BEYOND THE FRAME

by
Joanna Smythe
BFA Emily Carr University of Art + Design/
University of Northern British Columbia 2011

A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF APPLIED ARTS
in
Visual Arts

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2013

©Joanna Smythe, 2013

	
  

	
  

ABSTRACT
This thesis essay describes a body of work developed for the Low Residency Masters of
Applied Arts program, which is presented in the form of three video installation environments:
Ripple Effects (2012), Veiled Effects (2012), and Shoreline (2013). Video images of outdoor scenes
are projected onto sculptural forms that set up points of indeterminacy to address our mediated and
constructed relationship with the environment.
The research focuses on a phenomenological connection to the environment supported by
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “chiasmic embrace”, a relationship that acknowledges a
two-way communication between our bodies and the environment. There is also a consideration of
Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology” that looks at the underbelly of environmental critique. The art
works developed for the thesis examine how the aestheticization of nature turns it into abstract and
ideological space, ignoring it as a complex and interconnected ecosystem. The work that emerged
from the process of research and experimentation engages a vision of nature as an altered,
synthetic, and hybrid environment.
My practice is contextualized in part by examining what I find productive and generative in
the work of Dan Graham, Bill Viola, Diana Thater, Ann Hamilton, and Char Davies, artists whose
practices focus on an embodied awareness of the environment. In addition to Merleau-Ponty, and
Timothy Morton, the ideas of thinkers and theorists such as Susan Stewart, Terry Smith, and
Marshall McLuhan, add perspective to a discussion that addresses the relationship between
aesthetics and environmental ethics.

	
  

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………..............................................ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................……………............................................iii
LIST OF FIGURES..........................................................................................................................iv
INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................1
1

CHAPTER 1 Expanding the Video Experience...................................................................3
1.1 Establishing the Ground In-between...............................................................................3
1.2 Immersion and Installation ............................................................................................5
1.3 Ripple Effects (2012).......................................................................................................6
1.4 Power and the Picturesque: Dan Graham......................................................................10
1.5 Re-visioning Nature: Diana Thater................................................................................12

2

CHAPTER 2 Embodying the Video Experience.................................................................15
2.1 Veiled Effects (2012)......................................................................................................15
2.2 Expanded Film Space: Bill Viola...................................................................................17
2.3 Embodied Space: Ann Hamilton....................................................................................19

3

CHAPTER 3 Landscape Space............................................................................................22
3.1 Shoreline (2013).............................................................................................................22
3.2 Sensing Nature: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology ....................................27

4

CHAPTER 4 A Question of Technology.............................................................................28
4.1 Timothy Morton: In the Heart of Darkness ...................................................................28
4.2 Char Davies: Virtual Reality and Distance.....................................................................33

CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………….......……….35
WORKS CITED.………………………………………………………………………………......40

	
  

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LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1: Joanna Smythe, Ripple Effects, 2012. Installation in the Abraham J. Rogatnick Media
Gallery, Emily Carr University, Vancouver, 2012. Photo: Kai Mushens.........................................6
Fig. 2: Joanna Smythe, Ripple Effects, 2012. Installation in Abraham J. Rogatnick Media Gallery,
Vancouver. Photo: Minttu Mantynen................................................................................................7
Fig. 3: Joanna Smythe, Ripple Effects, 2012. Installation in Abraham J. Rogatnick Media Gallery,
Vancouver. Photo: Minttu Mantynen................................................................................................7
Fig. 4: Joanna Smythe, Ripple Effects, 2012. Installation view showing ceiling reflections and
spherical disco ball shadow on wall. Photo: Joanna Smythe.............................................................8
Fig. 5: Dan Graham, Triangular Pavilion with Circular Cut-out Variation H, 1989-2000. Holland
Park. Used by permission of the Institute of Contemporary Arts.....................................................11
Fig. 6: Diana Thater, Dark Matter, 2003. 2 Flat Screen Monitors, 2 DVD Players, 2 DVDs and Lee
filters. Dimensions variable. Installation View, Haunch of Venison, 2003.....................................14
(Image removed due to copyright restrictions).
Fig. 7: Joanna Smythe, Veiled Effects, 2012. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Studio Image.
Photo: Joanna Smythe......................................................................................................................16
Fig. 8: Bill Viola, The Veiling, 1995. Video/sound installation. .....................................................17
(Image removed due to copyright restrictions).
Fig. 9: Ann Hamilton, ghost . . . a border act, 2000. Production still from the "Art in the
Twenty-First Century" Season 1 episode, "Spirituality," 2001 Segment: Ann Hamilton.
Used by permission of Art21, Inc. 2001...........................................................................................21
Fig.10: Joanna Smythe, Shoreline, 2013. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation at the
Charles H. Scott Gallery, July 2013. Detail. Photo: Joanna Smythe................................................23
.
Fig. 11: Joanna Smythe, Shoreline, 2013. Mixed media. Installation view in the Charles H. Scott
Gallery, July 2013. . Photo: Joanna Smythe.....................................................................................24
Fig. 12: Joanna Smythe, Shoreline, 2013. Mixed media. Installation view in the Charles H. Scott
Gallery, July 2013. Photo: Joanna Smythe.......................................................................................24
Fig. 13: Joanna Smythe. Cariboo Monolith (2013). Photo: Joanna Smythe....................................37

	
  

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INTRODUCTION
Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and
presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what a frame contains,
both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package and the commodity inside the
package.
W.J.T. Mitchell (5)

The impetus for this thesis project began with an experience I had while out in my
canoe prior to beginning the Master of Applied Arts (MAA) program. Most of the
residents had left for the season, making the lake seem remote and isolated. It was late in
the day and the warm summer air pressed down heavily as I paddled. I paused in a small
bay to watch a swell from a distant passing boat cross the lake and make its way toward
me. In a sluggish, rolling bulge, it shifted everything in its path, gently up and then down.
As it passed under the canoe, in the moment of the lift, I felt the boundary between
myself and the environment dissolve—the air on my skin, the motion of the boat, colours,
smells—all sensations became amplified and more cohesive. In that moment, I was
intensely connected to all the living elements around me, keenly aware of the intimacy of
this bond. It was also a moment of profound awareness, of how this sense of belonging
and personal connection to the environment has become rare in our fast-paced and
technologically focused lives.
Another part of this story that is important to add to the scene is that there was
also an injured dragonfly floating in the water beside me. What might be considered a
sublime component of the experience, was the realization that like the dragonfly, I was a
very small thing bobbing along, subject entirely to the “forces of nature”, which were
calm and warm and pleasant at that moment, but could quickly become harsh and
precarious, as it was for the dragonfly. My expansive reverie ended as I focused on the
predicament of the dragonfly, picking it up out of the water with my paddle, and placing
it into the canoe. Knowing how futile this gesture was, I still wanted to save the life of a
dying thing.
This intention, over my feelings of connection to the environment, indicates the
concept and philosophy of “dark ecology” introduced by Timothy Morton, English and
Ecology professor, who advocates abandoning Romantic, pre-industrial ideas of nature in
favour of coming to terms with the ecological crisis at hand. Morton’s ideas were a post-

	
  

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production focus for my work that ties the discussion of aesthetics more closely to
ecological critique.
My intense experience on the lake was disconcerting and difficult to articulate,
however I felt it provoked something important, not only about my own close
relationship to the environment, but also how the pictorial framing of nature promotes a
fantasy that we are somehow outside observers of our own atmosphere. The installation
work was a physical exploration to shape a nebulous sense of “oneness with nature” into
a critique of environmental attitudes. My original task was to capture something of the
embodied experience on the lake and create a space that could convey a sense of
phenomenological awareness of nature—a task that would evolve through various
processes in the studio. The sculptural components came to be included as means to
expand the two dimensional aspects of digital video projection. I was also working to
counter the effects of an “assumed” spectator who was external to the pictorial plane. The
work was intended to operate as a surrogate experience of nature, drawing the viewer into
intimate proximity with an environment that was at the scale of their own body.
During the process, I wasn’t completely sure how the works would operate, but in
retrospect, my choice of materials set the tone for each installation. In Ripple Effects, the
hard, reflective surfaces and jarring mechanical noises drowned out the ambient nature
sounds from the video sound track. The unnatural movements and multiple projections
were disorienting, creating a dystopian aesthetic. Where I had originally planned for
“nature” to provide a soothing, ambient background, Ripple Effects evolved into a
carnivalesque depiction of nature. In Shoreline, the silky fabric, soothing atmosphere, and
restive water sounds operated more seductively. The seductress however, turned out to be
an uncanny construct, disembodied from its location in the natural world, as it emanated
eerily out of a floating fabric apparition—a possible a siren call to technological union.
My original intention to bring the viewer closer to nature through embodiment became
instead, a pairing with the technological. This introduced another aspect of environmental
critique regarding the darker side of ecological issues. As noted, this perspective came
through a consideration of Timothy Morton’s work that situates ecological issues within
our post industrial and post nuclear environment. Tracing though my process to see how
the installations evolved demonstrates that an iterative process produced intuitive

	
  

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responses to materials and allowed productive relationships between ideas and forms to
develop.
The three art works examined in this paper are: Ripple Effects (2012), a 360
degree video and sculpture environment that immerses the viewer in constructed and
abstracted scenes of nature and was exhibited at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, in
July 2012 for the interim MAA exhibition; Veiled Effects (2012), a studio piece which
depicts a process of material experimentation that bridged both the first and second year
exhibition pieces; and finally Shoreline (2013), produced for the graduation exhibition at
the Charles H. Scott Gallery in July 2013, which is a video sculpture that presents an
intimate and contemplative experience of nature at its most unnatural.

CHAPTER 1 Expanding the Video Experience
1.1 Establishing the Ground In-between
Before discussing individual works, some terms will be outlined in order to clarify
how they are used in the context of this paper, where “nature” refers to the environment
and “all” of our planetary ecosystem, and “landscape” refers to scenes that are culturally
framed depictions of outdoor space. According to Humanist Geographer, Yi Fu Tuan, the
words “nature”, “landscape”, and “scenery”, have become nearly synonymous, collapsing
into one idea through paradigm shifts in how space is conceived. According to Tuan, the
pre-Socratic Greeks referred to nature as “The heavens above, the earth beneath, and the
waters underneath the earth” (132). He further explains that as the Aristotelian concept of
nature was adopted, the vertical orientation remained but did not include the “All” of the
cosmos and only referred to what was of planetary origin. Also, with a focus on Cartesian
space and the attempt to create “illusionistic” depth of field in pictorial representation, a
new focus on the horizon as vanishing point emerged. Nature continued to lose its sense
of the sublime as it lost its verticality, becoming the background for European cathedrals
and portraiture. Tuan points out that today these scenes can barely move us “to any
response more strenuous than the taking of a snapshot” (133).
“Scenery” and “landscape” also experienced shifts where scenery originally
referred to theatrical stage illusions and the word landscape, rooted in the Dutch word
“landschap”, referred to cultivated units of farms and fields (Tuan 133). The concept of

	
  

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landscape also has aesthetic ties with the picturesque and thus is perceived as something
to be “looked at” and taken in entirely within its frame. Timothy Morton describes the
existing portrayal of nature as scenery, as sadistic. He states, “Putting something called
Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy
does for the figure of Woman” (5). The installation works presented in this thesis subvert
this kind of consuming gaze by creating environments where the viewer participates by
walking around in the space, incorporated into the dimensionality the work.
In the close-up framing of conventional cinema, nature is blurred behind intimate
views of the human actors. Alternately, the characters move so quickly through scenes
that the outdoors is reduced to a blur. Chris Lukinbeal, a cultural geographer specializing
in media and urban landscape studies, explains that framing nature as background turns it
into space, a mere location for human drama to unfold (6). Western culture has a long
history of portraying nature in this manner beginning with the visual apprehension of
land through picturesque framing and Romantic depictions in paintings from the 16th to
the 19th centuries. This was accompanied by the actual apprehension of land through
Colonial expansion.
These depictions tell narratives about how space is ordered rather than conveying,
in geographic terms, any “sense of place” or location. Terry Smith, contemporary art
historian, critic, and artist, explains in his essay “Visual Regimes of Colonization” that
the portrayal of the environment was a process tied to “practices of calibration,
obliteration and symbolization (specifically, aestheticization)” (483). This
aestheticization was part of a process of mapping and reportage where land in the new
colonies was depicted to look like picturesque British scenery (Smith 490); a kind of
familiar packaging intended to promote emigration. The paintings progressed from
pastoral visions of countryside as settlement was established, into paintings that were
done as “portraits of property” (Smith 491). This depiction deliberately overwrote or
denied prior habitation or depiction of land by other peoples (Smith 486). Smith describes
how Aboriginal Australians have a version of mapping that exists more like a conceptual
field of what is present in the environment and “being alive within it” (488).
As I worked out ways to represent my own “conceptual field” around my
experience of place in the natural environment, I looked to the work of Maurice Merleau-

	
  

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Ponty, whose perceptual philosophy explains a phenomenological relationship existing
between our bodies and the environment. In a very different and darker view of nature,
Timothy Morton presents an alternate way to perceive and move forward in our
increasingly complicated relationship with the environment. He does this by posing a
relentless set of questions about essences where we completely drop the “constant elegy
for a lost unalienated state” that never really existed (23).
I was also interested in how some artists draw attention to the way landscape
tropes are used to conceal ideologies as Dan Graham demonstrates in his ongoing
Pavilion series. While looking to dramatize particular aspects of my work, I considered
how such artists as Bill Viola, Diana Thater, and Ann Hamilton effectively convey
emotion in their work: Bill Viola, through his use of monumental scale, frame speed
manipulations, and theatrics, creates strong visceral responses for the viewer; Diana
Thater, whose video work, use of 360-degree space, and concerns about the environment
set up the viewer to question their own perspectives; Ann Hamilton, whose focus on the
human gesture brings the viewer into intimate awareness of their own embodied
presence; and most recently the work of Char Davies has become significant as an
example of how a technological interpretation of nature can operate as both a critique of
the form as well as emphasize the significance of embodied awareness in virtual space.

1.2 Immersion and Installation
In her book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,
the Collection, Susan Stewart, Professor of English and the Humanities, describes
landscape as something that we move through, not something that moves through us (71).
However, my experience on the lake was not a “moving through”, but rather a “being
within” nature. In order to get close to the state of immersion that I felt, I looked to
patterns and rhythms around the lake that might instigate a meditative and embodied
sense of place. I produced multiple recordings of repetitive water movements, reflections,
and swaying wetland plants with the idea that these images might convey a contemplative
mood. The resulting videos, however, shown on a flat screen monitor, could not represent
the sense of vitality of what I had encountered. The presence of the monitor as an object
also situated the images in both a mechanical and virtual space. These observations led
me to further explore ways in which to express the quietude and nuance of natural

	
  

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processes that are best experienced through immersion. The translation of a natural scene
into an artificial environment, without literally transporting the natural materials into the
gallery, paradoxically required the use of highly illusionistic and artificial forms. I was
aware of the contradiction between the artificial forms and the naturalistic scenes,
however the full extent of the how this contradiction operated developed over time as the
process and works evolved.
The process began with a series of investigations using digital video that became
exciting as the dynamics between projections, sculpture, and architectural space became
evident. Through the process of experimentation, the impact of immersive space and its
potential to affect the viewer both aurally, visually, and sensationally was taking shape.
Investigating the physical properties of projected light led to using clear acrylic panels for
the structure in Ripple Effects that worked as both projection and reflective surfaces.

1.3 Ripple Effects (2012)
The piece Ripple Effects was exhibited in the Abraham J. Rogatnick Media
Gallery for the MAA 2012 interim exhibition at Emily Carr University. The media
gallery was specifically chosen rather than in the open Concourse gallery as it allowed
control over the ambient light and came equipped with its own projector and sound
system. The media gallery also offered the opportunity to completely utilize all
surfaces—the walls and extra high ceiling—as projection surfaces.

Fig. 1: Joanna Smythe, Ripple Effects, 2012. Installation in the Abraham J. Rogatnick Media Gallery,
Emily Carr University, Vancouver, 2012. Photo: Kai Mushens.

	
  

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Fig. 2: Joanna Smythe, Ripple Effects, 2012. Installation in Abraham J. Rogatnick Media Gallery,
Vancouver. Photo: Minttu Mantynen.
Fig. 3: Joanna Smythe, Ripple Effects, 2012. Installation in Abraham J. Rogatnick Media Gallery,
Vancouver. Photos: Minttu Mantynen.

One incidental issue with the projections was that in order to maximize the reflective
properties of the acrylic, the projection needed to enter the structure at a right angle and
at mid-point. Having the projection at this height caused the image to be blocked if a
viewer walked in front of the projector. However with three projectors in the gallery
installation, the viewer’s body could only partially block the image and became more of a
shadow-like form within the overall scene, adding a “live” sculptural dimension to the
work. Margaret Morse, Professor of Film and Digital Media, explains how moving
images affect the space of the installation:
I have come to think of this possibility for repetition, contrast, and migration of
images across a shape as a poetic dimension of video installation; that is, it is a
practice that deemphasizes the content of images in favor of such properties as
line, color, and vectors of motion, with content of their own to convey. The
choreography of these properties is another kinaesthetic dimension of
transformation. (164)
Noting formal properties and de-emphasising content, Morse describes how establishing
a dimensional field also creates a “charged space-in-between” activating the installation
in a way that makes its composition akin to choreography, and the consideration of the

	
  

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viewer in the work becomes part of the planned movements.

Fig. 4: Joanna Smythe, Ripple Effects, 2012. Installation view showing ceiling reflections and spherical
mirror ball; shadow on wall. Photo: Joanna Smythe.

The upper portion of the media gallery with its extended height was an ideal space
to activate through projection. A mirror ball was used as a reflective surface to bounce a
projection into the ceiling space. The majority of the projection was masked off so that
only a small portion would hit the top of the ball and shine into the ceiling, which was a
projection of a swamp water scene. The purpose for choosing this subject matter was to
show nature in an inverted relationship to its expected orientation. The work of Diana
Thater has been a strong influence on my approach and one of her strategies to get the
viewer to look differently at nature is to disrupt viewing perspectives. Projecting the
swamp onto the ceiling was done to draw attention to how power and value is often
established in space relations through height. By repositioning what is normally located
under us, (the unpleasant smelling swamp water) to celestial heights, it subverts the
cultural hierarchical interpretation of a given ecosystem.
At the same time the intention was to create a simulacrum of a starry night sky,
with the small moving squares establishing a sense of depth and deep space. The mirror
ball also formed a silhouette on one wall, reminiscent of the Earth viewed from outer
space (see Fig. 4 on the right). An additional and unanticipated effect of the revolving
mirror ball was that it emitted a constant, low mechanical drone that disturbed the

	
  

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soothing sounds of lapping water and bird song from the video soundtrack, a sound that
was disruptive, but in keeping with the mechanistic and artificiality of the installation.
Just as learning to manage the effects of various materials became part of the
production, adapting and adjusting to constraints during installation offered some
insightful developments1. There were other unanticipated aspects of the installation of
Ripple Effects that became part of the finished work. The windows in the gallery needed
to be covered to block light. By doing this from the outside, the window glass became an
additional reflective surface for the projections. This type of provisional adaptation is one
of the interesting aspects of an installation practice, where the work exists in an
incomplete state until it is actually installed, with each space having its own
contingencies that activate the work in different ways. The idea of continuing to develop
the work based on relationships that are produced on site is an exciting aspect that has the
potential to expand the work and allow it to have new meanings configured into each
separate space, making each installation an individual and evolving work.
The overall intention with Ripple Effects was to expand the projected image onto
sculptural materials and place the viewer into a quasi-soothing environment that was
nature-like, but not entirely readable in its artificial presentation and moving images of
nature that are normally still. This was done to disturb the viewer’s sense assuming
complete ease and visual command over the scene. Cartesian perspectives were disrupted
by immersing the viewer into a moving landscape that presented a close-up view of
nature as it might appear out of a car window driving down the highway through a forest.
It reminded me of the scenery on a rear projection screen that zooms past behind actors
sitting in their unmoving cars. It was in this piece where the idea of landscape being
treated as background first emerged.
With conventional seated cinema, the mechanical camera movements and jump
cuts do not disturb us, which demonstrates how we have come to accept these artificial
disruptions in time and space as a natural and normal way of viewing the world. Media
The viewer coming in front of the projector was a result of the positioning of the projectors at
body height to maximize the angle of projections, however it introduced an interactive component for the
viewer that I allowed and incorporated in the piece. In Shoreline, the graduation piece, the projector was
ceiling mounted and isolated the projection onto the fabric. The viewer was invited to engage with the
fabric, at which point they would come into the path of the projection, a more incidental effect, but again,
offering further engagement and interesting interaction for the viewer.
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studies professor Martin Loiperdinger and Bernd Elzer, a media studies doctoral
candidate, explain in their journal article, “Lumiere’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s
Founding Myth” how early cinema audiences viewing the Louis Lumière one minute film
Arrival of the Train (1885), (which depicts a train coming into a train station “moving” in
the direction of the audience), were purportedly terrified as they thought the train might
come off the screen and crash into their seats. This was no doubt an exaggeration
perpetuated for publicity, but nonetheless described the initial surprise of the audiences to
the first moving pictures (98), but when fixed in a seat, there is no other perspective for
the viewer. Anne Friedberg, Media Theorist and Film Studies professor points out that
the position of the cinematic audience “guarantees the dependence on the constructed
view provided by representation” (398). She adds that even though there is a sense of
omniscience—seeing everything from every point of view—this sensation is illusion
only. The film spectator is literally invisible not only in the film but also to themselves
and therefore must assume the subjective position presented by the camera lens. In video
installation work however, the viewer maintains their own subject position. They are
(bodily) free to move around the installation, independent of the camera perspective,
shot, or angle, freeing them from the rectilinear viewing frame as well as the controlling
viewpoint of the camera.

1.4 Power and the Picturesque: Dan Graham
The constructed prism shape in Ripple Effects, while functioning as a reflective
surface, also references Dan Graham’s pavilion series begun in the 1980s that reminds us
how landscape tropes can be used subversively to mask power relations. Graham’s
pavilions, set in parks and leisure spaces, use the same reflective glass as the surrounding
modern office towers. Similar to the techniques used in Colonial expansion, where the
wilderness spaces of the “New Worlds” were overlaid with picturesque representations of
pastoral British landscapes, we are asked to look at the reflections in the office tower
glass rather than at the towers themselves. In a Canadian Art article surveying Graham’s
pavilion works, artist and writer Josh Thorpe quotes Graham describing how the mirrored
office towers are “an attempt by the corporation to appear innocuous, and in harmony
with the city and nature (reflecting skies, clouds, and trees), while preserving the one-way
gaze that keeps the public ignorant of what goes on inside” (“Searching for Dan

	
  

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Graham”). This representation becomes an extended metaphor where we are asked to
suspend our disbelief about what we see and accept the constructed vision of the office
tower as being part of the natural landscape.

Fig. 5: Dan Graham, Triangular Pavilion with Circular Cut-out Variation H, 1989-2000. Holland Park.
Used by permission of the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Graham’s mirrored pavilions use the same material as the office towers, but
reduce the scale to that of the human body. Graham also contrasts the business location of
the office towers by situating his pavilions in leisure spaces such as playgrounds and
parks, which allow the viewer to engage in a playful manner, also contrasting the work
behaviour prescribed in the office tower. By constantly subverting the devices of
corporate architecture, through scale, purpose, and location, Graham’s pavilions expose
the manipulation present in corporate strategy to “naturalize” their ideologies.
In a personal encounter with one of Graham’s works, Two Half Cylinders (2008),
at the Rennie Collection, gazing into the warped cityscape within the convexly curved
surface, I had the distinct sense of being present in a twisted, “othered” space, (a more
accurate depiction of the warped relationship between social and economic forces within
the city). This mirrored, alternate view underscores the nature of subjectivity; seeing
one’s body separate and away in the mirror space without the “self” attached. Graham
acknowledges this subjective gaze, stating the effect is intentional and that all of his
“forms are inhabited and activated by the viewer. A sense of uneasiness and

	
  

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psychological alienation is produced by a constant play between feelings of inclusion and
exclusion” (Graham 39).
Like Graham’s pavilions, the reflective properties of the acrylic prism in Ripple
Effects implicates the viewer where they can see aspects of their own form, like catching
a glimpse of oneself in a window with “nature” all around (see Fig. 2 and 3). An
important aspect of Graham’s work is contained in the reflective properties of the glass,
which directly places the viewer as subject within the mirror space. Ripple Effects also
establishes the viewer in a similar subject position, but with the prism set at oblique
angles to the projections, the viewer is required to negotiate the installation space in order
to find a position that makes them visible as either reflection or shadow.
While we often watch nature documentaries indoors on television, the nature
scenes in Ripple Effects behave in a distinctly unscenery-like manner, actually moving
onto the viewer’s body and through the structures in the room. The artificiality of the
environment with the moving landscape and a moving viewer sets up the questions of the
“naturalness” of what is being represented, and asks how this reflects our vision of
landscape. The multiple reflections and movements also disturb any sense of what is of
central importance, the mediating device (the prism), the images of nature, or the
viewer’s own presence. A post-production consideration of the work could also situate it
to reflect the actual condition of our existence in the world where we are synthesized into
a multi-layered and interconnected environment of natural and engineered materials.

1.5 Re-visioning Nature: Diana Thater
The work of Diana Thater has been an ongoing influence and especially interests
me where she melds her video sculptures into the architecture of the exhibition spaces.
She states one of her goals is to change the way audiences view film and video in
galleries (Light and Space). As is the focus of my work, Thater inserts an alternate visual
reality over an existing one. Her use of 360-degree space in conjunction with film and
video demonstrates a concern for form and structure and a visual aesthetics that also
relates to my own. Thater’s socially engaged practice involves her viewers at a level that
could alter their perspectives about pressing and critical environmental issues.2
2

Although Thater no longer uses trained animals, her piece, China (1995), a synchronized 360degree six channel video of the two trained wolves, China and Shiloh, who were used in the film White

	
  

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Thater often “overlay[s] an animate pictorial architecture on top of an inanimate,
dimensional one” (Thater 12) that brings together multiple presences and realities. A
focus of her work is to draw attention to the single perspective with which we engage the
animal world and the environment. Thater accomplishes a subversion of the cinematic
gaze by positioning the viewer as the “invisible eye” of the camera, making them feel out
of place as an interloper into the environment of the animal. Thater destabilizes the
viewer’s position by altering the colour of the light in a space, changing how time is
perceived through slowing the film speed, and especially through changes in scale. She
states: “Scale is the most important thing in art. In my work things are always a different
size than they are in the real world so the viewer is physically conscious of the objects
she approaches” (Thater 17). Thater emphasizes that everything the viewer sees including
their ideas of nature are “constructed and machined” and she is not interested in engaging
nature as a soothing, picturesque environment:
I don’t want nature to be contemplative and reassuring but sublime and
terrifying. Not in the 19th Century way where it is yawning wide -- endlessly
dangerous and devouring, but like that 21st century way -- like a dead or dying
body because we’ve killed it and it is gone and that is terrifying. (“More Stars”
25-26)
Thater’s purpose is to completely disorient the viewer in order to allow a shift or
reorientation of their perspective about her environments.
Thater’s use of film and video allows her to control viewing perspectives. She
states, “Time and space ... are the two hardest things to make a viewer consciously
recognize ... I alternate between, and often combine, making time (with editing) and
making space (with installation)” (Thater 30). Thater expresses non-time as the unmoving
image of clouds in White is the Color, 2002, and endless time in the animations of
spinning galaxies shown below in Dark Matter, 2003. The spinning galaxies are the
ultimate concept of cosmic and dimensional space, but are compressed into two “flat”
screen plasma monitors. A stationary image of White is the Color is seen through a door
into an adjoining room, contrasting timeless space with the “no time” of an unmoving
cloud.
Fang II, is a work that demonstrates through extending the artificial circumstances of trained animals to
hold a pose, how the projection of our fantasies of nature onto the bodies of animals, is repulsive and
transgressive.

	
  

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Thater creates further disorientation through the stark contrast between what is
being depicted (nature, outdoors) and the complete technological re-imagining of the
scenes into interior landscapes where the viewer is being represented as the alien in the
world of the animal and the environment.
Figure 6 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.
Fig. 6: Diana Thater, Dark Matter, 2003. 2 Flat Screen Monitors, 2 DVD Players, 2 DVDs and Lee filters.
Dimensions variable. Installation View, Haunch of Venison, 2003.

These juxtapositions of how time is “read” through movement, and how we orient
ourselves through the perpetual vanishing point of Cartesian space, are elements that can
be manipulated to engage an alternate viewing of what we take for granted in our
environment.
Video imagery itself has illusionistic properties that situate the viewer in the
specific time and space of the original recording. With projection, the frame can be
expanded until it dissolves into the architecture of the room, establishing an immersive
effect as the viewer is engulfed in the scene. Morse describes this space in her essay,
“Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, the Space-in-Between”, how the “frame of
an installation is then only apparently the actual room in which it is placed. This room is
rather the ground over which a conceptual, figural, embodied, and temporalized space
that is the installation breaks” (155). Alternately, as Thater’s work demonstrates, the
projected image can be set on any surface, using any variation of scale to create particular
effects. Morse further sets out that the cultural function of video installation is the
exploration of the materialization of the conceptual:
[E]ach installation is an experiment in the redesign of the apparatus that
represents our culture to itself: a new disposition of machines that project the
imagination onto the world and that store, recirculate and display images; and, a
fresh orientation of the body in space and a reformulation of the visual and
kinaesthetic experience. (156)
For the viewer, there is a direct sense of being within the space and time of the projected
image, and with the added effects of dimensional objects and sound, a simulacrum of
reality is produced. Morse’s articulation of the cultural function of video installation
follows Thater’s statement that everything we see is mediated, but through reorienting the

	
  

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perspective of the viewer using the same machinery by which the mediation is produced,
a “fresh” orientation of the body is created that brings about new thinking that can arise
only through a kinaesthetic and embodied experience.

CHAPTER 2 Embodying the Video Experience
2.1 Veiled Effects (2012)
The decision to use video projection in conjunction with sculptural elements in
my work is a way to reactivate the projected image and make tangible the volume of
space through which it travels. Projecting onto actual bodies or objects that have
“thingness” recuperates some of the essence that is lost in the ethereal and mechanical
reproduction of the recorded environments. The notion of “thingness” came to my
attention when experimenting with the path of the light from the projector. The work of
James Turrell, who is known for his video and light installations, plays with our
perception of light and its illusory qualities. Turrell explains this principle:
Although light exhibits wave phenomena, nevertheless it is a thing—it is optical
material. We don’t treat it as such. Instead we use it very casually to illuminate
other things. I’m interested in the revelation of light itself and that it has
thingness. It alludes to what it is, which is not exactly an illusion. (Taylor, chpt. 4)
This play between illusion and optical material is one of the main attractions for me in
projected video imagery. A considerable amount of time was spent in process-based
experimentation observing how the projected image travelled through space as well as
observing its volume and shape as it emerged from the lens of the projector. I found the
“thingness” of the light was best expressed by “trapping” it on various surfaces, which
interfered with the conventional purpose of the projection, but created a whole new field
of exploration for me.
These initial investigations led to the studio piece Veiled Effects (2012) where the
focus was to identify the sensations and contours of the original event on the lake: light
reflecting off the water, multiple forms of ripples, under water scenes, and numerous
other vignettes that might capture what it was like to be “present” in a natural
environment. Viewing the images on a monitor or as a projection on the wall did not
achieve the desired level of emotional intensity or immersion I was looking for, so I
continued to search for ways to structurally “expand” the imagery.
	
  

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Fig. 7: Joanna Smythe, Veiled Effects, 2012. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Studio Image. Photo:
Joanna Smythe.

In order to achieve this dimensional space and “shape” the projected light, I
discovered semi-transparent tulle fabric was useful as a screen, which at the same time
allowed the image to pass through it. Several yards of the fabric were arranged into
panels, and suspended in front of one another in order to allow the projected image to
“catch” on each layer as well as continue on its expanding trajectory. It was fascinating to
see how each image hung like an independent holograph where it touched the fabric. A
sense of how to further manipulate the video image started to emerge. By re–filming the
projections at close range while walking along the scrims, an apparent microscopic
intimacy with the image was produced which created an effect of seeing living cells
under a microscope (an example can be seen in the rectangular figure in the foreground
on the left in Fig. 4). This work evolved to be the footage used in Ripple Effects in 2012.
It was also the initial experimentation with fabric that led into the final exhibition work
for Shoreline in 2013.
Bill Viola’s piece The Veiling (1995), which is discussed next, uses very similar
materials to that of Veiled Effects. At the time my work was being developed, I was
unaware this piece and in retrospect I am glad that I did not know about it as this allowed
me freedom to experiment without restrictions. While freely re-enacting some of Viola’s
strategies, what I learned in my experiments was very different from what is produced in
Viola’s work. However, after being introduced to The Veiling I came to examine Viola’s

	
  

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work more closely and found it interesting how he activates video space to add to the
emotional tension among the actors.

2.2 Expanded Film Space: Bill Viola
Bill Viola’s piece, The Veiling (1995) relies on dramatic performances by human
actors, but Viola also engages similar techniques to Thater such as changes in film speed
and scale to create contrast and alter the sense of time within the narrative. The Veiling
consists of nine parallel panels of suspended sheer fabric. Two projectors are mounted at
either end of series of panels. From one projector, the image of a man walks forward out
of the dark and straight ahead “through” the panels. From the opposite projector, the
image of a woman walks forward, seemingly toward the man. They come together and
merge in the central panel, but any sense of actual contact dissolves as they pass through
one another and dissipate further into the depths of the screens.
Figure 8 has been removed because of copyright restrictions.
Fig. 8: Bill Viola, The Veiling, 1995. Video/sound installation. The Fabric Institute. Web.12 April 2013.

The movement across the multiple screens creates a self-enclosed world and the
slowed film speed expands the sense of time. Viola describes the ability to “record the
time flow of experience, and then to stretch or compress it, reorder events, and otherwise
manipulate image and sound” as the reasons he was attracted to video in the first place
(Viola 249). Viola projects his human forms at the same size as the viewer, so there is an
immediate identification with the work in the recognition of the sameness of scale. The
installation arrangement also engages the viewer through their own movement where
they can follow the progression of video “bodies” as they come out of the projectors, onto
the scrims, and then meet on the central panel. The projectors are not concealed and are
part of the viewing environment. There is no pretence to be “real” in the way
conventional cinema masks its mechanical origins, and the performance aspect of Viola’s
work brings it into the time and space of the viewer rather than that of the film. The effect
of reproducing the essence of the human body in dimensional space as Viola does in this
piece, creates an intimate drama which is an effective strategy, however, with my focus
on an environmental issues, I do not want to literally put “bodies” into the work,

	
  

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preferring the human presence to be that of the viewer who participates in the
environment of the installation.
Conventional cinema immobilizes and disembodies the viewer in relation to the
actual site of the theatre, while their presence is situated in the imagined and multiple
locations within the film. Chrissie Iles, Film and Video Curator at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, in a roundtable discussion “The Projected Image in Contemporary Art”,
states that if “you bring the image down to the floor, you’re negating cinema, if the space
is painted white, then it refers to a gallery, if it is black then it is more of an immersive
space, like cinema” (Turvey et al. 80). Video installation separates from cinema in that
the viewer is generally mobile and encounters real space and real objects. As Iles puts it,
if the viewer “takes a walk” it makes the work reference the gallery (Turvey et al. 80).
In Veiled Effects the intention was to create a close-up perspective of nature
through an exaggeration in scale. The viewer would be enclosed in an intimate and
contemplative world of water, rocks and reflections, but at the same time have a sense of
disorientation due to the scale alterations, extraneous camera movement, and disturbing
mechanical sounds from the rotating mirror ball. There is also uneasiness when one is
unable to see the boundaries or edges of one’s environment, as attention needs to be
directed everywhere at once. An integral part of the immersive experience is brought
about through being in a darkened space where the viewer must rely on various
environmental cues to direct them through the work. The reduced light also requires the
viewer to engage with the space sensationally as well as visually in a whole body manner.
Marshall McLuhan, communications and media theorist, discusses how we have
become less aware of our surroundings due to an overreliance on our visual faculties. He
describes our general disengagement with space as result of our relationship with
technology and that we use technologies as extensions of our bodies through which we
“see”. McLuhan developed a concept called “acoustic space” to describe the environment
we inhabited prior to our use of advanced technologies, particularly writing.3 McLuhan
states that in preliterate times, people negotiated their surroundings using all of their
senses rather than a predominantly visual or “rational” approach:

3

For a more complete explanation of acoustic space see Marchessault, especially Chapter 5
“Experimental Seminar”, pages 86-93.

	
  

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Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous
interplay of all the senses; whereas “rational” or pictorial space is uniform,
sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich
resonance of the tribal echoland ...The man [sic] of the tribal world led a complex,
kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and
is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear. (“The Playboy Interview”)
Through the introduction of written language, and subsequent technologies, McLuhan
theorizes we have lost physical and psychological connection to the environment as we
observe “through” technology in a visual, analytical, and disembodied manner. What is
relevant about his description of acoustic space is that it privileges the whole body as a
site of knowing, that recognizes the importance of embodiment as being fully aware of
our surroundings. The installation work creates an enveloping atmosphere and sets up the
conditions a “simultaneous interplay of all the senses” making the viewer aware of their
bodily presence in the work in a way they will hopefully carry beyond the gallery.

2.3 Embodied Space: Ann Hamilton
The presence of the human body is indirectly addressed in most installation work,
in that the viewer needs to enter the space to take in the various dimensional, aural,
visual, and sensory apparatus. After working with installation components and realizing
how intimately the viewer can be involved, I became interested in how other artists
address this potential. Where Viola’s portrayal of the human body seems to operate at a
theatrical level, Ann Hamilton work operates more as a “performance of presence” as
described by Joan Simon, independent curator and writer (“Objects”). Simon explains
that Hamilton’s work often requires a performed human gesture or action to complete the
work. In my most recent piece, Shoreline (2013), I address the viewer directly by leaving
a written invitation for them to walk within the fabric folds in order to experience the
work in a fully sensational manner, with the projection also forming on their body. This
seemed like an important aspect to include, as it was such an evocative experience while
designing the work that I wanted to offer it to the viewer.4
I have been aware of Ann Hamilton’s work for quite some time but did not
become interested in her practice until I started working with fabric. Because Hamilton
has a background in textiles, she has a very considered approach to its use. It was
4

While the Shoreline doesn’t immediately address labour, the rigging of the work involved much
handwork that as an art form ritualizes labour and mimics the domestic action of hanging laundry.

	
  

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important to be clear in my intentions about using fabric and fully aware of its domestic
implications and connotations for hand labour, so its significance in Hamilton’s work,
with her background in textiles and focus on labour, became a research focus. The piece,
ghost . . . a border act (2000), was of particular interest, especially her use of fabric in the
context of being installed in a former textile factory.
In ghost . . . a border act, Hamilton contemplates the accumulation of the slow
handwork done by thousands of workers, over many years, and creates a scale of human
effort that becomes monumental. Stewart comments on how the relationship between the
nature and the machine is inverted, with the machine time imposing its order over the
human body:
[W]e...realize that the transformation of nature is often worked by a
reordering or remaking of time, as if geological time had been ordered within
domestic space. Her [Hamilton’s] works have explored especially the relation of
the time of the body to the time of the machine: thus we see juxtaposed the
temporality of devices, linked to clock or artificial time. (Stewart, “As
Firmament” 20)
Hamilton’s work expands the time of bodily labour and ritualizes the presence of the
body in the disturbed, mechanized existence of the factory. She acknowledges the
vacancies created by mechanisation that transfers where the body exists to its “presence”
in the movement of a machine.
Hamilton also addresses the idea of the “maker” or artist as labourer, frequently
employing many workers and volunteers in her installations. The work of the artist is a
re-enactment of the work in the textile factory that metaphorically reconstitutes the
human element involved in mass factory production.

	
  

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Fig. 9: Ann Hamilton, ghost . . . a border act, 2000. Production still from the "Art in the Twenty-First
Century" Season 1 episode, "Spirituality," 2001 Segment: Ann Hamilton. Used by permission of Art21,
Inc. 2001.

The work, ghost...a border act consists of two thirty foot square, silk organza
room structures that are suspended within the architecture of the open factory space.
Enclosed within each fabric room is a ten-foot long wooden table with a projector
mounted on a rotating housing and enclosed in an acrylic vitrine. The subject of the
projection is a close-up of the tip of a pencil drawing a line, which is projected
simultaneously from both projectors, however, one video shows the line being drawn,
and the other projector, run in reverse, has the effect of the line un-drawing or “eating”
itself. The projectors are on motorized mounts constantly circling in opposite directions,
an ironic moving movie. The acrylic vitrines also act to mirror and refract the projected
images (much in the way the prism performed in Ripple Effects), and circulate around
with the main projections. The speed of the rotations is “at the speed of a slow walk” or
the time it would take the viewer to walk around the room following the projector. The
viewer is implicated in this relationship through the time involved in watching and
“walking” the installation. In the absence of actual workers in the factory, Hamilton
draws attention to the essence of the mechanization process that replaces human thinking,
human bodies, and ultimately produces only an empty building.
The time put into planning, arranging, and constructing artwork, while being
performance-like at times, is also an act of artistic labour. Hamilton explains what this
means in terms of being present in her own work:
I am...interested in the way the body through physical labor leaves a transparent
presence in material and how labor is a way of knowing—this is very different
	
  

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than speaking about labor in terms of class relations and social history...Labor
with materials can be a way of being present. (74)
Hamilton acknowledges how physical work is a way of being present in one’s body and
the environment. This presence also seems to me as an act of caring that can remain in
the places we inhabit or the objects we construct.

Chapter 3: Landscape Space
3.1 Shoreline (2013)
Building on the concepts developed in Veiled Effects and Ripple Effects that
examined how cinematic and pictorial practices relegate nature as background scenery, I
wanted to change the focus for the final exhibition to present nature as if it were the
dramatic protagonist whose beautiful face is viewed in an intimate close up. While the
earlier works had been about experimentation, with Shoreline I wanted to create
something more deliberate and refine the elements that had been previously explored.
In Ripple Effects, upon entering the installation space, the viewer was assaulted with the
excess of visuals and sounds. Conversely in Shoreline, the viewer is drawn to the work
through its pleasant formal elements, sensual fabric, and soothing simulation of the
seashore.
The isolated section of beach, which is the cinematic focus of the work, brings
“nature” into the foreground. This close up perspective establishes intimate proximity and
removes the distraction of vanishing points or receding horizons. Also, by removing any
reference to its origins as a rectangular projection, the video is transformed into an object
within the fabric. The choice to use imagery of the shoreline and isolating it in a
suspended vignette, could also be viewed as a type of forced framing that highlights how
we romanticize the sublime aspects of nature yet want to consume it in its most truncated
and disciplined form. Stewart in her book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the
Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, describes Edmund Burke’s definition of beauty
operating on this push and pull between closeness and distancing as “the interface
between the sublime and the picturesque”(75):

	
  

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...but that the former is individual and painful, while the second is social and
pleasant, resting upon love and its attendant emotions...While the sublime is
marked by a potential recklessness, a dangerous surrender to disorder in nature,
the picturesque is marked by harmony of form, color, and light, of modulation
approached by a distanced viewer. (75)
However if the viewer does not have this controlled distance, the close proximity with
“ordered” nature in Shoreline, might see how this fantasy has turned into something other
than the scene we thought it was.

Fig.10: Joanna Smythe, Shoreline, 2013. Fabric, airplane cable, projector, 3 min. digital video loop.
dimensions variable. Installation at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, detail shot. 2013. Photo: Joanna Smythe.

The effect I was working toward was a calming, sensual, embodied experience. At the
same time however, I wanted to hint at something unnatural and possibly ominous with
the shoreline existing as an independent entity. While it is impossible to completely
determine how a work might be perceived, the works highlight that what is historically
considered as “natural” may no longer exist. Our new ecology is an integration of natural
forms with those that are entirely constructed and artificial
During the production of the work, which came out of the idea to extend what had
been discovered in Veiled Effects, the physical aspect of how the various fabrics felt as I
manipulated them came to be an important aspect of the work. Sheer fabric is a sensual;

	
  

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we know how it feels next to our skin and the sensations registers even just looking at it.
In “Remembering the Senses”, Stewart describes how this operates:
To the extent that works of art also make possible particular sense experiences,
such thematic uses of the senses call forth an originary and complex kind of
synesthesia - not just in the mixture of sense impressions as in ‘a bright noise’ a
‘cold color’ or a ‘sharp aroma’ but as well in a synthesis of imagined and
material experiences. (64)
The sense of synaesthesia Stewart refers to is an integrated way of being in the world.
The fabric appeals at this same sensory level evoking associations with the interior, the
domestic, the unconscious, and with sleep and dreaming. Fabric, like water and light, is
soft and unstructured; it takes on the shape of what it covers or it can suggest other forms
through its own weight and fluid structure.
As the twenty-two meters of sheer fabric were rigged to cables suspended across
the studio, the construction of the work was like my own personal performance where I
was hanging linens or running through the laundry strung across my childhood backyard.
It was about concealing and revealing; it was about static electricity. When the projection
of the shoreline was laid over the fabric with the sounds of the water arriving and
dissipating, the fabric became like waves and surface; moving through the excess fabric
became like swimming.

Fig. 11: Joanna Smythe, Shoreline, 2013.
Fig. 12: Joanna Smythe, Shoreline, 2013.
Mixed media. Installation view in the Charles H. Scott Gallery July 2013. Photos: Joanna Smythe.

The configuration of the fabric at this point needed to relate conceptually to the
content of the video as well as hold the projection on its surface. Various experiments
with the fabric demonstrated that there needed to be two sets of cables in order to produce
draping that could hold a flat area on the top and provide a surface for the video
projection. In the final structure each draped section of fabric is about one foot in width at
	
  

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the centre and arranged in close proximity to the next drape, creating a horizontal
projection surface for the video. As discovered in Ripple Effects, the projected video light
also penetrates the semitransparent fabric and “fills” the structure.
The video playback speed was reduced in Shoreline to exaggerate the sounds of the
water and moving pebbles. The change in film speed is not immediately apparent, having
no other visual references, but the effect draws attention to the sounds of the pebbles as
they roll back and forth with the wave action, a detail that would be hard to observe in
real time. There is also a barely perceptible floating movement within the video image, a
result of the hand-held recording that moves up and down with the action of my
breathing, and with the altered film speed, results in uncanny movement that appears to
emerge from within the fabric.
The final arrangement of the fabric in a continuous undulating structure, is
suggestive of repeating waves, but also of ship sails that are rigged to hold the wind (or in
this case, the light from the projector). It was also a consideration that the drapery fabric
has a specific domestic function of screening vision, which contains the double entendre
of “screening a video” and “screening vision” and becomes an additional layer of
interference between the viewer and what is outside. Additionally, viewing an image of
nature on top of highly artificial and manufactured materials such as the polyester fabric
and airline cable literalizes how nature is used as raw materials to produce manufactured
goods. Conversely, the pairing of natural and artificial forms could suggest a synthesis
between natural and human-engineered forms.
Stewart states that through the creation of models and images of the landscape we
perceptually shift the scale of our bodies to be larger than the model so that the vastness
becomes contained (On Longing 71). According to Stewart, where we are terrified by the
sublime in nature we are soothed by the picturesque, the ordered version of landscape
(On Longing 75). Through “framing” nature, according to Stewart, we essentially make
the gigantic, miniature; we encapsulate it and reduce it until it becomes viewable as an
“overseeing” whole.
Cinematic form relies on continuous framing. An establishing or master shot is
frequently used at the beginning of a new scene to indicate the location. In Shoreline,

	
  

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there is no master shot only the close-up. Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari discuss how
the cinematic close-up of the face turns it into landscape deterritorialized from the body:
The close-up in film treats the face primarily as a landscape; that is the definition
of film, black hole and white wall, screen and camera. But the same goes for the
earlier arts, architecture, painting, and even the novel: close-ups animate and
invent all of their correlations...(191)
The act of framing in Shoreline is taken to its extreme, where the viewer is deprived of
the ability to look around and take in the “whole body” so the landscape then becomes a
face.
The fixed gaze on a moving shoreline counters our normal roving eye that wants to
keep moving and take in the whole scene. Unlike viewing conventions such as radical
shifts in time and space created by jump cuts, the viewer in Shoreline is presented with
movements within the projection that do not have a narrative purpose but instead are the
result of the camera being held by a living, breathing body. The camera movement is a
reinsertion of the body into the machine of the camera and a disruption to the invisible
eye that the audience is expected to assume.
In July 2013 the MAA graduate exhibition was held at the Charles H. Scott Gallery
in Vancouver. The exhibition was a group show entitled OFFLINE, in which the piece
Shoreline was installed. The work was presented in such a way that the viewer could see
the wave-like form of the structure from the side as they walked into the gallery space. In
order to get the full effect of the video on the fabric, the viewer needed to walk around
the installation to where the main sound was directed. The viewer was also invited to
touch and walk through the work.
While there are always challenging aspects to group exhibitions, especially with
works that have external sound components and rely on darkened environments, what I
learned most from the graduation exhibition had to do with how sound operated in the
space. In the interim exhibition in 2012, where Ripple Effects was installed in the media
gallery that had its own speaker system, the issue of sound did not come up to the same
extent. Shoreline on the other hand, relies heavily on sound for texture, atmosphere, and
environmental information, with the video adjusted to one quarter of its original speed in
order to expand and deepen the sounds of the waves and create a heavier, more ominous
effect. The space for the graduation exhibition was an open room with hard surfaces and
	
  

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no speaker system, which complicated the installation significantly. This required
installing ceiling mounted speakers to provide an area of enveloping sound at the focal
point of the installation. The focused sound environment also prevented excess sound
from spilling out or entering the space of other works. Ideally, the piece would have
benefited from sound baffling, however the process of working through the sound
situation led to future considerations such as a surround system that could move the
sound forward and backward with the action of the waves.
A few years ago I experienced Storm Room (2009), Janet Cardiff and George Bures
Miller’s multi-media soundscape at the Art Gallery of Alberta. Sitting on the floor in the
installation, I felt completely immersed in the “storm” with water dripping into metal
pails and lightening and thunder effects crashing all around. I remember thinking how
profoundly the sound affected me. Cardiff and Bures Miller utilize a 70s technology
called “ambisonics” to record their sound and then create three-dimensional sound fields
within their installations. As sound has recently become more of a focus in my
installation work, Cardiff and Bures Miller’s work will offer context for future
investigation.
3.2 Sensing Nature: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology
In the moment on the lake, where I felt my boundaries merge into that of my
surroundings, there was an “essence” of being in mutual relationship with the
environment. Maurice Merleau-Ponty states that phenomenology is the study of the
essence of perception with its focus of “achieving a direct and primitive contact with the
world”(Phenomenology vii). While I have some reservations about what exactly is meant
by “primitive” or how this would apply in contemporary circumstances, Gayle Salaman,
Professor of English, specializing in phenomenology points out that phenomenology as a
philosophy supports an embodied and individual relationship to the environment, which
is “an unsettling of the fantasy of a universal perspective” that is at the core of
environmentally destructive activity (“Feminist Interpretations of Maurice MerleauPonty”).
The sensation on the lake was a basic and direct connection “with” my
surroundings. Merleau-Ponty states, “The phenomenological world is not pure being, but
the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also

	
  

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where my own and other people’s intersect and engage each other like gears”
(Phenomenology xxii). Merleau-Ponty is referring to a communication that crosses the
threshold of the skin and is a two-way sensing with one’s entire environment. The
relationship of the body to its perceived world is elaborated upon in Merleau-Ponty’s
later writing in The Visible and the Invisible: Intertwining - The Chiasm, where he
describes the body as a location where the subject/object positions shift:
One can say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that
thinks itself—or that the world is at the heart of our flesh. In any case, once a
body-world relationship is recognized, there is a ramification of my body and a
ramification of the world and a correspondence between its inside and my outside,
between my inside and its outside. (136)
Merleau-Ponty defines this shifting state as an intertwining with the other in a “chiasmic
embrace”. The work “chiasm” according to Professor of Philosophy, Thomas Baldwin,
comes from the Greek letter chi which refers jointly to “subjective experience and
objective existence” and is the nature of the relationship between one’s inner life and
one’s experiences (247). Merleau-Ponty’s thinking about the chiasm or “flesh of the
world” recognizes a “oneness” of experience that accommodates the shifting loci of
sensation from body into space and back again, rather than privileging the human body as
the singular source of all sensation as set out in his earlier work in Phenomenology of
Perception (Stewart, “Remembering” 60).
Chapter 4: A Question of Technology
4.1 Timothy Morton: In the Heart of Darkness
Creating work that challenges our ideas about nature leads to the question of what
exactly is nature? As discussed earlier, the act of framing nature as one thing or another,
separates it from its contiguous relationship and interconnectedness with all the other
parts of the environment. The complexity of this relationship is coming to the foreground
as we experience global warming, mass species extinction, soil erosion in an everwidening sphere of ecological collapse. According to Timothy Morton, we are stuck in an
18th century Romantic interpretation of nature and refuse to address existing
circumstances. He criticizes movements such as deep ecology and its proponents for
“consciously block[ing] their ears to all intellectual developments of the last thirty years”

	
  

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(Ecology without Nature 20). To instigate change, according to Morton, a full
engagement with all levels of critical discourse, intellectual, creative, activist, and
scientific, needs to occur. To counter deep ecology’s nostalgia, Morton suggests an
alternate “dark ecology”—“a ‘Goth’ assertion of the contingent and necessarily queer
idea that we want to stay with a dying world” (184-85). He explains:
Dark ecology is the ultimate reverse of deep ecology. The most ethical act is to
love the other precisely in their artificiality, rather than seeking their naturalness
and authenticity. Dark ecology refuses to digest plants and animals and humans
into ideal forms. (“Dark Ecology of Elegy” 269)
Dark ecology lets go of the idea of nature entirely, and instead suggests we exist in a
collective state with all elements that have contributed to the condition of the planet. The
idea is that we learn to love and care for the “Frankenstein” monster we have created.
Dark ecology presents nature as an indefinable “flux” that does not exist as one thing or
another.
One of the reasons I chose to focus on the shoreline for my final piece is that its
essence is an indefinable edge—water one moment, and ground the next. The shoreline is
a liminal space; those spaces that are not one thing or another and break down normative
hierarchies such as foreground/background. This duality is present in the structure of
Shoreline. Is the fabric screen, or sculpture? Is the image inside the work or on top of it?
The sound isn’t physically attached to the work yet it surrounds it and is an integral
component.
Liminality is also present in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the Chiasmus, the
twofold embrace that confuses self and other, foreground and background, yet Morton
categorizes Merleau-Ponty’s depiction of the chiasmic embrace into that of ineffectual
“nature writing” (attached to deep ecology) since both terms, self and environment, need
to be maintained even as they cancel each other out, making it impossible to completely
“intertwine” (Ecology without Nature 69). It could be argued that intertwining does not
imply dissolution, but the point is that Morton identifies a “gap” between the self and
other that cancels out the ability to totally merge, a gap that is necessary in order to
prevent a collapse of infinity, even though there is “nothing in the gap, not even space”
(Ecology without Nature 144). This introduces a useful paradox.

	
  

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Julia Kristeva describes in her book Powers of Horror, this form of gap is a
reaction to the breakdown of meaning (usually in an encounter with something like death
or vomit) when something cannot be assimilated as outside or inside, or self and other
(1). Morton brings the idea of the gap together with Kristeva’s notion of the abject in
relation to ecology as “qualities of the world we slough of in order to maintain subjects
and objects”(Ecology without Nature 159). He establishes the idea that the abject parts of
nature include pollution, miasma, or slime and are what deep ecology refuses to deal with
or address. Abject states are dark ecology’s content. Morton states, “Remaining with the
dying in the present moment, and accepting the fact of our own death, are echoed in the
choice to maintain the painful awareness of being alive—of having a mind that differs
from our body and from itself (“The Dark Ecology of Elegy” 267). Rather than an
immersion into an imaginary and ideological form of nature worship (which is essentially
narcissistic), Morton proposes we gaze fully at our planetary ailments and include them
in our chiasmic embrace.
4.2 Char Davies: Virtual Reality and Distance
The final artist to be included in this conversation is Char Davies, who is
considered to have produced the first interactive virtual reality artworks with Osmose
(1995), and Éphémère (1998). Using million dollar supercomputers (at the time) and
programs developed for military simulations and film sequences, Osmose and Éphémère
depict imagined elements of nature in navigable environments that explore the
implications of our phenomenological existence in virtual space (Grau, “Charlotte
Davies: Osmose” 196).
Timothy Morton finds an analogy between the ecological crisis and the immersive
aspect of VR environments:
Both virtual reality and the ecological panic are about immersive experiences in
which our usual reference point, or illusion of one, has been lost...In virtual reality
it becomes impossible to count on an idea of “distance.” We feel we can’t
achieve a critical purchase, but are instead about to be dissolved into a psychotic
aquarium of hallucinatory un-being. (Ecology without Nature 26)
Davies’s virtual interface, however, acts to paradoxically turn the viewer’s awareness to
being present in their own body rather than the “Un-being” of feeling dissolved into
hyperspace. Using a stereoscopic head-mounted display with audio, and an interface vest

	
  

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which measures lung capacity and motion, the “immersant” navigates virtual space in a
non-aggressive manner; breathing in and out to move up and down, and simply leaning to
move forward or backward. Davies explains that the interface was “intended to ‘reaffirm’
the role of the subjectively-experienced, ‘felt’ body in cyberspace, in direct contrast to its
usual absence or objectification in virtual worlds” (“Changing Space: Virtual Reality as
an Area of Embodied Being”).
Davies presents nature in its ultimate disembodied state of virtual reality, yet the
viewer (immersant) becomes more aware of their embodied physicality by re-orienting to
bodily functions that produce entirely different results. Attention to breath, our most
primary and basic movement, subverts Cartesian principles that privilege the eye and
mind over the body. In a recent interview, Davies says of her virtual reality worlds, that
they were not intended to create a virtual version of nature, but to demonstrate how
technology could be used in a non-aggressive manner. She explains:
Conventions in early 3D computer graphics included linear perspective, Cartesian
space, and objective-realism. At the time, such realism was highly sought after by
the advertising/entertainment industries. (I was well aware of this as a founding
director of the 3D software company Softimage.) Similarly, VR was grounded in
conventions that reinforced the worldview of (male) engineers, the military and
the gaming industry. These included the same striving for realism, a point-andshoot-or-grab interface, and emphasis on achieving domination and control. To
use the medium/technology differently, that is, for my own purposes, such
conventions had to be subverted, or at least circumvented. In other words, the
technology had to be "turned". (“Technology at the Service of Art”)
While Davies’s environments were inspired by the real world terrain of her home in rural
Quebec, Oliver Grau, Professor of Art History, points out that the virtual environments
create “rather polemic references to kitsch and esotericism...”(204). Frances Dyson,
writer, media artist and associate professor in Techo-Cultural Studies, explains some
possible misunderstandings of her virtual reality works, reiterating that they were a
critique of traditional virtual reality interfaces and not a utopian melding of nature and
technology. Dyson quotes Margaret Morse saying the “nature” represented in the virtual
reality environments were “ambiguous spaces [...] bordered by code, constituted by code,
and already culturally coded” (116-17).
Like my own installation practice that emerged out of a desire to expand the two
dimensionality of pictorial space and bring the viewer into a relationship with the lived
	
  

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space of the artwork, dimensionality was a motivating factor for Davies. Davies, who
also began as a painter, wanted to alter the viewer’s perceptual realm in order to
encourage a fresh way of seeing and experiencing. Davies quotes Marshall McLuhan in
his statement that discusses the artist’s role in society:
The function of the artist in correcting the unconscious bias of perception in any
given culture can be betrayed if he [or she] merely repeats the bias of the culture
[...] In this sense the role of art is to create [...] counter-environments that open the
doors of perception to people otherwise numbed..."5
The idea of “repeating the bias of culture” not only operates in my work through
repeating tropes of the picturesque, but by also re-framing them as unnatural and abject
forms, they become “counter environments”. Davies’s critical purpose is to subvert the
focus of technological interfaces to enable remote acts of violence. She states her move to
virtual reality or VR, was motivated by a desire to counter the disembodied “point and
shoot” interface that was the driving force in VR development (“Changing Space: Virtual
Reality as an Area of Embodied Being”).

CONCLUSION
The experience on the lake, as a moment of recognition of my connection to
nature, will resonate with me for some time. The search to find ways to translate this
quasi-mystical experience led to many experiments using new materials and media, and
introduced me to the ideas and practices of artists Bill Viola, Dan Graham, Diana Thater,
James Turrell, Ann Hamilton, and Char Davies, in whose work I have discovered a close
affinity. Their practices also demonstrate deep personal insights into experiential
existence and awareness of the cultural impacts that affect our relationship to the
environment.
My investigative path also led into the territory of phenomenology, an approach
that helped interpret the intuitive aspects of sensation and supplied a vocabulary around a
subject difficult to express in conventional terms. As a philosophy, phenomenology
acknowledges the body as a site of knowing and intelligence, and recognizes our

5

Quote from Marshal McLuhan and Harley Parker, "The Emperor's New Clothes"
The Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, 1968, p241.

	
  

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relationship with the world as an embodied, flowing-between experience, counter to the
disengaged perspective of Cartesian rationalism.
In a culture absorbed by consumption, production, and excess, articulating a
sensory bond as a legitimate way to connect to the natural world is one of my main
concerns. I also want to disrupt the perspective of the “overseeing whole”; the
miniaturization that Stewart indicates as the way we mediate vision to feel powerful
when overwhelmed by the vastness of nature. It is my belief that we are at a stage where
the environmental conditions and problems are so complicated that the view is now one
of a disembodied terrain, like a face that is so large on the movie screen that it is barely
recognizable as flesh. We do not understand the “range, nature and scale” of the
circumstances due to it vast scope according to anthropologist and sociologist Bruno
Latour (Londres-On Gaia 2). Latour asks:
Is there a way to bridge the distance between the scale of the phenomena we hear
about and the tiny Umwelt inside which we witness, as if we were a fish inside
its bowl, an ocean of catastrophes that are supposed to unfold? How are we to
behave sensibly when there is no ground control station anywhere to which
we can send the message, “Houston, we have a problem”? (Londres-On Gaia 2)
This question speaks to the powerlessness we feel in the face of an environmental crisis
that is beyond the scale of individual comprehension, something we cannot contain
within our personal perspective and thus experience as an ongoing abstract spectacle.
Video installation has become a dominant component of my multivalent practice
that also includes sculpture, drawing, and painting. The installation work has expanded
the perspective and scale of my imagery as well as allowed me to work more broadly and
critically with concepts that I felt were not being articulated in less dimensional or
experiential forms. The technical aspects of coordinating space, sound, sculpture, and
projection, while challenging at times, continues to offer unlimited potential for
exploration and conceptual development. Along with enhancing the audio aspects of the
installations, there is room to extend the projection work with proprietary video editing
software programs such as “MadMapper” that literally shape the video projections to
match projection surfaces.
A project I am currently developing, where I may utilize MadMapper software,
works with the idea of projecting onto constructed objects set into outdoor environments.

	
  

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The idea originated with an encounter while on a recent excursion into Cariboo
Mountains Provincial Park. While hiking, I came across a freshly constructed 8-foot
plywood crate. There was no context for this crate being where it was and I could only
surmise that hunters had built it. I upended the box into a stance to reference the monolith
in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey in which a mysterious structure
appears to a group of proto human apes on the plains of Africa.

Fig. 13: Joanna Smythe. Cariboo Monolith, 2013. Photo: Joanna Smythe.6

Kubric’s monolith corroborates the Enlightenment myth of humanity’s intellectual
superiority and distinction from uncivilized “nature” being introduced by “alien” (read
divine) technology into the genetic makeup of the apes, which enables them to develop
tools and thus “evolve” into humans. The “Dawn of Man” scene with the apes
encountering the monolith, establishes the precise moment when humans become
separated from nature.
Coming across an obviously constructed form in the middle of a wilderness park,
stood as a marker of something “civilized” and made me think of ways I could address
the overlap between what fits our picture of nature and how technology crosses into our
experience of outdoor space. Although I have not worked out the exact relationships
6

In the photograph, Cariboo Monolith, the alien presence in the forest is the corporation
represented by the mechanically processed raw materials, the plywood crate, standing against the
monumental presence of the Cariboo Mountains in the background.

	
  

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between the objects, images, and sounds for the series, or whether I want to have any
popular culture references, I do want to address the way parklands represent an
institutionalized form of nature.7 I also want to introduce more complex and layered
audio into my work, as previously I simply manipulated the diegetic sounds from within
the video recordings. The mix of natural and human made sounds are thoroughly
integrated outdoors as jet engines penetrate even the most remote wilderness site.
In its final form, Ripple Effects offered picturesque and soothing landscape tropes
that never completely resolved due to the extreme artifice of their presentation. The
combination of synthetic forms, mechanical sounds and motion, and the controlled
perspectives, stopped anything completely familiar or comforting from taking shape. The
engagement with Shoreline in the graduation exhibition played out as I imagined, with
viewers touching the fabric, lying under it, leaning into its curves to take photographs, or
just watching closely, engrossed in the sounds and movements of the work. My intention
was to create a formally attractive work creating an experience that could operate on
various levels, offering contemplation and critique. At the very least, the viewer might
continue a phenomenological and sensory engagement with the environment as they
leave the work, staying present (for a while) in a culture that continually asks us to
disconnect and accept pre-digested versions of reality.
Where my initial goal was to produce works that activated the space of the videos
to create an immersive, surrogate experience of “nature”, the resulting installations turned
out to be artificial, constructed, self-referential environments that highlighted the
artificiality of their existence. The contrast between my original intentions and how the
installations evolved in the studio and from piece to piece, offered a productive reflection
on my process over the last two years. This process was informed by theory, research,
and a close examination of how critique is engaged in contemporary art practice. The
In their edited volume, Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective,
Bernard Gissbl, Patrick Kupper, and Sabine Höhler address the importance of national parks as one of the
most significant tools of nature conservation on a global level. In the introduction to their text they explain
the paradoxical relationship between nature conservancy and civilization as intertwined but “thoroughly
ambivalent” to one another (9). They explain the development of national parks was a “scheme” of national
or imperial development, but it also a badge of “civilized” behaviour with respect to managing the
“aesthetic, ecological and social value of wild nature” (9). One of the aspects of “civilizing nature” reflects
the imperial technologies of: “the map, the expedition, the fieldwork, the research station...law making,
bureaucracy and armed surveillance” (11). It is this technological and disciplinary perspective that I would
like to focus on in our current relationship with nature parks.
7

	
  

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independent environments question aesthetics and artifice that fix certain ideas of nature,
as well as offer an alternate way to envision our relationship with a human altered and
constantly changing ecosystem. This type of research-based, experimental enquiry will
inform my future work as I expand the series begun with Ripple Effects and Shoreline to
continue a conversation about environmental ethics, articulated through a critically
informed art practice.

	
  

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