Abstract

Cross-examined by Kathy Marmot & Matthew Shadbolt

Contemporary media artists doing installations, by the creative attention they give to both form and content, appear to be looking for a formula that could, by it general appeal, launch a new content based industry. I like to compare their work to that of early cinematographers who had to develop simultaneously the technology to create the content, the content itself and also the context in which the content could be delivered. We tend to forget that today’s cinema industry with it’s relatively stable technologies, unionised workers, marketing strategies, distribution networks, star systems and millionaires, evolved from modest experiments attempting to adequate form with content. In that sense, cinema can be seen as a hugely successful installation. In this timely turn of a millennium, new computing and connecting technologies appear to invite new type of contents just as individuals and societies are trying to look at themselves and at the world in new ways. The example of early cinema will give today’s media artists doing installations a sense of the time it might take for their experimental field to evolve into an art and an industry.

• Luc Courchesne, CA, was born in 1952 in St-Lonard d’Aston, Quebec. He studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (BDComm, 1974), and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (MSVS, 1984). He began his explorations in interactive video in 1984 when he co-authored “Elastic Movies”, one of the earliest experiments in the field with Ellen Sebring, Benjamin Bergery, Bill Seaman and others. He has since produced several installations including Encyclopedia Chiaroscuro (1987), Portrait One (1990), Family Portrait (1993) Hall of Shadows (1996), Landscape One (1997) and Passages (1998). His work has been shown extensively in galleries and museums worldwide (Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Montreal’s Musee d’Art Contemporain, Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada, Tokyo’s NTT InterCommunication Center, Museum of New Zealand, Korea’s Kwangju Biennale ’95). He was recently awarded the Grand Prix of the ICC Biennale ’97 in Tokyo for his interactive video panorama “Landscape One”. He is professor of information design at Universite de Montreal.
• Kathy Marmot, US
• Matthew Shadbolt, UK/NL