Notes

1. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (Summer 1967): 23 n. 16. For a recent historical evaluation of this essay in relationship to art and technology in the 1960s see Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), especially chapter 1, “Presentness Is Grace.”

2. Of course, media screens have not always functioned exclusively or even primarily as thresholds onto virtual worlds. Tom Gunning’s classic study “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” for example, suggests how early cinema (pre-1906) enjoyed a different relation to its spectator, emphasizing the exhibitionist, vaudevillelike “cinema of attractions” that accentuated the new cinema technology itself. In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990). Dominique Païni speculates that expanded cinema projects in the 1960s may in fact come closer to approximating the origins of cinema than classical Hollywood film for this reason. Païni, “Should We Put an End to Projection?”, 31.

3. The screen is an extremely ambivalent material object, functioning simultaneously as a material surface and as an immaterial or conceptual threshold to imagery or other information. I have written about the screen’s ambiguous hybrid status elsewhere. See Kate Mondloch, “Not Just a Window: Reflections on the Media Screen,” Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (Spring 2006): np. Deleuze observes that “everything” can be a screen in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, although he leaves undeveloped the subjective consequences that these “virtual windows” generate as material objects. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 215.

4. This is famously articulated by Hal Foster in “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). As I demonstrate in chapter 4, the phenomenological and anti-illusionist interpretation of postminimalist North American media art production is well established; Benjamin Buchloh, Regina Cornwell, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and Peter Wollen, although primarily concerned with film as opposed to other media arts, initiated the important project of charting the intersections between advanced art and film practices in a series of articles in the 1970s in journals such as Artforum, Film Culture, Interfunktionen, and Studio International.

5. Critic and artist Brian O’Doherty notably identified a shift in art spectatorship associated with the turn toward “context as content” as early as 1976. See Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica, Calif.: Lapis Press, 1986).

6. Developed within the context of film studies in the 1970s, this theory is concerned with defining how cinema works as an “institutional apparatus” consisting of a programmed relationship between the film, the film projector, the screen, and the spectator. As described by film theorist Christian Metz in 1975 in his seminal essay “The Imaginary Signifier” (English trans. 1982): “The cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry. . . it is also the mental machinery—another industry—which spectators ‘accustomed to the cinema’ have internalized historically and which has adapted them to the consumption of films.... The institution is outside us and inside us, indistinctly collective and intimate, sociological and psychoanalytic.” Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,” in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, and Ben Brewster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 7. In addition to Metz’s essay, key texts on apparatus theory include Jean Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Cinéthique 7–8 (1970), and “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” Communications 23 (1975). Both essays are reprinted in translation in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 286–98 and 299–318.

7. Psychoanalytic theory, especially Lacan’s theorization of the mirror stage, was at the forefront of these debates. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, and New York: Norton, 1975).

8. See Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Baudry refines this line of critique in his more psychoanalytically informed 1975 essay “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema.” Both essays are reprinted in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 286–318.

9. The New Museum of Contemporary Art’s From Receiver to Remote Control: The TV Set (1990), a little-known exhibition crated by Matthew Geller that prominently displayed television sets/screens as objects in the museum space, constitutes a noteworthy exception within an art gallery setting.

10. See, for example, Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), especially chapter 3, “Video: Surrealism without the Unconscious,” and Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (London: British Film Institute, 1994).

11. Media scholar Anna McCarthy argues for what she calls a site-specific understanding of television in “From Screen to Site: Television’s Material Culture and Its Place,” October 98 (Fall 2001): 93–111. See also McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), for a detailed analysis of the physical placement of television sets outside of the domestic realm and the corresponding implications for televisual spectatorship.

12. Media ecology offers a useful model here. As Matthew Fuller observes in Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), “Complex objects such as media systems—understood here as processes, or elements in a composition as much as ‘things’—have become informational as much as physical, but without losing any of their fundamental materiality” (emphasis added). The concept of a media ecology in relationship to media art originated with Gregory Bateson within the context of the activist publication Radical Software. See also David Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), and William Kaizen, “Steps to an Ecology of Communication: Radical Software, Dan Graham, and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson,” Art Journal 67, no. 3 (2008): 86–107.

13. Paul Sharits, “Statement Regarding Multiple Screen/Sound ‘Locational’ Film Environments—Installations,” Film Culture 65–66 (1978): 79–80. (Sharits contends that he first wrote this in 1974, hence the date cited in the text.)

14. Rosalind Krauss, “Paul Sharits,” in Paul Sharits: Dream Displacement and Other Projects, ed. Linda Cathcart (New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976), np; reprinted in Film Culture 65–66 (1978): 92. Federico Windhausen offers a historical reading of Sharits’s shifting interest in spectator participation in his “Paul Sharits and the Active Spectator,” in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 122–39.

15. Celebrated American film critic P. Adams Sitney first coined the term “structural film” in 1969 to describe a new tendency in North American experimental film-making exemplified by the works of Sharits, Snow, Tony Conrad, George Landow, Ernie Gear, Hollis Frampton, and Joyce Wieland. Applying a strict formalist criticism, Sitney contended that their films constituted “cinematic propositions in a rigorously ordered form.” “The shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified,” Sitney argued, “and it is that shape that is the primal impression of the film.... What content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline.” In spite of the name Sitney coined to describe it, North American “structural film” has nothing to do with structuralism as a philosophy; he apparently chose the label to denote the way in which the work’s “structure” is determined in advance. P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969); reprinted in P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” in Film Culture Reader (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 327. Annette Michelson distinguished related developments as early as 1966 when she observed that “these films, in their intransigent autonomy, make an almost wholly plastic use of reference and allusion, by no means excluding extra plastic resonances, but animated by a sense of structure as progress in time so absolute and compelling that very little else has room or time enough in which to ‘happen.’” (“Film and the Radical Aspiration,” reprinted in Sitney’s Film Culture Reader, 419.) Foreshadowing the confusion to come in regard to descriptive terms for film art, Sitney’s coda to the 1970 printing of his essay includes reference to the “distinguished sculptors” (he mentions Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Robert Morris, and Hollis Frampton) currently developing a sort of film art practice that Sitney confirmed could not be adequately understood within the framework of structural film (346). See also Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

16. Sharits, “Statement Regarding Multiple Screen/Sound ‘Locational’ Film Environments—Installations,” 79–80.

17. These are known as “flicker films” because they depict short bursts or “flickers” of barely comprehensible optical information lasting from a single frame (1/24th of a second, slightly below visibility) to a sequence twelve frames long. Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad, Takahiko Iimura, Fred Drummond, and Birgit and Wilhelm Hein are among the filmmakers first associated with the flicker film genre.

18. Paul Sharits, “Notes on Films,” Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969): 14.

19. Sitney, “Structural Film,” in Film Culture Reader, 326–48. For a recent historical account of structural film (including so-called “flicker films”) within the context of expanded art and media experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s, see Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2008), especially chapter 6, “The Flicker.”

20. Sharits’s comments regarding the final section of T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G indicate his shift from predominantly formal to more phenomenological concerns: “I wanted to visualize ‘inverse pain’ as a kind of imploding reverberation of the picture edge—the screen appears to collapse, in rhythmic pulses, into itself. This latter mode—of introducing shapes into the frame which were reflective of the film frame’s perimeter-shape and which acted as a commentary on the state of consciousness of the film’s protagonist at that point in the (backwards) ‘narrative’—struck me later as being somewhat too related to strategies of painting, as did other aspects of my films of that early period.” Paul Sharits, “Hearing: Seeing,” Film Culture 65–66 (1978): 72.

21. Paul Sharits, “Exhibition/Frozen Frames: Regarding the ‘Frozen Film Frame’ Series—A Statement for the ‘5th International Experimental Film Festival,’” Film Culture 65–66 (1978): 82.

22. There are many more discoveries for the viewer related to the film’s material process that I cannot thoroughly explore in the body of the text. For instance, in studying the film imagery, viewers quickly notice the exposed sprocket holes that seem to indicate the filmstrip has slipped off the tracks of the projector. (Sprocket holes are the parallel lines of holes that run the length of the celluloid and secure the film as it runs through the projector.) On closer inspection, it is clear that the sprocket “holes” are recorded images that are revealed when scratched lines occasionally pass over the supposed holes at the top of the strip. (The scratched lines on each film were created over two generations of recording and projecting. Sharits scratched the emulsion of each filmstrip, back-projected it onto a screen, rephotographed this off of the screen, and scratched the new image.) Thus, the scratches from the “original” film appear as blurred bands of light (images of scratches) that contrast with the sharply defined scratched lines on the current film’s surface (“real” scratches that developed over the course of the art exhibition). Sharits explained: “The sprocket holes that were really empty spaces now are images. Even though they’re passing white light, they’re acting as images, as things.” “Paul Sharits Interview with Linda Cathcart,” Paul Sharits: Dream Displacement and Other Projects, np.

23. That said, it is important to acknowledge the experimental films that occupy a halfway point between these two models. In addition to so-called structural film-makers, film artists such as Bruce Conner, Carolee Schneemann, and Stan Brakhage have created films whose subject matter or narrative focuses on the materiality of the medium and/or the apparatus, even while the works themselves are meant to be experienced in conventional theatrical/cinematic viewing conditions. I have discussed this discrepancy at length elsewhere. See Kate Mondloch, “The Matter of Illusionism,” in Screen/Space, ed. Tamara Trodd and Samantha Lackey (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, forthcoming). For a historical investigation of the “paracinematic” in work by artists such as Paul Sharits, Anthony McCall, and Tony Conrad, which privileges the conceptual over the material, see Jonathan Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film,” October 103 (2003): 15–30.

24. John Rajchman, “Deleuze’s Time, or How the Cinematic Image Changes Our Idea of Art,” in Art and the Moving Image, ed. Leighton, 326. On the specific relevance of the screen for Deleuze, Rajchman suggestively explains: “We see that from the start there is a sense in which the screen was less an illusionist window or ersatz classical stage than a moving frame with an ‘out-of-frame’ that allows movement and time to be rendered in new ways that would move beyond the conceptions of space in classical painting or theater, suggesting alternatives to them” (320). Emphasis added.

25. Nicole Gingras, “Michael Snow: Transparency and Light,” trans. Frank Straschitz, Art Press 234 (April 1998): 23.

26. Artforum X, no. 1 (September 1971): 63.

27. Regina Cornwell, “Michael Snow,” in Martin Friedman et al., Projected Images: Peter Campus, Rockne Krebs, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, Ted Victoria, Robert Whitman (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1974), 26, 31. Cornwell’s 1978 comments on Snow’s oeuvre in Film Reader are apposite; the critic noted that his film-based works share with minimalism a “concern with the object, immediate presence, holistic and dehierarchized structure, and distancing.” Unlike minimal art, however, Snow’s pieces deliberately and unapologetically retain “a representational image.” Although written specifically in regard to the artist’s experimental film Wavelength, this powerful observation applies broadly to Snow’s media installations as well. Regina Cornwell, “Hitting on ‘A Lot of Near Mrs.,’” Film Reader 3 (1978): 241.

28. Media installation’s early critical reception is explored in more detail in chapter 4.

29. Païni, “Should We Put an End to Projection?” 44.

30. Snow’s own remarks would appear to substantiate this interpretation. In correspondence with art critic and historian Thierry de Duve, Snow writes: “I do think that my work ‘is more radical than that,’ and why I think that is related to my attempt to make the work a ‘now,’ ‘materialist,’ yes a ‘modernist’ experience as well as to have and to direct the references elsewhere of representation, ‘away’ and back to you and the work itself.” Michael Snow, “A Letter to Thierry de Duve,” Parachute 78 (1995): 63.

31. Cited in Cornwell, “Michael Snow,” in Friedman et al., Projected Images, 30.

32. It is worth noting that the critical reception of all of Snow’s film and video work between 1966 (the year Snow created his celebrated film Wavelength) and 1975 is largely circumscribed by the critical discourse surrounding structural-materialist film as defined by the two most influential critics associated with British experimental film, Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal—both of whom were primarily associated with the pivotal London Filmmakers’ Co-op that Le Grice established in the late 1960s. Key texts include Peter Gidal, “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film,” Studio International 189/190 (December 1975): 189–96, and Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977). For a useful analysis of the consequences of the curious (mis)reception of Snow’s film-based oeuvre in the 1960s and 1970s, see Bart Testa, “An Axiomatic Cinema: Michael Snow’s Films,” in The Michael Snow Project: Presence and Absence: The Film of Michael Snow 1956–1991, ed. Jim Shedder (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario/Knopf, 1995).

33. The shot/reverse-shot editing technique shows a single character looking (often offscreen) at another character, immediately followed by the second character looking “back” at the first. The spectator automatically and somewhat irrationally assumes that the viewers are looking at each other because the characters are shown facing different directions. On the topic of cinematic suture in film studies, see especially Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” Screen 18 (1977), and Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” Screen 3 (Fall 1976), as well as Kaja Silverman’s helpful analysis of suture theory in her The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

34. Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 348.

35. Vivian Sobchack, among others, has written extensively on the phenomenology of viewing moving-images within the institutional context of the cinema. See her Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). It is interesting to note that neuroscientific studies over the past few decades would appear to confirm that embodiment is inseparable from the cognitive activity of the brain; in other words, all viewing is inherently embodied viewing, making it impossible to fully distinguish between activity in the feeling body and in the brain. See, for example, Joseph Ledoux, The Emotional Brain: The Emotional Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), as well as Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994); The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999); and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace, 2003).

1. Media scholars such as E. Ann Kaplan and John Ellis have argued that television technology and its characteristic forms of flow produce a spectatorship qualitatively different from that of cinema (Ellis specifically articulates this difference in terms of the gaze and the glance). John Ellis, Visible Fictions (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 138. E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Post Modernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987). For a contrasting, intermedial approach to the conditions of specifically electronic media spectatorship, see Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).

2. Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Englewood, Colo.: Roberts and Company Publishers, 2004), 161.

3. The critical thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School were the first to theorize the relationship between advanced technologies and the “culture industry.” See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1972). Benjamin Buchloh is among the foremost proponents of these ideas in the realm of contemporary art history and criticism. See his Neo Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).

4. See, for example, Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy; and Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage.

5. I borrow the phrase “architecture of spectatorship” from Anne Friedberg, who in turn notes her debt to the title of a 1999 College Art Association panel organized by Sylvia Lavin, of which Friedberg was a part. Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 314 n. 2.

6. Quoted in Youngblood, Expanded Cinema.

7. Joselit, Feedback, 97.

8. Reiss, From Margin to Center. Emphasis added.

9. In retrospect, this argument is spurious since “experience” itself is subject to commodification. For the critique of commodification of experience, see especially Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79; Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (1990): 3–17; and Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).

10. While not strictly concerned with the relationship between media screens and constrained participation, numerous art historians and critics have profitably theorized spectator experience (in the form of an obligatory social engagement) as an economic relationship based on the model of the gift. See, for example, Janet Kraynak, “Rikrit Tiravanija’s Liability,” Documents 13 (Fall 1998): 26–40. For an influential analysis not limited to art history, see Alan Schrift, ed., The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (New York: Routledge, 1997).

11. Although Nauman has experimented with corridor constructions in a variety of works for more than fifteen years, the vast majority of the self-titled corridor installations were completed between 1969 and 1972.

12. Nauman’s screen-reliant corridor pieces include Video Corridor for San Francisco (Come Piece) (1969), Corridor Installation (Installation at Nick Wilder) (1970), Four Corner Piece (1970), Going around the Corner Piece (1970), Going around the Corner Piece with Live and Taped Monitors (1970), and Live Taped Video Corridor (1970).

13. Lacan’s concept of the gaze—first developed as a series of lectures titled “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a” and later published in The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis—concerns both the acknowledgment of the presence of others and the process by which subjects seek confirmation of themselves. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).

14. Parveen Adams, “Bruce Nauman and the Object of Anxiety,” October 83 (1998): 101.

15. Samuel Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 121. Emphasis in original. For Weber, this undecidability is ultimately related to the question of placelessness; he concludes the passage quoted above this way: “but that someone or something remains at an irreducible, indeterminable distance from the television viewer: and this distance splits the ‘sameness’ of the instant of perception as well as the identity of the place in which such viewing seems to occur” (121).

16. Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 14.

17. Although contemporary audiences are certainly more media savvy and acclimated to video surveillance technologies than were their peers in 1970, the disconnect between the viewer’s lived bodily experience and its video representation, as well as the issue of screen-based control of the viewer’s movements, remains forceful. The best account of this historical shift in terms of contemporary art practice is Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2002).

18. Regarding the presumption of liveness in relationship to commercial broadcast television, see Samuel Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed. John Hanhardt (Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1982); Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, and Catastrophe,” Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” Regarding Television: Critical Approaches—An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, American Film Institute Monograph Series, vol. 2 (Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1983); Sconce, Haunted Media; and Weber, “Television.”

19. “Willoughby Sharp Interview with Bruce Nauman (1971),” in Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words: Writings and Interviews, ed. Bruce Nauman and Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 136–37.

20. As if to guarantee that there could be no facile way for the spectator to achieve a satisfactory screen image/presence, the camera lenses in Video Corridor for San Francisco were turned from time to time, rendering it next to impossible for the spectator to keep himself or herself “in view.” The fact that Nauman’s later screen-reliant corridor installations do away with this additional permutation of camera-monitor relations suggests that Nauman wanted to make the highly constrained relationship between the spectator and the screen more comprehensible (or perhaps that the artist found he could control the terms of the spectator’s participation even more effectively when the “rules of engagement” were more clearly delineated).

21. “Willoughby Sharp Interview with Bruce Nauman,” Please Pay Attention Please, ed. Nauman and Kraynak, 136–37. Nauman’s description of the piece is worth quoting in full: “It’s really like the corridor pieces only without the corridors. I tried to do something similar, but using television cameras and monitors, and masking part of the lenses on the cameras.... If one camera is at one end of the room and the monitor is at the other, then the camera lens can be masked so that an image appears maybe on a third or a quarter of the screen. The camera is sometimes turned on its side, sometimes upside down, and that creates a corridor between the camera and the monitor. You can walk in it and see yourself from the back, but it’s hard to stay in the picture because you can’t line anything up, especially if the camera is not pointing at the monitor. Then you have to watch the monitor to stay in the picture and at the same time stay in the line of the camera” (136–37).

22. Janet Kraynak, “Dependent Participation: Bruce Nauman’s Environments,” Grey Room 10 (Winter 2003): 29.

23. Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society: Tomorrow’s Social History: Classes, Conflicts, and Culture in Programmed Society, trans. Leonard F. X. Mayhew (New York: Random House, 1971).

24. According to Crary, video display–based viewing “imposes a highly articulated, coercive apparatus, a prescriptive mode of activity and corporeal regimentation”—what he theorizes to be “the banal legacy of the nineteenth century and the dream fabricated then of the complete bureaucratization of society.” Television and the personal computer’s terminal screen, in other words, are simply the most recent techniques and locations of capitalist control and productivity via the requirements of sedentarization and passivity. See Jonathan Crary, “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York; Boston: New Museum of Contemporary Art; D. R. Godine, 1984), 293.

25. Crary, “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” 294.

26. For an interesting discussion of Dan Graham’s video installations in relationship to the artist’s notion of topology, see Eric de Bruyn, “Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism,” Grey Room 25 (2006): 32.

27. Dan Graham interview with RoseLee Goldberg, June 1975; quoted in Rose-Lee Goldberg, “Space as Praxis,” Studio International 977 (September/October 1975): 134. Emphasis in original.

28. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I and Cinema II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986 and 1989). See also Bergsonism, trans. Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlison (New York: Zone Books, 1990).

29. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (orig. 1896), trans. W. S. Palmer and N. M. Paul (New York: Zone Books, 1988).

30. Colin Gardner explains how Deleuze, following Bergson, understands time as “a stream in which the virtual [the immateriality of memory] is already contained in the actual, the cause in the effect, so that the latter can constantly move on to its new actuality-as-future-anterior.” Colin Gardner, “Thinking the Unthinkable: Time, Cinema and the Brain,” Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory 3 (2008), artbrain.org.

31. Joselit, Feedback, 106.

32. Ibid., 163.

33. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London, New York: Continuum, 2004).

34. Joselit, Feedback, 157. See also Anne Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (2000): 59–80. Krauss’s theorization of how much early video art is bound up with the psychological condition of narcissism is famously rehearsed in her “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (1976): 51–64.

1. While many works of art clearly require temporal engagements, and the experience of visiting museums itself could be described as “cinematic,” the installations considered in this chapter are distinctive for the way in which they self-consciously (and quite literally) put media time and duration on display. Annette Michelson makes an interesting proposition regarding the parallels between the experience of viewing a film and visiting a wax museum in her 1966 essay, “Film and the Radical Aspiration,” reprinted in Film Culture Reader, 406. On the museological archaeology of cinema and cinematic affective transport, see Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), as well as her Public Intimacy.

2. Art and media historian Anne-Marie Duguet uses the term “exploratory duration” in passing in describing the time-based aspects of Jeffrey Shaw’s oeuvre but leaves the concept undeveloped. Anne-Marie Duguet, Jeffrey Shaw: A User’s Manual: From Expanded Cinema to Virtual Reality (Karlsruhe: Cantz Verlag and ZKM Museum, 1997), 21. She adopts the term based upon Gérard Genette’s notion of performance as having a “procedural duration.” Gérard Genette, L’oeuvre de l’art (Paris: éditions du Seuil, 1994), 73.

3. Jameson, Postmodernism, 72.

4. Anne Friedberg employs the term “window shopping” as an analogy for the relationship between normative cinematic viewing and the culture of consumption (specifically as rooted in the nineteenth century) in her influential study Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Her formulation of contemporary spectatorship will be evaluated in the second half of this chapter.

5. Working in the wake of minimalism’s challenges to formal autonomy and the opticality of the image, the instantaneity associated with observing formalist modernist art was thrown into question by many artists in the 1960s and 1970s. Artists embraced the contingencies of time and space and created works that were overtly bound up with the spectator’s participatory and temporal experience in the exhibition space, whether or not the individual works of art employed film or video technologies. For the extremely influential art historical argument for minimalism’s challenge to spectatorship as correlated to real time and space, see Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real.

6. Christine Ross, “The Temporalities of Video: Extendedness Revisited,” Art Journal 65 (Fall 2006): 83.

7. Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond, 121. The full excerpt reads: “As with perceptual enquiry, the durational issue in film has become very much concerned with the viewer’s changing state as content in itself, rather than with an interior content to which the viewer reacts.” Le Grice and Peter Gidal are the primary theorists of so-called structural-materialist film. See Gidal, Structural Film Anthology (London: British Film Institute, 1976).

8. Sharits, “Statement Regarding Multiple Screen/Sound ‘Locational’ Film Environments—Installations,” 79–80.

9. Developed within the context of film studies in the 1970s, apparatus theory is concerned with defining how cinema works as an “institutional apparatus” consisting of a programmed relationship between the film, the film projector, the screen, and the spectator. As described by film theorist Christian Metz in 1975 in his seminal essay “The Imaginary Signifier” (English trans. 1982): “The cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry...it is also the mental machinery—another industry—which spectators ‘accustomed to the cinema’ have internalized historically and which has adapted them to the consumption of films.... The institution is outside us and inside us, indistinctly collective and intimate, sociological and psychoanalytic.” In Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 7. In addition to Metz’s essay, key texts on apparatus theory include Baudry, “The Apparatus” and “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.”

10. The term is Obrist’s. See Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, Vol. 1 (Milan: Charta, 2003), 322.

11. Russell Ferguson, “Trust Me,” Douglas Gordon (Museum of Contemporary Art) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001), 16.

12. David Gordon, “... by way of a statement on the artist’s behalf” (a letter to the curators of the exhibition Wild Walls, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), in Douglas Gordon: Kidnapping (New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 1998), 83.

13. Although it is important to keep in mind the different institutional contexts between Warhol’s experimental films and art gallery–based screen-reliant experimental works, the way in which the time one spends with 24 Psycho is strangely pushed into the future again recalls Warhol’s films, such as the approximately eight-hour-long Empire (1964). Pamela Lee theorizes the experience of watching Warhol’s films in relationship to Hegel’s concept of “bad infinity” in her Chronophobia. Empire, she argues, “performs bad infinity at both internal operations and external reception.... [The film] thus stands as an allegory for time located elsewhere: not only the time of its audience, engaged in business other than that of watching, but the future, anticipated in making one’s escape from the theater.” Lee, Chronophobia, 281, 287.

14. Note that Mapping the Studio exists in two versions that should not be confused. In the second version, Mapping the Studio II with color shift, flip, flop & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001), the images of Nauman’s studio are colored and periodically flip up and down.

15. “Night Moves: The Indifferent Grandeur of Bruce Nauman,” The New Yorker (January 28, 2002): 94–95.

16. Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) was first shown at New York City’s DIA: Chelsea in a vast, darkened gallery across the street from the DIA Foundation’s main building. The way in which the work was installed at DIA: Chelsea differs slightly from the way it is currently installed at DIA: Beacon (and upon which the above description is based). At DIA: Chelsea, Nauman’s video images were projected simultaneously onto four walls and seven rolling office chairs were set in the middle of the space, allowing audience members to relax, swivel, and/or roll around on them while observing the various projections. Now permanently installed at DIA: Beacon, Mapping the Studio I incorporates wall like screens (as opposed to literal walls) and includes wooden, nonrolling chairs. Also note that the DIA: Beacon installation admits more incidental light than did the DIA: Chelsea version.

17. For an interesting investigation of the artistic consequences of simultaneous transmission to multiple sites specifically in regard to video technology, see Margot Bouman, “Translucent Temporalities: The Ontology of Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio,” paper delivered at College Art Association Conference, Seattle, Washington, February, 2004. Bouman emphasizes video’s ability to simultaneously represent an event occurring in one location across multiple locations or, following Samuel Weber, video’s “differential specificity.” Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).

18. Collectively, the original unedited footage was forty-two hours. Nauman subsequently edited the seven videos in Mapping the Studio to approximately five hours and forty-five minutes each.

19. Extremely patient observers will perceive traces of camera movement in addition to the scattered movement of the various nocturnal studio dwellers. The reasons that these and certain other changes are occasionally perceptible are largely fortuitous. Nauman explains: “Because I wasn’t shooting every night, every hour the camera moves a tiny bit. The image changes a little bit every hour regardless of any action that’s taking place. I was working in the studio during the day all that time, and I would unconsciously move things around.... So the areas that I was shooting tended to get cleaner or to have fewer objects in them over the six hours.” Bruce Nauman and Michael Auping, “A Thousand Words: Bruce Nauman Talks about Mapping the Studio,” Artforum 40, no. 7 (March 2002): 121.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. David Hunt, “Doug Aitken: Immoral Video,” Art & Text 67 (1999–2000): np.

23. “A Thousand Words: Douglas Aitken Talks about electric earth,” Artforum 38, no. 9 (2000): 161. See also Aitken and Noel Daniel, ed., Broken Screen: Conversations with Doug Aitken—Expanding the Image Breaking the Narrative (New York: D.A.P., 2006).

24. Apparently committed to the democratic distribution of her work, Ahtila has released many of her films on DVD, complete with scripts of all dialogue.

25. Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Fantasized Persons and Taped Conversations (Helsinki: Crystal Eye: Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002). The artist recommends that exhibition venues start the film every full and half hour.

26. Royoux, “Remaking Cinema,” in Cinéma Cinéma, 26.

27. Jean Christophe Royoux, “All Around the World,” Art Press (October 2001): 39.

28. Peter Osborne, “Distracted Reception: Time, Art, and Technology,” in Time Zones: Recent Film and Video, ed. Jessica Morgan and Gregor Muir (London: Tate, 2004), 72.

29. Birnbaum, Chronology, 40.

30. “The subject—what Husserl calls the ego—is what keeps all the levels of such a multidimensional structure together: ‘I am always in the present and still in the past, and already in the future. I’m always here and also elsewhere. I as ego come in between these two modes. I am only in this doubling, and I emerge in this displacement.” Birnbaum, Chronology, 38. (Quoting Robert Sokolowski, “Displacement and Identity in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung, ed. S. Ijsseling (London: Kluwer, 1990), 180.)

31. Robert Storr, “Stan Douglas: L’Alienation et la proximité (interview),” Art Press 202 (2000): 262.

32. Dominique Païni, “Le cinéma expose: flux contre flux / Movies in the Gallery: Flow on Show,” Art Press 287 (2003): 29. Païni defers to Bernand Steigler as to the cinematographic nature of consciousness, which is also based on a montage of temporal objects—objects constituted by their movement. Bernand Steigler, La technique et le temps, le temps du cinéma et la question du mal être (Paris: Galilée, 2001).

33. Païni, “Le cinéma expose / Movies in the Gallery,” 29.

34. Even if on the whole he is more sympathetic than Païni, Birnbaum’s praise for media installation art is also measured. Birnbaum makes an especially compelling call for new theoretical methods in his incisive refutation of the critical celebration of outmoded technologies in media art by Rosalind Krauss, among others; see Birnbaum, Chronology, especially the final chapter, “Chronometers.” See also Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea.

35. In an exhibition catalog essay from 1997 (reprinted in October magazine), Païni states his case plainly, describing his critique of “the immobile and collective viewer (chained up in Plato and Diderot), captive in the film theaters of the twentieth-century,” such that “the viewer of a contemporary projection installation once again becomes a flâneur, mobile and solitary.” (“Should We Put an End to Projection?” 32–33) He subsequently refines this argument in a series of articles in Art Press, which will be discussed in the body of this text.

36. Païni, “Le ciné ma expose/Movies in the Gallery,” 26.

37. Païni, “Le retour du Flâneur: The Return of the Flâneur,” Art Press 255 (2000): 39, 41.

38. Bellour, “D’un Autre Cinéma,” 5–21.

39. Ibid., 15.

40. Michael Archer, “Video Lives,” Art Monthly 228 (1999): 2. Archer singles out Shirin Neshat’s two-screen installation Turbulent (1998) as a work that takes this mode of viewing into account, so that the viewer’s discomfort in observing the piece is presumably integral to the meaning of the work itself.

41. Even if, in actual practice, viewers appear to be emboldened by the institution and by the presumed etiquette of the “white cube” to enter and leave film and video installations, including pieces like Consolation Service, at any time, the critical gesture bound up with the work’s ideal spectatorship is noteworthy. For a discussion of contemporary media artworks that deliberately encourage the cinematic possibilities of imaginary identification and fantasy, see, for example, Amelia Jones, Self/Image, especially chapter 6, “The Televisual Architecture of the Dream Body,” and Maria Walsh, “Cinema in the Gallery—Discontinuity and Potential Space in Salla Tykkä’s Trilogy,” Senses of Cinema 28 (September/October 2003): np.

42. Hall and Fifer, “Complexities of an Art Form,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, 20.

43. Illuminating Video, ed. Hall and Fifer, 20.

44. Chrissie Iles, “Roundtable: The Projected Image,” October 104 (2003): 94, my emphasis.

45. Prominent exceptions include David Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube,” Artforum (2004): 154–59; Liz Kotz, “Video: The Space between Screens,” in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, ed. Simon Leung and Zoya Kocur (London: Basil Blackwell, 2004); and Kraynak, “Dependent Participation.”

46. Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” 3–17.

47. Put simply, minimalism’s quest for the “death of the author” was not supposed to mean a corresponding total empowerment of the spectator. Nonetheless, minimalism’s “immediacy,” explains Krauss, was always “potentially undermined—infected, we could say—with its opposite.” Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” 287. See also Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism.”

48. Païni, “Le retour du Flâneur: The Return of the Flâneur,” 39 and 41.

49. Ibid., 41.

50. For example, in the Artforum article devoted to Nauman’s description of Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), Nauman makes pointed remarks about the intended spectatorship for this work that closely correspond to the way in which viewers tend to observe the omnipresent media screens in contemporary life. Nauman has this advice for his spectator–participants: “If you try and concentrate on or pay attention to a particular spot in the image, you’ll miss something. So you really have to not concentrate and allow your peripheral vision to work. You tend to get more if you just scan without seeking. You have to become passive, I think.” Nauman would appear to be asking his spectators to enjoy this work in a manner most closely approximating the experience of “flow” that Marxist critic Raymond Williams famously associated with television. Nauman and Auping, “A Thousand Words,” 121.

51. Friedberg, Window Shopping, 143. Friedberg revisits this argument in her “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Baudry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also Paul Virilio’s discussion of the VCR in “The Third Window” (interview) in Global Television, ed. Cynthia Schneider and Brian Wallis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), as well as Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006) on the contemporary viewer’s gratifyingly easy access to repetition, slow motion, and the freeze frame.

52. Loop (exh. cat.), ed. Klaus Biesenbach (Munich: Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, 2001).

1. Some exceptions are works by Anthony McCall, Paul Sharits, Fabio Mauri, Joan Jonas, Michael Snow, and Robert Whitman.

2. The notion that the viewing subject constructed by Renaissance perspective remained unchanged throughout modernity has been challenged on many fronts. Crary’s Techniques of the Observer and Hubert Damisch’s The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994) are particularly useful for considering these shifts in relationship to technologies of visualization.

3. See, for example, Benjamin Buchloh, “Sculpture and Process in Richard Serra’s Films,” in Richard Serra: Works ’66–’77 (Tubingen: Kunsthalle, 1978); Regina Cornwell, “Paul Sharits: Illusion and Object,” Artforum 10 (1971): 56–62, and “Michael Snow,” in Projected Images; Krauss, “Paul Sharits,” 89–102, and “Richard Serra: Sculpture,” in Richard Serra: Sculpture (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986); Annette Michelson, “Paul Sharits and the Critique of Illusionism: An Introduction,” Film Culture (1978): 83–88, and “Toward Snow,” Artforum 9 (June 1971): 30–37. The catalog for the 1974 Projected Images exhibition offers a useful entry point to evaluate the early North American critical reception of film and video installation; evaluating works by Peter Campus, Rockne Krebs, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, Ted Victoria, and Robert Whitman, the writers are united by their emphasis on what they identify as a sculptural or environmental quality to the works, a concern with process, and the spectator’s alleged transformation into an active “participant.” (Interestingly, the now widely accepted term “projected images” was not favored by any of the writers, despite its use in the show’s title.) For a recent historical account of postminimalism and film, see Eric Le Bruyn, “The Expanded Field of Cinema, or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square,” in X-Screen: Film Installation and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (exh. cat.), ed. Matthias Michalka (Koln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2003).

4. Filmmaker and theorist Peter Gidal proposed the term “structural-materialist” film in 1975 to distinguish conceptual and materialist works that seek to expose their own ideological operations from the variant of “North American” structural film, famously identified in P. Adams Sitney’s 1969 landmark essay on the genre, whose exclusive concern, according to Gidal, was the largely formalist modernist project of investigating the “filmic” qualities of film. Key practitioners associated with structural-materialist film included Hollis Frampton, Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, Malcolm LeGrice, William Raban, Sharits, and Snow. See Gidal, “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film,” 189–96, and Structural Film Anthology, and Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond and Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film (exh. cat.), ed. Birgit Hein and Wulf Herzogenrath (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979). Peter Wollen’s highly influential critique of structural-materialist film describes what he takes to be the art form’s theoretical and political deficiencies, even as the terms of his critique tended to collapse the significant differences among variants of so-called structural film. See Wollen, “The Two Avant-Gardes,” Studio International 190, no. 978 (1975): 171–75; and “‘Ontology’ and ‘Materialism’ in Film,” Screen 17 (1976): 7–23.

5. See Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Baudry refines this line of critique in his more psychoanalytically informed 1975 essay “The Apparatus.”

6. Since the 1970s, critics, historians, and especially feminist film theorists have criticized apparatus theory for what were taken to be sweeping, ahistorical generalizations—including a generalized, ungendered account of subjectivity—and for theorizing spectatorship in such a way as to leave no room for oppositional practices or resistance.

7. Although strictly concerned with mainstream cinema, Roland Barthes theorizes a related type of spectatorial doubleness (what he calls an “amorous distance”) in his “Leaving the Movie Theater,” 345–49.

8. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 12–23.

9. Wollen’s well-known theorization of two separate filmic avant-gardes—a formalist avant-garde associated with the Co-op movement and especially associated with the “essentialism” of structural film, and an overtly “political” avant-garde associated with filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard—is at the core of many of these debates. Wollen, “The Two Avant-Gardes,” 171–75.

10. Anne Friedberg, “The Virtual Window,” Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 337–54, and The Virtual Window. Although Friedberg devotes a chapter of her book to “exceptions” to the dominant virtual window model (including certain visual artworks), she contends that the spatially and temporally fractured frames proposed by the multiple and overlapping screens that characterize the Windows operating system inaugurate a fundamentally new form of visuality.

11. Manovich, The Language of New Media.

12. I borrow the term “warped space” from Anthony Vidler. Vidler theorizes the history of “warped” psychological and artistic spaces extending from the nineteenth century to the present in Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).

13. The pioneering text here is Metz, The Imaginary Signifier. See also my discussion of film theory as it pertains to media art spectatorship in chapter 1 [note 33].

14. Media scholar and artist Erkki Huhtamo has written a detailed history of the cultural function of screens that carefully attends to transitions in material forms. See Huhtamo, “Elements of Screenology,” 31–82.

15. It is interesting to note that Ping-Pong emerged as a privileged cultural trope in the 1960s–1970s. U.S. players invited to Beijing for an international table tennis competition in 1971 constituted the first group of Americans allowed into China since the Communist takeover in 1949, which proved a catalyst to thawing relations between the two countries and ultimately led to Nixon’s visit to China in 1971. (Time magazine described the sporting event as “the ping heard round the world” and the metaphor “ping pong diplomacy” followed shortly after). I thank Judith Rodenbeck for this reference. Atari introduced the screen-based virtual equivalent of Ping-Pong with its seminal video game PONG (originally an arcade coin-op) in 1972, variants of which had been in development since the late 1950s.

16. Miriam Hansen has examined Walter Benjamin’s extremely provocative but lesser-known work on the playfully disruptive capacities of film technology. “Spiel, [play],” explains Hansen, “provides Benjamin with a term, and concept, that allows him to imagine an alternative mode of aesthetics on a par with modern, collective experience, an aesthetics that could counteract, at the level of sense perception, the political consequences of the failed ... reception of technology.” Most relevant to the current argument, Benjamin extended the concept of play [spiel] to, in Hansen’s words, “the behaviour of the spectating collective in front of the screen, including involuntary, sensory-motor forms of reception.” Miriam Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (2004): 3–45.

17. The artist’s creation of an alternate version of Ping Pong using a television screen later the same year suggests that EXPORT’s principal interest was in challenging the viewer’s experience with media screens in general as opposed to cinema in particular. In the spirit of Duchamp and Fluxus, EXPORT even advertised a do-it-yourself, ready-made version of the installation in Film magazine in 1969. Titled Ping Pong Kassette, the work included a ball, paddle, and 8 mm film (as shown in the relevant figure) whereas the consumer presumably supplied his or her own projector and screen.

18. EXPORT in Wien: Bildkompendium Wiener Aktionismus und Film, ed. Peter Weibel (Frankfurt/Main: Kohlkunstverlag, 1970), 262.

19. The desired creation of a progressive, “democratic,” and presumably critical spectatorship via obligatory participation is a paradox of much installation art. For two interesting accounts of how art historians are beginning to rethink the critical discourse around spectator participation in relationship to installation art, see Kraynak’s “Dependent Participation,” 22–45, and Judith Rodenbeck’s “Madness and Method: Before Theatricality” (Grey Room 13 (2003): 54–79). Branden Joseph theorizes a divergent historical model of theatricality stemming from the legacy of John Cage in Beyond the Dream Syndicate, especially chapter 2, “The Social Turn.”

20. See especially “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre” and “A Short Organum for the Theater” in Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 33–42 and 179–205. See also Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 254–69. His alienation effect and theorization of the apparatus were deeply influential for film and media artists and critics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Peter Wollen explicitly critiques the (mis)reception of Brechtian aesthetics within the context of structural-materialist film in his influential 1976 essay, “‘Ontology’ and ‘Materialism’ in Film.” Wollen argues that these media practitioners, in what amounted to a misappropriation of post-Brechtian aesthetics, misapprehended the critical value of “materialism” by collapsing an emphasis on materiality and filmic materials (anti-illusionism broadly conceived) with the critical gesture of political materialism (in the specific post-Brechtian sense).

21. David Joselit, “The Video Public Sphere,” Art Journal 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 48. See also his Feedback, especially chapters 3 and 4.

22. See Adams, “Bruce Nauman and the Object of Anxiety,” 96–113, for a detailed exploration of the phenomenological and psychoanalytical valences of Bruce Nauman’s artistic production, including his influential video installations.

23. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Lacan’s theory of vision is most fully developed, however, in his series of lectures titled “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a” and collected in The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis. On the considerable misinterpretation of Lacan’s model of vision and specifically within film theory, see Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge and London, UK: MIT Press, 1995).

24. Looking back on this period in a 1996 essay, Le Grice discerns an emphasis on screen-based experimentation and confirms that “the language or discourse of cinema is fundamentally altered—philosophically and in the social/cultural arena—by emerging forms which first establish the screen as surface then reverse the symbolic space from behind to before the screen.” Although Le Grice recognizes the pivotal role of the screen in these works, his formulation is incomplete. Screen-reliant installations such as those by EXPORT and Campus grapple with (at least) three screen spaces simultaneously: the space behind the screen, the space before the screen, and, finally, the spatial presence of the screen object itself. Le Grice, “Mapping in Multispace: Expanded Cinema to Virtuality,” in White Cube/Black Box: Video, Installation, Film (exh. cat.), ed. Sabine Breitweiser (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1996), 267.

1. Beyond its more recent association with digital media technologies, the term “virtual” has a rich and complex history in critical philosophy since the late nineteenth century in texts by Jean Baudrillard, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Pierre Lévy, Paul Virilio, and others (although one could locate the roots of this discourse as early as Plato’s writings on the simulacrum). In this chapter, I follow Anne Friedberg’s working definition of the term “virtual,” which she defines as that which “serves to distinguish between any representation or appearance (whether optically, technologically, or artisanally produced) that appears ‘functionally or effectively but not formally’ of the same materiality as that which it represents. Virtual images have a materiality and a reality but of a different kind, a second-order materiality, liminally immaterial. The terms ‘original’ and ‘copy’ will not apply here, because the virtuality of the image does not imply direct mimesis, but a transfer—more like metaphor—from one plane of meaning and appearance to another.” Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 11.

2. While this chapter focuses exclusively on artworks conceived of and executed with digital computer screens, it is important to note that artists have experimented with incorporating computer technologies into artworks since the mid-1960s, including practices as diverse as expanded cinema, media events and actions, cybernetic artworks, and, more recently, net art. Also worth mentioning is how, in recent years, artworks originally executed in film and video are routinely reconfigured in digital formats for the purposes of publicity and/or exhibition; intentionally or otherwise, this decision echoes the omnipresence of computer technologies in daily life. For a cogent treatment of digital media in the institutional context of the visual arts, see Net_Condition: Art and Global Media (exh. cat.), ed. Timothy Druckrey and Peter Weibel (Cambridge and London: MIT Press and ZKM | Center for Art and Media, 2001).

3. On telepresence in media art see especially Lev Manovich, “To Lie and to Act: Potemkin’s Villages, Cinema, and Telepresence,” in The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, ed. Ken Goldberg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 164–79. See also his Language of New Media, 99–102, which documents the ways in which screens have been employed to directly affect reality in various military applications from radar to interactive computer graphics.

4. Media scholar Ron Burnett proposes that virtual images occupy a “middle space” by combining the virtual and the real into conceptually ambiguous visual environments in How Images Think (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

5. Computer gaming—in which players are active participants in remote virtual screen-based realms—presents an interesting border case here. On the cultural ramifications of gaming see Alex Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). While it falls outside the scope of the current study, the burgeoning realm of mobile computing and gaming that requires users to engage with screens in a haptic fashion while engrossed in multiple spaces offers a rich subject for future research. For a preliminary analysis along these lines, see Andreas Gregersen and Torben Grodal, “Embodiment and Interface,” in Bernard Perro and Robert Wolfe, ed., The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (London: Routledge, 2009).

6. Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 285.

7. Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 235.

8. Hershman and the Internet design company Construct were announced co-winners when The Difference Engine #3 won the Ars Electronica Golden Nica Award in 1999.

9. Paul Virilio traces the disturbing connections between the subject’s relationship to war and to media forms in War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989).

10. On the question of “immersion” and “interactivity” in relationship to gallery-based media art, see Grau, Virtual Art; Morse, Virtualities; Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, ed. Mary Ann Moser and Douglas MacLeod (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, ed. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); and Critical Issues in Electronic Media, ed. Simon Penny (New York: SUNY Press, 1995).

11. The intertitle “Two-Way Mirror Power” is a deliberate reference to the title of an influential book about Dan Graham that makes extended reference to the artist’s participatory and experiential installations, many of which were influential precedents for the artworks assessed in this chapter and throughout this book. Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press and Marian Goodman Gallery, 1999).

12. When the BBU screens are inactive for an extended period, a “Siren” type screensaver image appears on the BBU screens that beckons observers to engage with the work. If viewers succumb to the Siren’s advances and physically manipulate the screen objects, the screensaver disappears and the screen returns to featuring selected “virtual” images of the physical museum.

13. Each museum visitor’s captured image travels on a three-stage journey through the virtual environment conceptualized as “inside” The Difference Engine #3’s screens. First, each spectator image-cum-avatar briefly passes through the graphically rendered museum corridors shown on the BBUs. This part of the avatar’s journey can be seen by any online or museum viewer who happens to be looking at any of the computer screens during the avatar’s thirty-second cycle through Hershman’s diagrammatic representation of the museum space. Next, the avatar pauses for one hour in what Hershman calls “Purgatory,” the intermediate stage of the journey where the visitors’ faces are automatically and temporarily transferred from the BBU screens onto the display screen positioned immediately inside the museum. What Hershman calls the “Archive” proper is the third and final stage of the captured image’s virtual journey. Upon leaving Purgatory, the spectator images are permanently archived, irrevocably rendered components of this digital realm and stored in a virtual environment on the artwork’s Web site.

14. Goldberg’s description of the project nevertheless acknowledges the fragility of the work’s objective of long-term cooperative virtual gardening: “Strangers will rub shoulders with strangers, raising questions of cooperation versus competition in the use of limited resources. The garden could evolve as a green and blooming oasis, or it could become a barren plot. The garden’s future has been left up to its ‘gardeners.’” Goldberg cited in E. Mankin, 1995; news release, University of Southern California, June 1995.

15. This raises a related question about the “lifespan” of Internet-based works. While neither project is currently functional, aspects of both continue to exist in documentary form on the Internet.

16. Researchers at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications conducted a series of empirical studies on “community building” in relationship to The Telegarden. See Margaret McLaughlin, Kerry Osborne, and Nicole Ellison, “Virtual Community in a Telepresence Environment,” in Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety, ed. Steven Jones (London: Sage Publications, 1997). It is worth noting that the larger critical discourse on the question of “community building” in relationship to contemporary art has problematized many of these assumptions. See, for example, Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity; and Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 51–79.

17. Mitchell, “Replacing Place,” in The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 127.

18. Ibid., 126.

19. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 90.

20. Vidler, Warped Space, 236.

21. Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 88.

22. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). According to Deleuze, “For Ideas, to be actualised is to be differenciated. In themselves and in their virtuality they are thus completely undifferentiated. (In this sense the virtual is by no means a vague notion, but one which possesses full objective reality; it cannot be confused with the possible which lacks reality. As a result, whereas the possible is the mode of identity of concepts within representation, the virtual is the modality of the differential at the heart of Ideas)” (279). Deleuze later uses the term “virtual” to help distinguish the two sides of what he deems the cinema’s “crystal-image” (the “actual” and the “virtual”) in Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

23. Deleuze’s concept borrows from Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory, in which the philosopher famously theorized matter as an aggregate of images: “And by image we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing—an existence placed halfway between the ‘thing’ and its ‘representation.’” Bergson, Matter and Memory, 9–10.

24. Herbert Dreyfus, “Telepistemology: Descartes’s Last Stand,” in The Robot in the Garden, ed. Goldberg, 54.

25. Ibid.

26. Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 97.

27. Albert Borgmann, “Information, Nearness, and Farness,” in The Robot in the Garden, ed. Goldberg, 90–107. See also Borgmann, Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

28. To the extent that artworks simply “bracket out” the body and personal presence by (to use Heim’s words) “omitting or simulating corporeal immediacy,” they may inadvertently contribute to the disembodying of contemporary viewing subjects and the seeming “dematerialization” of the viewer-screen interface. See Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 100. Heim’s cautionary remarks are apt: “The stand-in self can never fully represent us. The more we mistake the cyberbodies for ourselves, the more the machine twists ourselves into the prostheses we are wearing” (101).

1. Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 7.

2. Morse, Virtualities, 119.

3. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–51.

4. Hansen, “Room-for-Play,” 45.

5. For example, although it is beyond the scope of the present inquiry, there is a need for a book-length study of the deployment of “artistic” screens situated in urban, ambient spaces outside of the art gallery’s “white cube.” Giuliana Bruno, Anne Friedberg, Anna McCarthy, and Margaret Morse, among others, have begun this important work (as detailed in the book’s introduction), although there is more to be done on identifying the spectatorship associated with experiencing large-scale public art projections, interactive video installations, and the multitude of artistic and/or commercial moving-images sited on architectural surfaces of all kinds. The International Urban Screens Association investigates the commercial use of outdoor screens in combination with “cultural content.” See http://www.urbanscreens.org/.

6. The Variable Media Network (initially known as the Variable Media Initiative, sponsored by the Guggenheim Museum and spearheaded by curator John Hanhardt) and the biannual “Orphan Film Symposium,” directed by film scholar Dan Streible and affiliated with New York University, are among the better-known institutional efforts dedicated to addressing issues of preservation and obsolescence among screen-based media arts. http://variablemedia.net/

7. Crary, “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” 290.

8. Ibid., 294.