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This chapter addresses theories of memory and theories of the moving image. It follows Paul Ricoeur in a conviction that memory is fundamentally ‘about the past’. It also presents an examination of the implications of digital technologies that result in the question of linear conceptions of time through Gilles Deleuze's concept of the time-image. Ricoeur discovers in Henri Bergson's analysis a useful approach to the problem of differentiating imagination from memory. Digital technologies would present a Benjaminian ideal of perfect and limitless reproducibility. The problem of authenticity is relevant to a discussion of memory in cinema. The current expansion of the use of digital technologies in all aspects of cinema is offering filmmakers with new opportunities. Roland Barthes' literary understanding of intertextuality meets a Deleuzian concept of the image-crystal, the cinematic incitation to perceive multiple temporal layers.

This chapter traces the lineage of moving-image installation through film history. A brief journey through the history of film reveals many elements that might well have been cast off in the digital age but instead prevailed and resurfaced, refreshed in the work of contemporary artists, especially when taking the form of moving-image installation. This chapter first charts the history of film, with particular emphasis on the origins of the world of illusions that began deep in human history with shadow plays and puppetry, along with the camera obscura and magic lanterns. It then considers how the science of optics has successfully re-animated the hallucinatory world of the paranormal, both at the dawn of cinema and in the analogue phase of film and video. We see in these works an enduring fascination with the moving image and its ability to transport the viewer into another reality or the “power to take perception elsewhere.” The chapter also looks at the rise of magic shows and vision machines, along with the evolution of mainstream narrative film, European art cinema, abstract film, and Russian montage.

This chapter discusses the complex and varied fascination of contemporary art with the history of theatrical cinema, or what the author calls the memory of cinema. The memory of cinema in current moving image and installation art is producing a new kind of time-image (Deleuze) whose challenge to previous conceptions of medium produces a “naming crisis” in what counts as still or moving images. Here the memory of cinema, and the disappearance of a certain experience of cinema, demand from viewers a new imagination of what movement, time, and history might mean. The author also offers new definitions of the virtual and the virtual image. Examples of the memory of cinema in contemporary art are offered through close analysis of two exemplary works. Christoph Girardet and Mattias Müller’s Meteor (2011) is read through Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Schriftbild and non-sensuous similarity. Ken Jacobs’s Capitalism: Child Labor (2006) is read as an example of paracinema whose reflexive examination of history, time, and the archive produces a new kind of critical time-image.

This chapter discusses the public exhibition of 3-D films that began to take place in Europe and the United States. Many inventors also started proposing an array of devices for capture and display of moving images in three dimensions. The chapter looks at the developments around 1900, including high-speed stereo cinematography, color stereoscopic cinematography, innovative editing, color 3-D photography, and anaglyphic motion pictures.

A recent flurry of scholarship around slow cinema’s use of long takes signals a renewed interest in looking. Adding to this work, this chapter considers contemporary artists’ moving images shown in galleries, focusing in particular on a work by Sharon Lockhart. Lockhart’s film installations have much in common with slow cinema, including an emphasis on minimal movements, minor elements and the apparently undramatic. However, because it is conceived for contemporary art spaces, this work commonly adopts the short form or operates through a looped format. As a consequence of these differences, a new critical trajectory is opened up in which it is less duration that is of interest – or how seeing is produced by a sustained look – and more visuality itself, or how ‘really looking’ can produce a different kind of engagement with the visual. By applying ideas from Georges Didi-Huberman to Lockhart’s installation Double Tide (2009) we find that the work calls for a kind of slow looking. Through slow looking we are more able to ‘imagine for ourselves’ and more open to the experience of not knowing.

This chapter examines the rapid and accelerating technological transformations to film that have been happening in the last decade. These transformations make it anachronistic to speak solely of film and require the analysis of a more inclusive moving image. Moreover, these transformations have occurred simultaneously with the developments of globalization and transnationalism. Broadband, streaming video, and networked social relationships have been central to the formation of new communities and new forms of engagement with existing social conditions. The chapter seeks to highlight the interconnection between technology politics and economy by focusing on the question of moving-image experiments and migration. It focuses on the works of filmmakers who have worked in an experimental mode.

In 1976, Maastricht University Library developed the concept of the Study Landscape to respond to students' needs. It consists of a combination of study spaces and learning resources, supervised by skilled librarians and with generous opening hours. The Study Landscape contains a variety of titles and types of resources, directly related to the curriculum. Text, pictures, models, diagrams, and moving images, all are present. To ensure just-in-time availability of information to all students, large numbers of titles (3–25 copies of each title) and programmes (selected by teaching staff) are bought by the library and all the necessary facilities are concentrated in one building. This chapter discusses the development of the Study Landscape over the past few decades. It addresses questions such as: How does it offer access to all the information and tools for searching, using, sharing, and building knowledge in relation to teaching and learning at Maastricht University FHML in particular)? What changes have occurred and are likely to occur in a future characterized by a knowledgeable society with growing needs for flexibility and mobility, and students that are ‘digital natives’?

This book concludes by discussing three issues related to the genealogy of installation and the moving image: the displacement of analogue technology by the digital age, the ironing out of technical and procedural differences between artists' film and video by means of standardized digital equipment and universal data conformity, and the impact of cognitive science on spectatorship. The chapter also examines how the status of moving-image artists began to rise when practitioners such as Bill Viola, Martha Rosler, and Isaac Julien gained international recognition, and how film theorists like Catherine Fowler de-emphasized the role of the artist by appealing to concepts of “inter-relationality” and reallocate agency to the audience or to “participants.” Finally, it considers what motivates the artist to create a moving-image installation for public consumption.

This chapter considers the lineage of moving-image installation through painting. There are obvious continuities across painting and the installation of a moving image—both practices organize pictorial elements: shapes, textures, colors, light and dark into readable signs, for the most part defined by a frame, singly or in series. The orchestration of these components draws on compositional principles, forms of staging that were developed in painting. Beyond the common artistry that unites painters and those creating moving image installations, further homologies can be found in the structuring of spectatorship around a fixed point of view in front of the image, an operational bequest from classical realist painting. This chapter also examines Cubism as a new aspect of mobility, articulated within the spatialized domain of the image itself, as well as Futurism's depictions of movement. Finally, it discusses the historical moment of rupture in which the limitations of painting were held to be inhibiting the progress of modernity in the arts.

This chapter examines expanded cinema as a critical antecedent of moving-image installation. The American critic Gene Youngblood is credited with coining the term “expanded cinema,” which denotes the condition of “liberated film”—a practice that develops the making and viewing of film beyond the conventional screen-to-seating configuration of movie theaters and multiplexes. Expanded cinema explored the relationship of film to what Duncan White describes as “the environment of perception,” testing the limits of cognition by seeking to establish the minimum legibility of sound and picture, the degree of semantic coherence required for the projection to be read as a film. This chapter considers the ways artists emphasize the material instability of the filmstrip as well as the apparatus that could magically bring film to life—but only in darkness. It also discusses the sculptural and phenomenological properties of the projection beam and the spatial relationship between the projector, the shaft of light, and the surface it strikes to create a moving image. Finally, it looks at the emergence of “paracinema” as a variation on expanded cinematic works.

This book explores the frequent co-incidence of installation and the moving image—two irreconcilable artistic practices—in galleries and museums. More specifically, it traces the lineage of moving-image installation through architecture, painting, sculpture, performance, expanded cinema, film history, and countercultural film and video from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It argues that moving-image installation embodies the perceptual doubleness of the spectator, the human ability to suspend disbelief and entertain two realities simultaneously. It also discusses the arguments of experimental film's detractors and counters them by indicating the lessons that may be derived from oppositional film practices, particularly structural/materialist film. Finally, it considers sound, a component of installed work that is often overlooked, along with the procedural, political, theoretical, and ideological positions espoused by artists in the period from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

This chapter investigates how projection mapping reconfigures the relationship between projection surface, moving image, and space in the field of artists’ projected moving-image works. Projection mapping is a relatively new method that can be used to transform irregularly shaped objects and indoor/outdoor spaces into display surfaces. This mode of projection envelops three-dimensional surfaces with digital moving images, using complicated projection technologies. In examining this process, the author analyses various contextual reviews as well as her own piece Casting to discover projection mapping’s distinctive properties. Casting (2016) is Kang’s projection-mapping installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, which was created as the culmination of Kang’s six-month artist-in-residency program at the V&A, and acquired by the institution in 2017 as its first purchase of a projection-mapping installation piece. This chapter examines how, by integrating volumetric objects and space, projection mapping dismantles the conventional notion of screen and frame that are accepted in experimental film and video installation works. The chapter introduces the concept of augmented space to understand how the spatial employment of projected moving images generates a novel type of narrative and experiences in comparison with the previous projected moving-image artworks. Accordingly, the chapter identifies how projection mapping practices can develop a distinguished type of aura in the realm of digital media art works.

Introduction: makes a case for the importance to study the long take today as something that probes our sense of time across different moving image platforms; develops the category of wonder—first time seeing that appeals to our curiosity—as a central category of the book; presents the contemporary long take as a medium to challenge the attentional economy of today’s agitated screen cultures; argues against associating the long take with slow cinema or contemporary cinephelia.

Chapter 1: traces the history and theory of the long take in twentieth-century art cinema to make a case who and why twenty-first century moving image practice differs from the past and its concepts; shows how contemporary long take practice absorbs the recalibrates the dual legacies of expanded cinema and art cinema of the 1960s, and how it asks to rethink our concept of art cinema today, and why its study neither belongs to film scholars nor art critics alone today

Conclusion: the focus is on durational work done with handheld screens (Janet Cardiff/Georges Bures Miller) and video games; the aim is not simply to probe the extent to which we can locate the durational as a stage for the wondrous in technological environments whose emphasis on mobility is normally seen as hostile to contemplative modes of perception, but in so doing to define an expanded concept of contemporary art cinema—a polymorphic concept of art cinema centrally concerned with exploring the temporality of movement, of bodies and matter in motion, across different media today.

This chapter explores the dialectics of spectatorship as it pertains to moving-image installation. It first considers Antonio Damasio's concept of a “protoself” rooted in the theater of the senses before turning to a discussion of the subject as instantiating a unique coincidence of physical and psychic attributes, framed by historical and socio-political circumstances, and endowed with varying propensities to resist or be altered by an experience of a moving-image installation. It then explains how splitting of attention between multiple dimensions in a gallery can render us imperfect spectators, and goes on to describe the notion of double consciousness or spectatorial doubleness. It also examines the issue of complicity that lies at the heart of spectatorship, and how spectatorial attention deficit has been exacerbated by the oversaturation of the digital moving image in galleries and in both civic and domestic spaces. Finally, it looks at strategies for sustaining spectatorial attention.