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Themesicon: navigation pathArt and Cinematographyicon: navigation pathImmersion/Participation
 
 
 
 
 

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sound scenarios that absorb the viewer in a kind of hypnotic camouflage of reality, to create an allenveloping spatial effect. In order to attain such effects, which produce a kind of hypnotizing camouflage of reality, they consciously draw on professional editing techniques and the entire technological repertoire, from MTV to Hollywood production, which all endeavor to overwhelm the viewer, both visually and acoustically. Such immersive installations as these are interesting because they explore themes dealing with the social mainstream: the need for transcendence; the search for extraordinary experiences such as the rave or the Love Parade; the penetration of technology, mass media, and trends, and their influence upon all areas of contemporary culture; the stimulus of speed; the maelstrom of information; and the fascination of the potential for omnipresence, which is the futuristic promise of the media. The other, more conceptually defined trend in video installation exposes the cinema and media culture in general as a constructed spectacle. Working with found footage and icons of film and television history, artists such as Douglas Gordon or

 

Pierre Huyghe open up reflective approaches to the nature of cinematic images and their relevance for the patterns to be found within our inclination to identification. These impulses, both iconophilic as well as iconoclastic, are inherent in the re-make indicating an interest in transforming the usual models of representation in the cinema, a theme which is the actual focus of each formal «re-framing» of found materials. These approaches do not satisfy the public’s need for cinematic spectacle, as do old, familiar hits such as Alfred Hitchcock's «Rear Window»(1954), «Vertigo» (1958), «Psycho» (1960), or David Lynch's «Blue Velvet» (1985); instead, attention is redirected to the requirements of the medium itself. In refocusing the remake on the dispositif, the position of the observer becomes the actual topic. Splintering the standpoint (multiple-viewers, double vision, time-delay, etc.) causes Christian Metz’s principle of the identification with the camera (or alternately, with the actors) to become invalid. [7] The observer’s position, which, to this point, had had a defined frame of reference in a museum, loses its certainty regarding the object of reception, because the observer’s

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