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OPTICAL STRATEGIES OF NEW MEDIA: FROM PERSPECTIVISM TO DRIFTING GLANCE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2022. Issue 3 (33). P. 9-38

A new ontology of seeing introduced by cinéma d’auteur and video art is proposed in the present paper. This ontology is associated with the transition from a centered position of subjectivity and perspectival construction of reality belonging to classical art – to a slowed-down vision and “drifting” glance introduced by new media. These slowed, layered, drifting and uncentered types of vision and continuous plans of moving image make it possible to shape a new sensitivity of “matter” in its complex variety and specificity. This is where experimental film and video art provoke and shape a new ontology of seeing. The study is focused on cinéma d’auteur (A. Tarkovsky, L. Visconti, A. Kiarostami, I. Bergman) and aesthetically and structurally related video art pieces (P. Rist, G. Hill, E.-L. Ahtila, Y. Fudong, et al.). These artists created specific ways of guiding viewer’s glance by means of moving image; exploring the aesthetic potential of camera travelling, mis-en-scène and montage; outlining the frontier of contemporary screen culture as a promising “symbolic form” of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We analyze the shift from a static and centered position of the viewer of a classical painting (whose place is determined by the structure of the image’s perspective) – to the movie spectator, whose gaze, as Jean-Luc Nancy mentioned, “gets embedded” into the moving of the camera’s point of view (while the body remains motionless); and then to the drifting glance of the viewer of video art (walking in the space of a multi-channel installation or virtual reality). We argue that the transforming structures of the moving image and strategies of the gaze tend to shape new forms of sensibility in line with the current state of the communication society, the visuality of which is characterized by the ever-increasing speed and density of information, hybrid media flux, multi-layer texture, and fragmented image. In each section of the paper, we introduce one type of decentered image/glance, which is shaped in artistic experiment: (1) deep mise-en-scène (A. Bazin); (2) “empty center” (slowed-down or motionless camera losing interest in the hero); (3) “sliding glance” (smooth camera travelling, leveling all objects in significance); (4) “drifting glance” (associative poetic montage); and (5) multi-screen compositions (stratification of the moving image). In the 20th and 21st centuries, when information is transmitted, read, and accumulated at a supernormal speed, and reading it calls for a keen gaze, a diffused, drifting view turns out to be the mode of vision with which one can see the flux, dissimilation and ambiguity lying beneath the surface (screen) of contemporaneity. And artists who use moving image to create a model of a relaxed gaze and multi-faceted seeing accept this challenge; and the relaxed, decentered, drifting and wandering glance provokes the intensity of artistic seeking.

Keywords: new media, new media art, video art, cinema, experimental film, moving image, multimedia installation, multi-channel projection, virtual reality, symbolic form