A Virtual Presence in Space
A Virtual Presence in Space
This chapter examines recent work by Victor Burgin as a questioning or interrogation of the concept of medium in artworks that hold perception in an interstitial space between stillness and movement, image and text. The principle question is: what is a virtual Image? The analysis begins by reviewing Rosalind Krauss’s canonic essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” and George Baker’s more recent account of transformations of photographic media in his essay, “Photography’s Expanded Field.” The chapter continues in examining the variety of ways in Burgin’s artwork challenges normative concepts of the visual not by rebalancing the relation of image to text, but rather in investigating the relation between sense and Image. The argument begins with an analysis of Burgin’s earlier conceptual works like Photopath, and continues with close analyses of more recent moving image installations like Hôtel Berlin, Listen to Britain, and A Place to Read. In these works, what Burgin calls the remembered film acts as a force of memory where the experience of the work does not lie in any one formal element—whether textual, acoustical, photographic, videographic, or 3D computer modeling—but rather hovers between them in mobile acts of perception and memory.
Keywords: Victor Burgin, Gilles Deleuze, digital photography, Rosalind Krauss, George Baker, Robert Morris, virtual images, medium specificity, video art, remembered film
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