Moving Through Images: Spectatorship and Meaning-Production in Interdisciplinary Art Environments

This dissertation establishes a framework for understanding embodied experience within immersive art environments by examining artworks that deploy interdisciplinary conventions to turn attention towards spectatorship itself. To accomplish this, I apply cross-disciplinary theory from John Dewey, Henri Bergson, Brian ODoherty, Gilles Deleuze, Laura U. Marks, Peggy Phelan, and others, to close-readings of select case studies. My methodology articulates how memory, duration, material forms, and the relational dynamics between the spectator and artwork all structure the aesthetic encounter. It is my aim to bring together the rich, but isolated, knowledge sets of the art gallery, cinema, and stage to develop a more nuanced understanding of how attentive spectatorial engagement with artwork is produced.

In Chapter One, Robert Lepage and Ex Machinas installation The Library at Night (2016) demonstrates the philosophical framework for how a spectator moves between the virtual and physical within aesthetic encounters. Chapter Two extends these ideas through the spatial conditions of the art gallery in dominique t skoltzs y2o dualits_ (2015) exhibitions. Chapter Three addresses the architecture of the cinema, through Janet Cardiff and George Bures Millers The Paradise Institute (2001), which calls attention to the temporal and social conditions of cinema as an interloper in the gallery. Finally, Chapter Four examines the Situation Rooms (2013/2016) as theatre group Rimini Protokoll disrupts the division between the audience and stage by placing the viewer in the middle of the action as a live participant. Each of these case studies examines how artistic intervention either deploys or disrupts the architecture of the exhibition space in order to produce spectatorship that oscillates between the viewers immediate aesthetic encounter and the structures that construct their experience the work.