Cinesthesia: Museum Cinema and the Curated Screen

by Garrett Stewart

Discourses of cinephilia old and new have displayed a certain anxiety about opening film up and out to the unprogrammed zones of the museum, a space too dispersed and variable for the invested look. The museumised “movie”, with a spectator who is ambulatory rather than passive, demands a form of attention quite different from the theatrically-projected film or the mobilised platform. Breaking with the modes of intimacy and absorption associated with these more common movie-viewing experiences, galleries have gone public with the extracted, looped or otherwise installed moving image, in everything from its fetishized 35mm form through to the latest participa­tory virtual reality. When kinetic imaging enters the museum, it becomes one among the “media” in a new a time-based artefact under figurative “reframing” among other modes of picture making, its material parameters investigated as objet rather than dispositif . Garrett Stewart explores the recipro­cal redefinition of both moving images and wall art initiated by this museal estrangement of the “motion picture”. As the title suggests as well, this often entails a dimension of strained synesthesia in the disjunctures of non-syn­chronised recording. Altogether, curation re-frames both the audiovisual pace and plasticity of the seventh art in the rear-view mirror of media archaeology.

Published by caboose books, Montreal. Distributed worldwide, excluding Canada, by Rutgers University Press.

99 pages, Paperback

Published June 22, 2020