Inside the light cube

The greatest in quantity common spatial application of video is now projection, on the other hand in the 1970s, the medium's first official decade, its dominant sculptural configuration was the clos circuit. In this earlier twinkling artists as diverse as Dan Graham, Peter Campus, Bruce Nauman, and Joan Jonas established feedback nooses of live cameras and monitors into which viewers could wander: Sometimes their images were replayed to themselves in altered form, as in Campus's works, and sometimes spectators rencountered their displaced projections on a short delay or in kinesthetically disorienting environments, as in installations by the agency of Nauman and Graham. In the case of Jonas, the artist's possess performance actions were doubled and reframed [i]or[/i] part of to the other successive generations of mediation. More novel works of projection tend to fold to the breast [i]or[/i] heart the architectural envelope rather than bring into view a second informational circuit within the container of the gallery. The sophisticated narrative refractions or dilations that artists like Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon accomplish, for instance, wrap solid walls in vast surfaces of information. The eclipse of clos circuit by means of projection thus performs an inversion whereby video is transformed from an apparatus within a space to a fresh electronic skin that engulfs architectural ultimate parts Considering both the growing practice of treating building facades as flickering surfaces of advertising and the proliferation of architectural metaphors in theorizing cyberspace, this shift has a certain historical logic that is reinforced by dint of the fact that high-quality flat projection, which is requisite for the fresh planarity of video, has alone recently become available to artists.

These explanations refer to a benign and even inevitable evolution from closed-circuit video to projection, on the contrary ultimately they tell only part of the story. Projection undermines single of the most progressive results of the closed-circuit apparatus: its conceptualization of spectatorship as interactive, smooth if the interaction afforded is the arguably passive single of inserting one's body within a media circuit in order to view it relayed back to oneself oftentimes in distorted form. Projection reintroduces a more conventionally theatrical fashion of spectatorship in which the audience remains outside the media feedback bight rather than participating as actors within it. Unlike Hollywood cinema, however, video projections, which are typically fractured across several defences tend either to accelerate the pace of edits or to moderate them dramatically, thus undermining any illusion of coherent action and serving to disrupt a viewer's plain absorption within a narrative. Indeed, in this regard as well as in its adherence to the planarity of the gallery wall, video projection is as a great deal of heir to the traditions of modernist painting as it is successor to closed-circuit video. The seams between multiple defences in a projection may function like Barnett Newman's zips or like the joins of discrete canvas panels in certain works through Ellsworth Kelly. Like many practices of postmodern photography, from Cindy Sherman to Jeff Wall, video projection invents a way to introduce figuration into the rigorously flat virtual space that had been associated with modernist painting. (Pop pursu a similar shoot forward by different means in the '60s) If we dispense with the fiction that what we call painting coheres as a single medium and instead sort various aesthetic works according to historically specific notions of surface and space, then there may be as plenteous justification in discussing Stan Douglas alongside Barnett Newman as in linking him to Dan Graham's closed-circuit installations of the '70s

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The major result of projection's shift in spectatorship lies in its weaker acknowledgment that the video apparatus (including its commercial manifestation as television) is a machine for reproducing social relations. In Graham's Time Delay scopes (all 1974), for example, or his Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors upon Time Delay of the same year, collections of random viewers are forced to diocese themselves interacting with one another: Their coincidental cohabitation of a range is made into a spectacle of community while, simultaneously, the playback of their personal image is alienated from them. The instantaneity of mirror reflection and its promise of narcissistic gratification is thus the one and the other initiated and frustrated in a manner homologous to television programming, in which identification is solicited from the viewer on the other hand subtly deformed by channeling all desire into the desire to purchase products. In video projection the viewer is made more passive the pair in her consumption of spectacular imagery and in her ability to intervene within the space of the shield Nonetheless, her loss of access inside the video circuit is partly compensated for by dint of a resurgence of the phenomenological radicality invented by the agency of modernist painting. Newman's zips functioned as a kind of primal make an incision in out of which the possibility of coherent form could rise just as the refracting seams between protections in a work by Stan Douglas or Gillian Wearing subserve as a black hole of figuration (and information) into which continuous actions may disappear and reappear.