Abstract
This chapter considers how moving images generate new social spaces and encounters in front of the screen—horizontal zones of interaction and recognition. Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain (2004) in Chicago’s Millennium Park establishes a “magic circle” between two monumental screens. Artworks that explicitly engage interactive technologies fold viewing space into screen space. I develop the political potential of this mode of address through deep analysis of works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and conclude with a brief discussion of architectural interventions that act as paracinematic projectors onto the ground. The horizontal planes produced by moving images in this chapter evoke a longer history of places of public mixing and contestation from public fountains and pools to disco dance floors.
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Notes
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Koeck and Flintham, 303.
- 3.
When McCall first screened the work in grittier downtown loft spaces, he would “rely on the dust particles in the air, which would often be augmented by a couple smokers,” though when it is shown today in the more antiseptic white cube spaces of museums, curators opt for fog machines. Anthony McCall, “‘Line Describing a Cone’ and Related Films,” October 103 (January 1, 2003): 47.
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- 6.
Mondloch, 68.
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Sean Cubitt, “Defining the Public in Piccadilly Circus,” in Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces, ed. Nikos Papastergiadis (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), 83. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79.
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Cristina Albu, Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 23.
- 10.
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- 13.
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- 14.
The “Chicago Picasso,” a 1967 untitled piece by the world’s most famous artist living at the time, initiated the explosion of public sculpture in modernist plazas. Chicago was also at the forefront of the community mural movement in the 1970s, and in 1993, the city hosted Culture in Action, a show curated by Mary Jane Jacob that highlighted community engagement in art and featured works that were defined by Suzanne Lacy as “new genre public art.”
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Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 107.
- 16.
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- 18.
However, this is not without some local resentment at both the corporate control of the space and the lack of involvement by residents in selecting or designing the works in the park. Corrinn E. Conard, “Where Is the Public in Public Art? A Case Study of Millennium Park” (MA Thesis in Art Education, Columbus, Ohio, The Ohio State University, 2008), 125–27.
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I visited Crown Fountain over two days and one night in August of 2014, and was fortunate to have brief conversations with approximately forty individuals across fifteen groups.
- 29.
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The Instagram hashtag “#latergram,” which is used for images uploaded a significant amount of time after the user took them, is a perfect example of this phenomenon, as is the mere term “Instagram” and the application’s evocation of Polaroid photography’s immediacy and aesthetics.
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Dell’Aria, A. (2021). Screen Spaces: Zones of Interaction and Recognition. In: The Moving Image as Public Art. Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65904-2_4
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