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This chapter examines the occurrence of an authenticity effect through voice and in voice in digital media and media art. Drawing on specific examples of media and media artwork, it argues that “authenticity” itself may be heard as performative, and looks at a number of cases characterized by performativity rather than authenticity, and by intimacy and intensity, rather than by the immersiveness of the spectacle. These include amateur YouTube videos and machinima as well as Igor Stromajer’s Internet operas, Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post, and Janet Cardiff’s audio walks. The chapter also discusses how performative voices create and disturb sense and identity.

Since the mid-‘90s, contemporary art practice and criticism has been engaged in a widespread reformulation of the concept of “site-specificity.” At the same time, the vast proliferation of artists’ film and video installation has given rise to an anxiety over the proper material, institutional, and discursive location of these works as they abjure the traditional conditions of the art gallery’s white cube or the film theatre’s black box. The introduction endeavors to bring these two apparently disparate threads together by recalling their historical conjunction within a theory and practice of 1960s Expanded Cinema.

This chapter examines Janet Cardiff’s 2001 art installation, The Forty Part Motet, which was on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, in the winter of 2017. In this art installation, one enters the room and encounters forty speakers, arranged in an oval, playing a recording of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir singing “Spem in alium” (Hope in any other), which was composed by the English composer Thomas Tallis in 1556. One could opt to sit in the middle of the room and listen to the wall of sound created by the joint effect of each speaker, but one could also move about the room, causing one voice to pop out and another to be drowned out. In this way, the work invites the audience not only to enjoy the music but to remix it by sampling voices. The whole work is less an opportunity for deep listening than it is an opportunity for manipulating sound by moving around. The work itself is a supercharged technical remaking of the music. And the distortions one produces through one's own movements are the direct result of the fact that recording technology makes separate what was, in the making, collective.

This chapter investigates the recent trend toward installation of moving images in museums and art galleries. It considers the movement of the spectator through art venues and theorizes the nature of the screen and the haptic quality of the moving image in the work of such contemporary artists as Pierre Huyghe, Chantal Akerman, Janet Cardiff, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. The chapter develops an account of how the traditional theatrical projection of motion pictures has evolved into a new form of experiencing moving images with new affective and intellectual qualities.