Filmic Bodies: Transgressing Boundaries between Filmic and Real Space

ABSTRACT

Conventional cinema constructs a strict demarcation between filmic space and the architecture of the auditorium. In acknowledging the constructed nature of the filmic situation, moving image installation has the potential to transgress this metaphysical boundary between “virtual” and “real”: to establish an encounter with a figural presence. Here, our orientation toward the virtual image is brought into play, but in such a way that ambiguities of location problematize the spectator position, revealing the radical nonmateriality of the filmic image. Using examples of my own work and others, I examine how such works address an inherent filmic tension between the moving and still image, drawing upon photography’s spectral indexicality to blur the boundary between life and death.

Keywords:

• film/video theory
• spectatorship
• reception aesthetics
• body and space

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ken Wilder

Ken Wilder is an installation artist who has taught and practiced architecture. Wilder is Postgraduate Program Director at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. He has written widely on issues of spectatorship and reception aesthetics in relation to painting, installation art and the moving image, with articles published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Estetika, Image & Narrative and the Moving Image Review and Art Journal, and a recent chapter on the Freee Art Collective in the book Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics.