This book maps the presence of moving images within the field of public art through encounters with passersby. It argues that far from mere distraction or spectacle, moving images can produce moments of enchantment that can renew, intensify, or challenge our everyday engagement with public space and each other. These artworks also offer frameworks for understanding how moving images operate in public space―how they move viewers and reconfigure the site of the screen. Each chapter explores a mode of address that examines how artists and curators leverage the moving image’s attentional power to engage audiences, create spaces, make place, and challenge assumptions. This book also examines the difficulties and compromises that arise when using urban screens for public art.
Author(s): Annie Dell'Aria
Series: Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 307
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Praise for The Moving Image as Public Art
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
The Moving Image as Public Art
Moving Image Spectators and Audiences
Art in Public Space
The City and Its Ways of Seeing
Situating Moving Image Artworks in Space and Place
Chapter 2: Enchantment: Encountering Moving Images on Urban Surfaces
Encountering Art on Mass Transit
Bill Brand’s Masstransiscope (1980) and the Enchanted Subway Ride
The Fleeting Animation
The Resilient Installation
Dreamy Encounters and Nocturnal Illuminations
Doug Aitken’s SONG 1 (2012): Cinema-in-the-Round
Cinematic Museum
Amorous Entrancement
Cinema Sculpture
Chapter 3: Commercial Breaks: Intra-spectacular Public Art
Times Square Programming from Spectacolor Messages to Midnight Moments
Messages to the Public, 1982–1990
Video Art Initiatives from 2000 to 2010
Midnight Moment (2012–)
Other Platforms
The Turn Toward the Street
Chapter 4: Screen Spaces: Zones of Interaction and Recognition
Millennium Park as Public Art Playground
Fountain Portraits
The Magic Circle
Big Screen Selfies
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Spontaneous Moving Image Communities
Shadow Play
Under Scan
Sandbox
Paracinematic Parallels
Chapter 5: The Light Festival Phenomenon
Placemaking
Interfaces Between the City and the Urban
Origins
Projecting the Future City
Turning the City into a Canvas
Monumental Moving Murals
Multisensory Spectatorial Paths
On the Future of the Future City
Chapter 6: Precarious Platforms: The Paradox of Permanent Moving Images
Videowalls and Shopping Malls
Outdoor Screen Networks and Precarious Partnerships
An Unrealized Digital Canvas
Chapter 7: Superimposition: Forms of Moving Image Site-Specificity
The Other Side of the Window
Moving Image Fenestration
Wormholes
Hauntings
Apparitions
Montage Monuments
From Figures of Great Men to a Demand for the Right to Appear
Détournements
Chapter 8: Postscript: Reflections from a Summer Without Public Space
Bibliography
Index
