The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  The fragmentary and semi-post-structural logic behind this narrative structure was repeated in the treatment of the gallery space used.18 The way in which screens, seating, projected images and actor positions were organised in this basic rectangular space was intended to ensure that multiple and different associations between text, action and image were continually elicited. In short, the intention was to make space “active in plot construction”. Initially, the projections used in the piece were standard photographic or filmic images cast onto walls or independent partitioning screens.

  As the piece developed, however, the intention was to use projected filmic imagery to manipulate the “perceptual experience of the space”. By employing a technique of filming images in the space and then re-projecting those same images back into the space, the aim was to blur the difference between intangible filmic image and physical gallery setting. Consequently, Incidental Legacy became a work that functioned on various levels, as a fragmentary textual game, a spatially deconstructive experience and, most importantly, in the context of this series of essays, as a perceptually ambiguous phenomenon in which the difference between physical space and projected image blurs. A brief description of how it worked in practice is provided in the following chapters.

  Notes

  1Neumann, Dietrich. “Introduction”. In: Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner, Prestel, London, 1996. p. 7.

  2For an overview of video art and installation, see: Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function, Berg, Oxford, 2006. Also see: Rush, Michael. Video Art, Thames and Hudson, London, 2003.

  3For specific information on video installation, see: Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function, Berg Publishers, Oxford, 2006. Specifically, see: “The Gallery Opens its Doors: Video Installation and Projection”, p. 199–214; “Off the Wall: Sculpture and Installation”, p. 243–260.

  4For an overview, see: Freeland, Cynthia and Townsend, Chris. The Art of Bill Viola, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004. A more specific analysis of works in an installation context can be found in: Morgan, Stuart, Sparrow, Felicity and Viola, Bill. Bill Viola – The Messenger, Chaplaincy to the Arts & Recreation in North East England, Durham, 1996.

  5For information about the work of Bruce Nauman in the early stages of his experiments with video, see: Lewallen, Constance, M. (ed.), A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2007. An overview is offered in: Morgan, Robert, C. “An Introductory Survey”. In: R. Morgan (ed.), Bruce Nauman, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2002. p. 1–17.

  6For documentation and description of these and other works, see: Morgan, Robert (ed.). “Interviews”. In: R. Morgan (ed.), Bruce Nauman, Ibid. p. 233–316.

  7See the exhibition catalogue: Winter, Judith (ed.). Tony Sniden: Everything Must Go (Installation, Video and Film), University of Sunderland Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland, 2003.

  8See: Quasha, George and Stein, Charles. Tall Ships: Gary Hill’s Projective Installations, Station Hill of Barrytown, New York, 1997.

  9For an overview, see: Pelzer, Birgit. Dan Graham, Phaidon Press, London, 2001. For a more theoretical engagement, see: Moure, Gloria and Graham, Dan. Dan Graham: Works, and Collected Writings, Ediciones Poligrafa, Barcelona, 2009.

  10See: Corrin, Lisa, G. (ed.). Jane and Louise Wilson, Exhibition Catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, London, 1999.

  11Founded in 1980 by Julian Maynard Smith and Miranda Payne, Station House Opera has worked with video and performance in over thirty multi-media pieces. Their work is featured in: Kaye, Nick. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, Routledge, London, 2000. p. 163–170.

  12Punchdrunk was established in 2000 and offers a variation on “promenade theatre” in which the audience moves around the “theatrical events” presented. Described as “immersive”, this is intrinsically linked to the spaces of performance.

  13Hybrid Artworks was a UK-based multi-media cooperative of artists, actors, architects, designers, musicians and dancers. Producing multi-media installation work between 1995 and 1999, it was composed on three permanent members (Graham Cairns, George Crockford and Marc Wongsam) who collaborated with others on a project by project basis. The work outlined here was documented in a short documentary film: Hybrid Artworks: Experimentations in Space, Hybrid Artworks, Hull, 1999.

  14In this regard their work was typical of video installation and its engagement with spatial context. See: Murdoch, Kate. Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 2010.

  15Cairns, G., Crockford, G. and Wongsam M. (eds). Hybrid Artworks: Experimentations in Space, Video/DVD, Hybrid Artworks, Hull, 1999.

  16The key theoretical texts underlying this piece were: Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1973; Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader, Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1979. In particular, Eco’s concepts of semiosis, narrative and discursive structures were central to applying a post-structural theory of the textual reading process to the narrative engagement of audiences with performance texts. See also: Cairns, Graham. Syncretic Space, Hull School of Architecture, Hull, 1999.

  17Cairns, Graham. Syncretic Space, Ibid.

  18Hybrid Artworks produced site-specific pieces for galleries, theatres and exterior spaces. This piece was staged in The European Illustration Collection Gallery, Kingston upon Hull.

  The physical experience of space and the sensorial perception of image

  Performance 1

  Performed initially as part of a music festival in August 1998, in the European Installation Gallery, Hull, Shadows was the first of the three performances that made up the entire Incidental Legacy project.1 In addition to its three permanent members, this performance involved the collaboration of two musicians, positioned outside the doors of the gallery, and two principal actors, Actors A and B.2 Principally aimed at experimenting with ways in which space can “become active in the interpretation of the script”, the Shadows performance involved a very particular, if simple, plan arrangement. The basic rectangular space was divided by placing three large screens in the corners, two parallel rows of seating along the longest walls and projecting video and photographic images around the space3 (Figs. 1–2). The video projection was composed of material filmed during the rehearsals and, thus, presented the audience with images of the actors practicing their dialogue in the gallery itself (Fig. 3). By contrast, the photographic material (projected in the corner) was simply composed of slides taken of that same corner in which no action was seen.

  Figure 1: Plan arrangement in Performance 2, Memories.

  Figure 2: Image of rehearsal space later re-projected in the same space.

  Figure 3: Seated audience and movement of actors.

  With respect to the seating arrangement, various things were done to ensure it played an important role in the interpretation of the piece. On the simplest level, the use of seating mentally prepares the audience for a work that will conform to the standard public-actor relationship of theatre.4 However, it also sets up a performance arena in which the actors are free to move in front, behind and to both sides of the audience. Similarly, it sets out a spatial arrangement in which video footage and photographs can be projected roundabout. It is an approach to spatial planning that prevents any one member of the audience experiencing the same combination of images, actions and dialogue at any given moment.5 The piece thus becomes a multi-media collage that the public are obliged to selectively interpret.

  Performance 2

  Moving on from these spatially led experiments, the second performance of the project developed a more visual relationship between the filmic material, the gallery space and the action it witnessed. Not only did it multiply possible mental associations through controlling site lines, it optically manipulated the perception of the space through filmic effects. Titled Memories, this piece was
initially performed some months after Performance 1, Shadows, as part of an annual literature festival.6 It differed from its predecessor in two principal ways. First, the seating was completely removed from the gallery and the actors were generally restricted to set corners of the space; an arrangement that allowed the audience to move completely freely around the gallery (Fig. 4). Second, there was a greater use of videoed material as filmed images of Performance 1, Shadows, were projected during this second presentation.

  During the first performance, two cameras had been set to continuously film the piece. These cameras captured two differing perspectives of Performance 1, Shadows, in real time. In the subsequent Memories performance, this material was projected, again in real time, against the gallery’s two end walls. The result of this was that the audience now watched two simultaneous and totally synchronised performances, one on screen and the other live.7 In addition, footage from the initial rehearsals was also projected and, as a result, they also watched layers of rehearsal footage. Consequently, the space became a visual tapestry of its own history, the number of associations made between actions, dialogue and images multiplied, and the whole event became a symbolic representation of the complexity of memory8 (Fig. 5). The most important consequences of this overlaying of projections and actions, however, were perceptual; the images projected on each end wall were actually images of those same end walls that created a sense of an extended false perspective.

  Projected at large scale and on opposing walls, these projections actually created the effect of a double false perspective through which both ends of the space were apparently elongated. It was an optical effect utilised by the actors physically as they began interacting with their own projected image occupying the “filmic space”.9 This layering of physical space with filmic space definitively turned the piece from a “theatrically orientated” narrative work in its original manifestation, into a semi-filmic spatial installation in its second form. Whilst it still had a narrative component that the audience followed along with the “real” actors, they also became more interested in the manipulation of their perceptual reading of the gallery space. The use of filmic imagery not only had narrative implications in its explosion of possible associations, it extended the public’s reading of the gallery beyond its physical boundaries. It turned the filmic representation of space into a principal theme and operative device.

  Figure 5: Audience moves freely around a space optically elongated by its own video projection.

  Figure 4: Plan arrangement in Performance 3.

  Performance 3

  The use of film to manipulate our reading of physical space and live actions, initiated in Performance 2, Memories, was taken to its logical conclusion in the next, and final, development of the project. Echoes was a performance that involved the complete elimination of live acting and relied totally on the pre-recorded material accumulated throughout the previous performances. Given this independence from physical action, it represented the culmination of a project that had moved from the realm of theatre, passed through the field of performance art, and finally positioned itself completely within the theoretical framework of video installation.10 As had occurred previously, Performance 2 had been filmed using a continuously running camera, and this material was layered on top of the earlier material in Performance 3, Echoes.11 Given the multiplicity of the mediated imagery this now produced, and its fragmentary spatial disposition around the gallery, it became an alternative type of Cinerama in which multiple, repeated and contradictory images were continually replayed (Fig. 6).

  In Performance 3, Echoes, pre-recorded imagery was no longer accompanied by live action. Here, one was confronted with an aural, visual and thus perceptual experience that was completely based on mediated images. These images were not just mediated, however they were memories, echoes and shadows of the work’s previous manifestations. Memory was not only theme, but substance. As an installation, this mediated contemplation of memory was exhibited over an extended period of time and had no specific performance duration, unlike the previous time-limited “performances”. Consequently, it was not experienced by an audience as such, but rather by a stream of individuals. These individuals entered a space that, with the exception of a few screens, projectors and a TV monitor, was completely devoid of physical elements. They thus entered a space in which their attention was totally focused on the filmic imagery.12 Indeed, they entered a space that was completely “constructed” through the projection of filmic imagery (Fig. 7).

  Figure 6: Plan arrangement in Performance 1.

  Figure 7: A space constructed of televisual equipment, screens and images.

  Whereas in Performance 2, Memories, the attention of the public oscillated between action in the physical space and action in the mediated zone, here attention was continually located in the filmic mediated realm. At the level of symbolic representation and optical perception, the physical attributes of the space and the performance ceased to play any significant role in the experience of the work.13 The bodies of the audience may have occupied the physical space, but their eyes were focused on projections and their ears on recorded sounds. As a result, we could say that they mentally occupied a mediated “other space”. The physicality of the gallery had begun to dissolve as an important physical entity, and film had begun to impose itself as a “constructor of space”. The difference between the mediated and the real not only began to blur, but also the mediated began to dominate.

  Incidental Legacy: A technical description

  From a practical or technical perspective, the increasing importance given to the mediated image over the physical space in Incidental Legacy’s three performances affected both the way the space was arranged and how it was filmed. It also led to some simple but very specific technical decisions about spatial layout, scale of projection and issues of lighting that we will end by describing here. The most obvious consequences of the decision to use film as a way of manipulating the perception and use of the gallery space was in the decisions about where to position the projectors relative to the screens; a question that had to take into account both physical and perceptual factors.

  With regard the projection of the initial rehearsal footage, for example, the intention was to allow either audience or actors to position themselves between the projectors and the screens so that their shadows could enter into the projected image. The creation of this perceptual effect, however, had to be balanced by the need to have a correctly scaled filmic image on the screen which would present the filmic images of the actors at “real scale”. In order to achieve both the physical and the visual effect required using the rudimentary equipment available, the projector was positioned at a specific distance from the screen so that only the central parts of the images fell on the screen, with peripheral information being lost in the empty space down the sides of the screens.

  This simple problem of scale synchronisation was dealt with in a very simple cinematographic way. Careful compositional control at all stages of the filming process ensured that the most important visual information fell in the central section of the frame. Thus, although peripheral information may not appear on the screen, the image that is visible contains all the necessary narrative information (Fig. 8). Similar issues arose with respect to photographic images projected in the corner of the space. These images were photographed and later projected from such a position that the line that delineates the corner of the gallery in the image corresponds with the actual physical line of the space’s corner (Fig. 9). In both cases, there is an extremely close dialogue between the compositional techniques of the visual media used and the physical nature of the architectural setting.

  With respect to the end wall “false perspective”, this type of rudimentary dialogue between projected image and physical space became ever more important and slightly more complex. As already discussed, the main footage was filmed by two cameras set up to record in the direction of the end walls, the resulting material later being proj
ected in the same direction. In order that these images create a minimally effective false perspective, the projectors were tilted slightly and positioned so that the image more or less “fills the wall” (Fig. 10). In addition, during the initial recording stage, the actors were directed to avoid moving too close to the cameras whenever possible so as to ensure that their projected figures did not often appear larger than human scale in the resulting filmic image, which is essential if the actors were to later interact with their mediated representations as if real. Furthermore, in order to eliminate, or at least minimise, the clear borders that naturally tend to characterise projected images in dark spaces, the same lighting arrangement was used both during the filming and during the projection. This ensured that the darkened corners of the physical space were partly matched by the darkened edges in the projected images. Made to more or less compositionally correspond, the filmed shadow blended with the real shadow, thus reducing the impact of the image’s border (Fig. 11).

  Figure 8: Edges of projection beyond wall.

  Figure 9: Images of corner projected in corner.

  Figure 10: Projector angle coincides with wall-screen.

  Figure 11: Dark areas on film correspond with lighting.

  Although far from being serious, or in-depth cinematic/spatial experiments, and even though they did not create totally convincing visual illusions, these considerations were central to the perceptual effectiveness of the installation. What is evidenced in each of them is the fact that space and image were not considered independently, but rather as mutually determining factors; the physical characteristics of the gallery determining the compositional characteristics of the image, which, in turn, affected the perception of the space once re-projected. In short, the aim of perceptual fusion led to the need for a certain technical fusion between space and film.14