Thinking through Screens

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” Wittgenstein once wrote. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg adds new life to the philosopher’s celebrated axiom by mapping it onto the visual register: “The limits and multiplicities of our frames of vision determine the boundaries and multiplicities of our world.”1 If this is so, and indeed this is a foundational premise of the present study, then it is incumbent on us as critics, historians, and practitioners to theorize and construct our interactions with screens (among our principal “frames of vision”) as conscientiously as possible. This is the shared ambition of both Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art and the exemplary screen-reliant works of art that it has explored.

This book has provided a historical and critical context for the rise of gallery-based installations made with cinematic and electronic technologies, outlining their distinctive features and their particular relevance in terms of art history and spectatorship. By carefully assessing the operative conditions of what I call screen-reliant art spectatorship—attending to the complex ways in which screens orchestrate viewing postures, shift time and space, and separate subjects physically even as they connect them functionally—Screens introduced a theoretical model for critically assessing the moving-image installations that continue to proliferate since their inception in the mid-1960s. Situating present-day artistic production in relation to an over forty-year history allowed us to recognize that the issues and challenges posed by screen-based art are in fact not as new as certain “new media” scholars propose, even while providing a way to discern key characteristics, such as telepresence and teleaction, that do indeed constitute unprecedented modes of screen-reliant activity.

In contradistinction to many contemporary critical texts, Screens does not presuppose that artists should avoid employing advanced imaging and projection technologies or otherwise aspire to escape new media culture. Critical activity in what we might call our society of the screen requires a more nuanced approach. After all, as Margaret Morse correctly surmises, “aesthetic resistance depends on an older disposition of the subject in relation to the spectacle of an imaginary world framed and discrete behind the glass.”2 The art installations examined in this book are noteworthy precisely because they illuminate such transitions in models of spectatorship; these works explicitly engage dominant technologies of vision and underline the modes of mediation—material, psychic, ideological, and institutional—that are structural to interactions between viewers and screens. As I have argued throughout, a media art practice and criticism that is cognizant of the interimplicated relationship between screen objects, screen spaces, and viewing bodies is better prepared to confront the challenges (artistic, ethical, or otherwise) of the shifting connections among them.

Ultimately, the critical gesture of the media installations examined here is to call attention to the nature of screen-mediated visuality and to creatively disrupt our conventional relationships to media and imaging technologies in the process, however briefly. These works place the viewer– participant into an embodied circuit with a range of screen-reliant spatial and temporal realms and thus catalyze an awakening of their audiences to the materiality of the interface and the mediation inherent in vision and communication structured by screens. At the same time, however, our daily interactions with commercial and mass media screens of all kinds deeply inform screen-reliant spectatorship within the institutional context of the visual arts. Indeed, the production, reception, and exhibition of artworks made with film, video, and computer screens tend to reflect concurrent changes in mainstream media technologies.

Walter Benjamin’s famous “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” serves as a useful model here, although perhaps in an unexpected way.3 In evaluating early drafts of the Frankfurt School theorist’s seminal text, film scholar Miriam Hansen explicates how Benjamin was able to imagine that the cinema constituted a “sensory-reflexive horizon in which the liberating as well as pathological effects of techno modernity” could be “articulated and engaged.” Although this specific argument would be effectively edited out in subsequent iterations of the piece, Benjamin’s initial conception of the cinema and cinematic reception as a site for critically disruptive “play” should not be overlooked. It is Hansen’s effort to extend the implications of Benjamin’s position to the current day, however, which proves especially inspiring in the current context. While she concedes that Benjamin’s concept of “‘huge gain in room-for-play’” brought into being by the photographic media is, in her words, “more than matched by the industrial production and circulation of phantasmagoria,” she intrepidly concludes with the following manifesto: “All the more reason for us, as historians, critics, and theorists, artists, writers, and teachers, to take Benjamin’s gamble with cinema seriously and to wage an aesthetics of play, understood as a political ecology of the senses, on a par with the most advanced technologies.”4 It is arguably by engaging in such an aesthetics of play that screen-reliant installations allow contemporary viewers the opportunity to reconceptualize their relationships with dominant technologies of visualization.

Much scholarly work remains to be done on the provocative issues surrounding media screens and art.5 At the same time, issues of access and preservation pose considerable obstacles. Outside of contemporary exhibitions, it is difficult to observe many screen-reliant installations at all, much less to see them in their original configurations. This is due to multiple factors, including issues of site-specificity (which is, after all, a common dilemma for the majority of experiential and site-based artworks created since 1960) but also, and equally important, the problem of technological obsolescence. Media technologies are quickly outdated and media artworks are no exception; in many cases it proves impossible to operate or restore the technological apparatus, which, insofar as it served as a defining element of the viewer-screen interface, was once central to the artwork’s very meaning. While scholars and institutions are working diligently to address issues of preservation and access for museum-based media art, many thorny issues over artistic intention, ephemerality, and the commodity status of individual works remain unresolved.6 With limited opportunities for firsthand viewing of historic pieces, writing about this kind of artistic production requires patient review of archival materials, exhibition reviews, interviews, documentary photographs, and the like. Would-be audiences must also content themselves for the most part with (still) photographs documenting the initial installation of a given moving-image environment. The complexity of this type of research endeavor is clearly more than matched, however, by the foundational importance of these evocative works for theories of spectatorship in art history and film and media studies.

At present, as viewers are routinely constructed as screen subjects, in art as in everyday life, the urgency to appreciate the complex interactions between bodies and media screens is unmistakable. Contemporary visuality is so overwhelmingly defined by screens—from cell phones and laptops to Jumbotrons and electronic billboards—that the dramatic subjective effects of screen-based viewing often go unnoticed. Art historian Jonathan Crary articulated the perils of ignoring these developments in relationship to contemporary digital culture as early as 1984, pointing out how “the screens of home computer and word processor have succeeded the automobile as the ‘core products’ in an on-going relocation and hierarchization of production processes.”7 Even as he carefully enunciates the disciplinary aspects of digital technologies, however, it is precisely at the body-screen interface—“in the immediate vicinity of the terminal screen”—that he glimpses a prospective criticality: “We must recognize the fundamental incapacity of capitalism ever to rationalize the circuit between body and computer,” Crary argues, “and realize that this circuit is the site of a latent but potentially volatile disequilibrium.”8 It is this very condition of disequilibrium that the installations examined in this book creatively exploit: by asking us to “think through” our thinking through media screens, these works of art immeasurably enrich our arena of contemporary cultural activity arbitrated by screens, both inside the art gallery and beyond.