Abstract
Video installation as a medium offers filmmakers a means to explore nonlinear approaches to filmmaking that break away from the more traditional viewing and presentation of a film that has linear storytelling at its core. This medium offers its viewers new forms of experience. The viewer, I suggest, can be likened to a flaneur, as featured in Walter Benjamin’s, “Arcades,” but whom I imbue with particular qualities. I draw on Actor Network theory to investigate this new relationship between the viewer and the viewed and suggest that video installation can help create a new balance of power, where the viewer can become meaning-maker rather than merely meaning-taker. This I suggest can happen when the images are viewed in an immersive environment. In order to illustrate this, I discuss my video installation “Dancing with Mrs. Dale,” a two-screen installation based on found Super 8 home movies. This installation was part of an exhibition I created “Digital remembering” and I discuss my work in relation to this.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Andrea, S. Screening the Museum Aesthetic: Auteurs in Transnational Heritage Film. PhD, University of Washington, USA, 2016 [Online]. Available at https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/38102/Schmidt_washington_0250E_16646.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Accessed May 2019.
Baudelaire, C., and P. E. Charvet. Selected Writings on Art and Artists [of] Baudelaire. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Bishop, C. Installation Art: A Critical History. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Charleson, D. Digital Remembering. Melbourne: RMIT University, 2007. Available at https://www.intersect.rmit.edu.au/-ps-sr-/digital-remembering. Accessed April 2018.
Charleson, D. “Video Installation, Memory and Storytelling: The Viewer as Narrator.” Image and Narrative 12, no. 2 (2011): 17–30.
Charleson, D. “Video Installation, Memory and Storytelling: The Viewer as Narrator.” Image and Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative 12 (2011): 17–30.
Charleson, D. “Reading Between the Frames: Creating Digital Memories.” The International Journal of New Media, Technology and the Arts 7, no. 4 (2014).
Coulter-Smith, G. Deconstructing Installation Art: Fine Art and Media Art, 1986–2006. Southampton, UK: CASIAD, 2006.
Elwes, C. Installation and the Moving Image. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Gibson, R. Remembrance and the Moving Image. Melbourne: Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 2002.
Gibson, R. Remembrance + The Moving Image/Editor: Ross Gibson. ACMI Collections. Melbourne, VIC: Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 2013.
Gottschall, J. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston and New York: Mariner Books Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
Harris, M. P. “Thought, Object and Experience in Film/Video Installation Art.” In Human Creation Between Reality and Illusion, edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka, 185–197. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2005.
Hoffmann, J. Arcades. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Livingstone, J., and L. Gyarkye. Death to the Flâneur, 2017. Available at https://newrepublic.com/article/141623/death-flaneur. Accessed April 2018.
Norman, D. The Transmedia Design Challenge: Co Creation. ACM Interaction, 2010. Available at https://jnd.org/the_transmedia_design_challenge_co-creation/. Accessed March 28, 2019.
Oren, B. Expanded Spectatorship: Cinema in the Post-proscenium Era. Master of Arts Masters San Francisco State University, San Francisco, 2017 [Online]. Available at https://sfsu-dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.3/196008/AS362017FILMB66.pdf?sequence=1. Accessed March 2019.
Paôni, D. “Le retour du flâneur.” Art Press (2000): 33–41.
Usher, R., and R. G. Edwards. “Subjects, Networks and Positions: Thinking Educational Guidance Differently.” British Journal of Guidance & Counselling 33, no. 3 (2005): 397–410.
Utterback, C. Designing Systems for Human Interaction, Not Human-Computer Interaction, 2018. Available at http://www.core77.com/reactor/utterback.html. Accessed April 29, 2018.
Viola, B. The Raft, 2004.
Walter, B. The Arcades Project. New York: Belknap Press, 2002.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Charleson, D. (2019). Video Installation and the Agency of the Viewer. In: Filmmaking as Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24635-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24635-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24634-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24635-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)