions. By projecting images onto a sheet of glass (Campus) or a gallery wall (EXPORT), these works of art point to the way in which virtually anything can be reconfigured as a screen and thus act as a window onto another space. In the case of Campus’s Interface, the transparency of the glass reveals the relative opacity of the image; in a strange reversal, light emerges as matter. Put slightly differently, Campus’s screen must nearly disappear in order to (re)materialize the interface of screen-based viewing.
Peter Campus, Interface, 1972. Artist’s diagram depicting the spatialized arrangement between camera, monitor, observer, glass screen, and the related feedback imagery. Courtesy of Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Analyzing the spectatorial address of Campus’s video installations alongside others made by Graham and Nauman in the 1970s, art historian David Joselit proposes that the critical relevance of these works is the way in which they destabilize normative television spectatorship. In his “The Video Public Sphere,” Joselit points out how the subversive and defamiliarizing spatial experience central to these installations serves to render explicit the “idealized identifications” between viewers and fictional characters of highly moralized fictional TV narratives.21 While I agree that mass media spectatorship is central to the viewer’s experience with video art, and indeed to the spectatorship of any media art, Interface opens the possibility for critical reflection on conditions of mediated viewing that extend beyond specular identification with commercial television to contemporary subjectivity more generally.
Interface’s translucent glass is both metaphorically and materially linked to a window. Yet this material form works to question the screen’s typical role as interface between the real and the virtual and to highlight the way in which screens usually operate as literal and conceptual barriers, offering spectators a facade of autonomous disengagement from the “other side.” While Campus clearly intended for spectators to view the glass from the side that would generate their double likeness, it is nonetheless possible to observe this screen from both sides. Viewers can look at this screen as a virtual window but can also look through it, from “behind.” Because spectators can view it from all sides, they are able to understand Campus’s screen as an arbitrary division (or, perhaps more accurately, an arbitrary pocket of virtual space) inside the real exhibition space.
Campus’s choice of projection surface emphatically confirms that both sides of the media screen exist in real space, available for the viewer’s exploration and potential intervention. Interface enables visual continuity in terms of the spectator’s spatial perception, thereby destabilizing the screen’s conventional role of depicting representations that are visually and/or conceptually discontinuous with the spectator’s own space. This reversal is profound inasmuch as it challenges our traditional experiences with both screen space and real, material space in an art context. Accustomed to granting visual priority to media screens and to viewing screens as windows onto other spaces, viewers initially train their attention to the representational space “inside” Campus’s glass screen. Confronted with two different yet simultaneous self-images—closed-circuit video and mirror images that continuously transform as viewers walk around the exhibition space—viewers are incited to question the representational integrity of screen spaces. This questioning in turn compels the spectator to contemplate the physical gallery space in conjunction with (and as related to) the representational screen space. Exceeding dominant models proposed in both art and film/media criticism in the expanded field of film and art practices in the 1960s and 1970s—which tended to see media installations as either process-based attempts to disrupt illusionist space with “real” space or as materialist interventions against the “bad ideal” of conventional mainstream cinema—Interface’s forceful critical effect hinges upon its insistent attention to (as opposed to rejection of) illusionist, virtual space. Like the material yet immaterial screen itself, real space and illusionist space are revealed to be coterminous.
Drawing of Peter Campus’s Interface, 1972. Designer Antonio Trimani’s sketch of the glass frame constructed for Interface in the exhibition “Zero Visibility,” Genezzano, Italy, 2001. Courtesy of Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Walking around the installation, viewers can appreciate Campus’s “screen” for what it is: the minimal flat surface required for mediation between the viewer and the informational or representational space seemingly inside the screen, a thin membrane that nonetheless customarily establishes a sort of boundary line defining outside versus inside, actual versus virtual. While media screens may typically presume and reinforce a degree of disengagement between the times and spaces inside and in front of the screen (often encouraging attention to the former at the expense of the latter), the potentially radical intervention of works such as Campus’s Interface and EXPORT’s Ping Pong is how they ask their spectators to remain fully present in both temporal and spatial realms. These works propose a self-consciously dual spectatorship—one simultaneously caught up in the space of illusionist representation and made aware of the material conditions of the viewing experience. While spectators are allowed to partially immerse themselves in illusionist, virtual times and spaces, they must concurrently recognize their embodied presence in the here and now of the exhibition space.
Interface’s reflected and projected images emphasize this twofold aspect of embodied media viewing. Spectators readily comprehend the most obvious difference between their two likenesses represented in Interface because the viewer’s mirror reflection appears in color, whereas the slightly hazier video image appears in black-and-white. However, the work generates an interesting perceptual riddle beyond this difference. The viewer’s image, like all mirror reflections, appears in reverse, while the comparatively ghostly black-and-white video image shows the viewer the “right” way, perfectly imitating the viewer’s posture and body orientation. If the viewer stretches out his or her right arm, for example, the screen reveals a video image of a figure stretching his or her right arm, whereas the (inverted) mirrored image appears to stretch the left arm in relationship to the screen’s implied interior space. This discrepancy generates an unexpected, and therefore dramatic, effect: the slightly fainter black-and-white video image that perfectly mimics one’s body’s posture in relationship to the gallery space can appear more “real.” Mediated reality—the uncanny image of one’s self from without—assumes a primary importance as Interface’s spectators struggle to regain their sense of embodied self. The projected video portrait thus allows Campus’s viewer a disconcerting glimpse into how he or she is seen by others.
Film theory provides one tool with which to approach this phenomenon. Indeed, the spectator constructed in Interface is closely related to the Lacanian notion of the subject founded in (mediated) vision.22 Baudry’s 1970 essay regarding the ideological effects of the cinema had drawn explicitly on Lacan’s theorization of the mirror stage, which proposed a model of subjectivity as a fusion of the viewer and the viewed (displacing the notion of a stable, coherent Cartesian subject). The Lacanian subject, “caught up in the lure of spatial identification,” passes through a stage in which an external (mirror) image of the body allows the subject to identify itself, albeit erroneously, as a unified “I”—as a subject.23 This initial misrecognition has long-term psychic effects, generating a sort of doubled and contingent subjectivity fundamentally dependent upon its imaging by external objects and an “other,” as Campus’s Interface, with its concurrent mirror and video images of the viewer, effectively demonstrates.
The disquieting existence of two simultaneous yet different self-images is only part of the labyrinth of screen-reliant spaces Campus’s spectator is asked to reconcile. Interface initially exploits the spectator’s habitual screen-as-window viewing techniques, expecting its viewer to immediately understand the glass “screen” as a threshold to another representational space and to train his or her attention on the information or images being presented “inside” the screen space, on the “other side” of the glass. And yet, by presenting viewers with divergent live images of their own bodies, and by making the camera and projector technology visible and accessible, Interface compels its viewers to consider the space in front of the screen—the media(ted) space between the viewer and the screen—in addition to, and as coextensive with, the representational space inside the screen. It is only by understanding their role as embodied observers in the exhibition space, understanding the reciprocal relationship between their body placement, the projector, camera, and screen, that Campus’s spectators can unlock the riddle of their dissimilar live images.
What is important to stress is the way in which Campus’s installation establishes how the viewing techniques allegedly associated with mainstream media forms and self-reflexive, embodied spectatorship are not mutually exclusive. Like Ping Pong, Interface proposes a spectator whose experiences with a range of screen spaces serve to confirm, rather than usurp or render secondary, his or her experiences in the material here and now of the exhibition space. In an apparent contradiction, Interface generates an embodied spectatorship by asking spectators to engage with virtual screen space. Simultaneously engaging actual and virtual space, materiality and immateriality, this critical model of spectatorial doubleness effectively destabilizes conventional binary distinctions between these seemingly discrete categories.
EXPORT’s Ping Pong and Campus’s Interface provide cogent historical examples of the radical potential for certain media art configurations to productively destabilize our conventional relationships to screen spaces.24 They also provide, like the other projected and moving-image installations assessed thus far, provocative models for thinking about contemporary screen-mediated subjectivity. Both works offer potentially disorienting temporal and physical displacements, yet in both, the viewing experience is effectively rendered in an embodied present—by the viewer’s erratic optical and physical engagement with the prerecorded footage in Ping Pong and by his or her disorienting encounter with the closed-circuit loop of Interface. By foregrounding an active relationship between the spectator, media objects, exhibition space, and screen spaces, these media art installations generate a self-conscious and troubled spectatorship explicitly contingent upon the articulated tension between actual and virtual times and spaces. We are simultaneously both here and there, both now and then.
Taking the viewer’s relationship to screen space as their very subject matter, both Ping Pong and Interface work to reveal the institutional and ideological implications of the mass media spectator’s tendency to focus on the image or other information “inside” the screen and, in so doing, to effectively divorce the image space from their own space. These sculptural environments ask their audiences to consider the implications of their physically embodied and subjectively disembodied relation to these media interfaces: not only do spectators see themselves seeing in Ping Pong and Interface, they are viscerally and unremittingly reminded of the embodied conditions of all media viewing. In the next chapter’s analysis of art environments that incorporate computer screen interfaces, we shall see that this can also be conceived as an ethical issue and as a challenge to key premises of art, film, and media spectatorship as they conventionally have been understood.
Turning to the topic of computer screens in chapter 5, I begin by posing a similar inquiry into the spatial dynamics of spectatorship. How do computer screen-reliant artworks negotiate spectatorial doubleness and to what critical effect? Are we, as spectators of new media art installations, both here and there—or, perhaps more ominously, are we neither fully here nor there?