Art of Projection

Art of Projection investigates the history and current state of the use of projected images in art, moving from the screen to the exhibition space and back again. The volume’s ten essays, written by leading art historians and critics, address precedents for the projection of images in space in nineteenth-century magic lantern shows and world’s fairs as well as the alternative conceptions of duration or the representation of time pioneered by Surrealists and experimental filmmakers in the early and mid-twentieth century. Central to the book is the lacuna between the development of Expanded Cinema in the seventies and the resurrection of many of its techniques in video installations of the nineties: two generations of artists who shared a desire to create experiences of space and time that were an alternative to the conventions adopted and promoted by the culture industry. Now, in the early twenty-first century, when the projection of moving pictures has itself become a convention in art exhibition and when analog media are being “migrated” to digital proxies, Art of Projection is a timely reconsideration of the history of media art.