Be here now: the spatial dynamics of screen-reliant installation art

The disquieting existence of two simultaneous yet different self-images is only part of the labyrinth of screen-reliant spaces Campus's spectator is asked to reconcile. Interface initially exploits the spectator's habitual screen-as-window viewing techniques, expecting its viewer to immediately understand the glass "screen" as an interface to another representational space and to direct attention to the information or images being presented "inside" the screen space, on the "other side" of the glass. Yet by presenting viewers with divergent live images of their own bodies and by making the camera and projector technology visible and accessible, Interface compels its viewers to consider the space in front of the screen--the media(ted) space between the viewer and the screen--in addition to and as coextensive with the representational space inside the screen. It is only by understanding their role as embodied observers in the exhibition space, by understanding the reciprocal relationships among body placement, projector, camera, and screen, that Campus's spectators can unlock the riddle of their dissimilar live images.

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It is important to stress the way in which Campus's installation establishes how media screen spectatorship and self-reflexive, embodied spectatorship are not mutually exclusive. Like Ping Pong, Interface proposes a spectator whose experiences with a range of screen spaces serve to confirm, rather than usurp or render secondary, his or her experiences in the material "here and now" of the exhibition space. In an apparent contradiction, Interface generates an embodied spectatorship by asking viewers to engage with virtual screen space. Simultaneously engaging actual and virtual space, materiality and immateriality, this critical model of spectatorial doubleness effectively destabilizes conventional binary distinctions between these seemingly discrete categories.

At present, screen-reliant media installation art exists in an expanded (or possibly imploded) field of installation practices, making it especially urgent to develop a rigorous theoretical model for thinking about this work. Export's Ping Pong and Campus's Interface provide cogent historical examples of the radical potential for certain media-art configurations to productively destabilize our conventional relationships to screen spaces; in an era increasingly dominated by screen-mediated communication, they also provide provocative models for thinking about contemporary subjectivity. Both works offer potentially disorienting temporal and physical displacements; yet in both, the viewing experience is effectively rendered in an embodied present--by the viewer's erratic optical and physical engagement with the prerecorded footage in Ping Pong, and by his or her disorienting encounter with the closed-circuit loop of Interface. By foregrounding an active relationship among the spectator, media objects, exhibition space, and screen spaces, these media-art installations generate a self-conscious and troubled spectatorship explicitly contingent on the articulated tension between actual and screen-based spaces. Taking our relationship to screen space as their very subject matter, both Ping Pong and Interface work to reveal the institutional and ideological implications of the mass-media spectator's tendency to focus on the image or other informational space "inside" the screen and to divorce the image space from the viewer's own space. (27) Not only do spectators see themselves seeing, they are viscerally and unremittingly reminded of the embodied conditions of all viewing.