Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics

By: Sotirios Bahtsetzis

ABSTRACT

The article discusses multimodal meaning-making in the context of video and multi-media installation art and related curatorial practices. It draws on the Deleuzian concept of pure duration or ‘time-image,’ understood as a Foucauldian dispositive (Panagia) and, thus, as a broader heuristic device in discussing the viewer’s experience engulfed in installations. It discusses non-discursive aspects of meaning-making while focusing on the viewer/ participant’s subjectifying, multi-sensorial, kinaesthetic, performative, and time-based experience of an exhibition. We discuss installation art as a temporal situation, constructed on the difference between represented or narrated time and subjective or reception time (Petersen), following the phenomenological category of the artwork as a ‘temporal object’ (Ingarden). The paper aims to offer novel interpretive tools for investigating our current shifting sensorium engaged in meaning-making. It also maintains that installation art constitutes not only a compelling cultural strategy for “imagining and imaging the world” (Rodowick) but also the means to understand how modes of perception converge in producing subjectivity.

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