Thinking through the screen: Media installation, its spectator, and the screen

Situated at the intersection of art history and film/media studies, Thinking Through the Screen is an examination of the particularities of screen-reliant media installations as pertaining to art spectatorship. Focusing on selected case studies in European and North American art from 1968 to 1998---including works by Peter Campus, Valie Export, Dan Graham, Lynn Hershman, Bruce Nauman, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, and others--- Thinking Through the Screen interrogates the status and operative mechanisms of the media screen within an installation context. The first chapter assesses various categorizations of media installation art to demonstrate how efforts toward a theory and definition of this art form have thus far relied upon a series of hierarchical dualisms. I propose that the spectatorship produced by what I call screen-reliant media installation art is both material and immaterial, both virtual and actual, and is, as such, characterized by an inherent "doubleness." In the second chapter I theorize the doubleness structural to the screen, an ambivalent object that simultaneously exists as a material entity and an immaterial interface. The third chapter addresses the qualitative dimensions of the spectator's experience of media installations and the tensions associated with its exploratory duration. Chapters Four and Five focus on the spatial dynamics of media installation spectatorship. Chapter Four considers artists' reinterpretations of the ways that screen space has been traditionally described and experienced, while Chapter Five considers the digital screen and the continuities and breaks in the spatial conditions engendered by computer screen-reliant installations. Thinking Through the Screen aspires to offer a theoretical model for considering screen-reliant art spectatorship in an era in which we literally learn, work, play, and think through media screens.