Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introducing Massive Media
- 2 Large-scale Projection and the (New) New Monumentality
- 3 Low-Resolution Media Façades in a Data Society
- 4 Curating Massive Media
- 5 When Buildings Become Screens
- About the Author
- List of Exhibitions, Films, Songs, Videos, and Installations
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
2 - Large-scale Projection and the (New) New Monumentality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introducing Massive Media
- 2 Large-scale Projection and the (New) New Monumentality
- 3 Low-Resolution Media Façades in a Data Society
- 4 Curating Massive Media
- 5 When Buildings Become Screens
- About the Author
- List of Exhibitions, Films, Songs, Videos, and Installations
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
Summary
Abstract
The use of the moving image in public space extends the techniques of cinema — namely superimposition, montage, and apparatus/dispositif — threatening, on one end of the spectrum, to dehistoricise and distract, and promising to provide new narrative and associative possibilities on the other. These techniques also serve as helpful tools for analysis and practice drawn from cinema studies that can be applied to examples of the moving image in public space. Case studies and creative works are presented in order to examine and illustrate the ways that public projections extend the effect of superimposition through the rehistoricisation of space, expand the diegetic boundaries of the moving image through spatial montage, and enact new possibilities for the cinematic apparatus and dispositif through scale and interaction in order to reframe and democratise historical narratives and scripts of urban behaviour.
Keywords: architecture, dispositif, montage, superimposition, digital projection
Moving Images
In the summer of 2008, Quebec City became the site of the world's largest architectural projection: a 45-min long projection-mapped spectacle covering 400 years of settlement, development, and culture dating back to when the city was first founded as a French colony. For approximately 60 nights every summer, from 2008 until 2012, street lights were dimmed and people would gather on the docks, along the ramparts, or in hotel rooms around the city to witness an iconic building, the massive bunge grain silos in Quebec City's harbour, tell the story of this unesco world heritage site (UNESCO 2014). With each screening attracting about 10,000 spectators, Le Moulin à Images (The Image Mill) by director Robert Lepage and his team at Ex Machina (see Figure 2-1 and Figure 2-2) was seen by about half a million people every year (Dubé 2012, 187).
The Quartier des spectacles in Montreal represents another approach to the presentation of historical material in public space through large-scale projection. One particular installation, McLarena (2014) (see Figure 2-3), an interactive public projection commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada, invited participants to mimic the choreography of the dancer that appears in renowned Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren's Canon (1964) in a mobile recording unit located in front of the projection.
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- Information
- Building as ScreenA History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media, pp. 49 - 98Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019