Surge Conditions

Surge Conditions features three programs that challenge the containment of the moving image by the screen. The series approaches the presentation of film and video as a spatial practice with the potential to create composite sites—in which the visual, material, and sonic conditions of a screened film ‘surge’ and feed back into the surrounding environment.

From the cinematic works of in a plenum space that hinge on acousmatic sound and off-screen presence, to the installation-based projects Both, Instrument & Sound and μ (mu) that deploy film and video across expanded material environments, this series considers the moving image beyond its traditional frame. It delves into how the gradual integration of theatricality into modern and contemporary visual art has affected artists’ engagement with the moving image. It also considers the cinematic potential of live encounters with film outside traditional theatrical settings.

In a 1971 essay “A Cinematic Atopia,” visual artist Robert Smithson reflected on the tendency of cinema to dislocate and disorder its materials. Styling the locations in film as fabrications, he wryly speculated on his idea of the ultimate site-specific cinema: “What I would like to do is build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine, and film the process of its construction. That film would be the only film shown [there]....” Surge Conditions is a counter-inquiry into Smithson’s provocation. Here, the screen is neither a neutral projection space nor cinematic artifact, but a particular site—an architecture and platform that is attuned simultaneously to a film’s inherent setting and to the contingent space where it is encountered by the viewer.

–Katherine C.M. Adams