Projection between Exhibition and Information

Among the many reconfigurations and experiments with the ‘medium of the exhibition’ of the 1960–1970s, Sonsbeek 71 stands as one the most audacious examples. Organized by curator Wim Beeren as an attempt to find a new curatorial language and innovative exhibition form, Sonsbeek 71 took ‘the entire country as its field of operation’, the ‘exhibition’ consisting of several works of land art, ‘information centres’, as well as pavilions dedicated to film, video, and art mediation. The ‘spatial relations’ exposed by the scale of this apparatus became the very object of Beeren’s curatorial inquiry. Focusing on projected moving images at Sonsbeek 71, this chapter discusses it on three different levels. First, it identifies the way both the film and exhibition apparatus were reconfigured and how Sonsbeek 71 functioned as an epistemology of the exhibition as medium. Second, it articulates a critique of the exhibition as a form intersecting technical, discursive, informational, and sensible elements, and shows how, in its radical expansion of the exhibition medium, Sonsbeek 71 ‘conflates media history with earth history’ (Parikka). Third, what is meant by the notion of the exhibition as ‘medium’ is discussed in light of the inflatable pavilions designed by the Eventstructure Research Group where structural films and artists’ films were projected. This eventually opens up to a critique of the informational, cybernetic epistemology of Sonsbeek 71.

Researching Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities

The chapter explores the development of Elastic 3D Spaces as a research group, its span of inquiry, along with developments to date, using old and new technologies, including stereoscopy and augmented and virtual reality. Elastic 3D Spaces alludes to the space in front of a screen where images appear when using stereo to create 3D, where objects pop out of the screen. The perception of depth stretches if the viewer can move, hence elastic space. The chapter explores art projects whilst positioning the subject area involving both arts and science researchers and explains the topics it covers. Elastic 3D Spaces is interested in comparisons between 3D experiences and stereo 3D experiences from projection to virtual reality.

Between Copyright and Creativity

Focusing on Edison’s early cinematic apparatus and the optical printer, this chapter explores how copyright law intersects with creativity, providing an alternative to teleological accounts of moving-image technologies. Thomas Edison attempted to control the film industry through patents and copyright. Edison’s first film experiments were registered as a series of photographs on card by his assistant, W. L. Dickson. In protecting these contact copies as paper prints with copyright, the new medium of motion pictures was being formalized. The necessity to duplicate film to support the development of exhibition and distribution was also necessary for copyright purposes. An archaeological approach is utilized to explore how paper prints enabled innovation in the area of the optical printer, a primary form of duplication in cinema. In developing approaches that could bring to life the remaining examples of early cinema, novel solutions in the form of innovations were required. The overlapping concerns of the copyright clerk, the film entrepreneur, and the film historian thus provide a basis for new materials and new innovations in moving-image technology and film history.

Bark and Butterflies

This chapter explores the role of site-specific projections in the digital remediation of family and personal history and their role in memorial work and remembrance. The chapter refers primarily to the mixed-media performance/installation Bark and Butterflies by the author (palkadiaries.com). Drawing on the work of Marianna Hirsch, the chapter explicates the notion of post-memory, which complicates and extends family history through the idea of inherited traumatic memory. The concept is applied to Bark and Butterflies and accordingly the chapter offers a case study, amplified with theoretical reflections, on the role of projection in the creation of mixed-media memorial works and their dissemination. Bark and Butterflies was the artistic result of a research trip to Siberia following in the footsteps of an inherited wartime diary, which narrates the exile to the Gulag of the author’s father and grandfather. The chapter outlines and demonstrates the role of site-specific projections in a series of action-research performance interventions en route and examines the potential they offer for the visual interrogation and remediation of symbolic space. The chapter argues that site-specific projections produce a ‘phantasmagoric’ counter-world in which the experience of time and space becomes collapsed and that through this temporal and spatial overlap Bark and Butterflies enacts an immersive process of ‘self-sacralization’, using projections to re-enact paradigmatic devotional forms (Turner), in a type of secular ‘aesthetic redemption’ (Kristeva). In this case, the chapter concludes, the art of projection acts as a contemporary procedure within a personal ritual of pilgrimage and remembrance.

Summoning the Ghosts of Early Cinema and Victorian Entertainment

This chapter analyses the singularly arresting yet endlessly repeatable appearance via projection of the iconic British supermodel Kate Moss within the recent V&A Museum exhibition Savage Beauty: Alexander McQueen. Originally created for the late fashion designer’s 2006 Widows of Culloden show in Paris, this appearance by Moss was no less rapturously received at the V&A exhibition than it had been at the hologram’s launch almost a decade previously. Drawing upon scholarship in the fields of film history and media history, the chapter argues that the Kate Moss hologram should be conceptualized not as a ‘new’ technology, but as a remediation of older cultural forms and practices such as the Victorian entertainment known as Pepper’s ghost and the genre of early cinema known as the serpentine dance. Subsequently, the chapter examines how the exhibition’s marketing and critical reception helped to construct cultures of appreciation that reinforce dominant and idealist discourses of technology. The chapter argues that contemporary film and media culture cannot be understood without an appreciation of older forms and practices of visual entertainment and amusement.

Casting

This chapter investigates how projection mapping reconfigures the relationship between projection surface, moving image, and space in the field of artists’ projected moving-image works. Projection mapping is a relatively new method that can be used to transform irregularly shaped objects and indoor/outdoor spaces into display surfaces. This mode of projection envelops three-dimensional surfaces with digital moving images, using complicated projection technologies. In examining this process, the author analyses various contextual reviews as well as her own piece Casting to discover projection mapping’s distinctive properties. Casting (2016) is Kang’s projection-mapping installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, which was created as the culmination of Kang’s six-month artist-in-residency program at the V&A, and acquired by the institution in 2017 as its first purchase of a projection-mapping installation piece. This chapter examines how, by integrating volumetric objects and space, projection mapping dismantles the conventional notion of screen and frame that are accepted in experimental film and video installation works. The chapter introduces the concept of augmented space to understand how the spatial employment of projected moving images generates a novel type of narrative and experiences in comparison with the previous projected moving-image artworks. Accordingly, the chapter identifies how projection mapping practices can develop a distinguished type of aura in the realm of digital media art works.

They’ll Take Whatever You Feed Them

This chapter investigates the approaches to projection we find in the field of live audiovisual performance. This field comprises different kinds of performative expressions working with live manipulated sound and image, such as VJ and live cinema performances, as well as many expanded cinema and visual music projects, but also cases of collaborations with artists from other areas such as dance. As different as they may be in their approach to performance and the interconnection of sound and image, they share a similar approach to projection: as opposed to the ‘traditional’ cinematic dispositive, there are no fixed expectations or rules as to how the elements of the projection process should be arranged in a live audiovisual performance. Their set-up has to be decided anew for, and according to, every single performance project. This creative freedom opens up the space for a broad theoretical and practical exploration of the projection process, which, however, often becomes restricted by certain standardizations, as the analysis of performances and performance situations shows. This chapter develops some reflections on projection in this very specific field by, in a first step, discussing theoretical and discursive approaches to projection. In a second step, it analyses the role of projection in concrete situations of live audiovisual performance, relying on the author’s academic research as well as on her experiences with such performances as a curator and a member of the public.

Six (or Seven) Ways of Looking at a Lantern Slide

This chapter offers a consideration of the magic lantern slide from a series of viewpoints giving overlapping ways of thinking about what it is as an artefact, how it works as a component of a narrative and performance medium, and its significances in historical and contemporary contexts of creative use. With illustrations from the Lucerna web resource, institutional and private collections, and the work of the Million Pictures research project, the chapter considers the physicality of slides as objects; their relative cultural (and financial) valuations; their various roles and motivations in the transference and concealment of knowledge; their relationships with other portions of the projection process; and some parallels between historic usage of slides and modern media practices, especially in the complex mixture of ‘authority’ and ‘freedom’ that determines their use and interpretation. Conventional approaches to what is sometimes called the ‘historical art of projection’ can be prone to dwell on one or two of these aspects, often with an emphasis on the visual content of the slide image or the physical nature of the artefact. However, to begin to understand the overall cultural impact of this largely lost medium we need to open out the discussion beyond its component parts and consider its possible uses, both historical and current. This chapter therefore aims to describe lantern slide projection as an interactive, ephemeral performance medium, elusive and difficult to categorize, but rich in its creative possibilities.

A New ‘Wild West’ of Projection

This chapter will examine some of the possibilities that digital projection technologies have opened up with regard to the spaces of cinema exhibition. The authors argue that the process of projecting moving images—whether from a film print, a digital file, or another medium—has been significantly altered in the digital age due to the portability and affordability of digital projectors, which have permitted the widespread exhibition of projected moving images beyond the cinema auditorium. By outlining a tentative topography of three trends in digital cinema exhibition—‘forest cinema’, Bring Your Own Beamer events, and VJing—they argue that the current moment of digital cinema exhibition has much in common with the earliest years of cinema exhibition in the period before institutionalization. In this respect the current moment of variety in digital cinema exhibition offers a return to cinema’s ‘Wild West’.

Situating Projection

This introductory chapter situates the volume’s various investigations in projection practices within the broader context of visual culture and screen studies, striving to go beyond their moments of technological crisis. It seeks to present projection simultaneously as a process inherent to the territorialisation of film, a specialized effect of complex optical apparatus, and a mode of organising the world. In exploring these different definitions, the chapter argues for the importance of a materialist approach to moving-image technologies and a spatial understandings of time-based media. By providing an overview of the book chapters, it dwells on the significant role that projection has to play as a practice, technology, and expressive form across multiple cultural, temporal, and geographical contexts.