Definition
In general, the term installation art is used to describe works from the 1960s and onwards which share certain key characteristics, such as: the creation of an event, site-specificity, the focus on the theatrical, on process, spectatorship and temporality. Depending on the argument, various authors place the nature of installation art in its site-specific character (Onorato 1997), spectatorship (Reiss 1999; Bishop 2005) or the hybrid character of the installation as an art form (Suderburg 2000). Van Saaze adds that installation art has a long history and can be placed in the tradition of art movements such as action painting, dada, fluxus, minimalism, performance and conceptual art — movements which ’emphasise art as a process instead of the objet fini, and dethrone the autonomous and object-oriented character of art.’ Installation art, therefore, differentiates itself by making audience engagement a feature of the artform.
Van Saaze also notes that the ephemeral or temporal character of installation art lends itself to problems of conservation and reproduction. Our project can be viewed as an answer to that problem or an evolution to installation art. By transferring the exhibition from the material world to the virtual we break the barriers of temporal and spatial specificity by creating an artefact the is updated throughout and indefinite period of time.
Screens
X writes:
While the genre of installation art will be familiar to an art historical audience, it warrants a brief description here. Installation often overlaps with other post-1960 genres, such as fluxus, land art, minimalism, video art, performance, conceptual art, and process, all of which share an interest in issues such as site specificity, participation, institutional critique, temporality, and ephemerality. Installation artworks are participatory sculptural environments in which the viewer’s spatial and temporal experience with the exhibition space and the various objects within it forms part of the work itself. 8 These pieces are meant to be experienced as activated spaces rather than as discrete objects: they are designed to “unfold” during the spectator’s experience in time rather than to be known visually all at once. Installations made with media screens are especially evocative in that as environmental, experiential sculptures, they stage temporal and spatialized encounters between viewing subjects and technological objects, between bodies and screens. A potentially new mode of screen-reliant spectatorship emerges in the process. 9
Screens themselves have the curious status of functioning simultaneously as immaterial thresholds onto another space and time and as solid, material entities. The screen’s objecthood, however, is typically overlooked in daily life: the conventional propensity is to look through media screens and not at them. 9 Although the screen is a notoriously slippery and ambivalent object, one that seems to outrun its shadow of materiality at every turn, its physical form shapes both its immediate space and its relationship to viewing subjects. In environmental media artworks, the screen object and the viewer’s active, bodily experience with it can achieve a new centrality: the interface “matters” for media installation art. It matters in the sense that it constitutes an essential component of the artwork (the various dealings between spectators and the screen are structural to the work), but also because the body-screen interface is a phenomenal form in itself
In a 1974 manifesto, Sharits singled out four main imperatives for the development of the locational film works: (1) they must exist “in an open, free, public location”; (2) the form of presentation must not “prescribe a definite duration of respondent’s observation (i.e., the respondent may enter and leave at any time)”; (3) the very structure of the composition must be “non-developmental” and offer “an immediately apprehensible system of elements”; and, finally, (4) the content of the work must “not disguise itself but rather make . . . a specimen of itself.”
How might the terms of engaging media installations differ (or not) from observing other art objects? The moving images and illuminated surfaces of screen-reliant works provoke a different kind of attention from other art objects, both psychologically and physiologically. On the most basic level, moving and illuminated imagery insistently solicits the observer’s gaze and in so doing disciplines his or her body.
Discipline in our case means the calming effects we want to achieve with our animations and spaces. We can also reappropriate the ‘open, free, public location’ part of the definition above to mean the internet.