Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 18 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter explores the differences between immersive and reactive audiovisual art. The work of video artists Tony Oursler, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Bill Viola, Pipilotti Rist, and Camille Utterback and musicians John Cage, Brian Eno, and Björk is used to identify the ways in which video, as a medium, can press at the one-way flow of communication that often governs the performance of music and the consumption of visual art. Video technology can give visitors a hands-on, creative role in forging audio artwork, replacing the autonomy of an artist or composer with the spontaneous possibilities of audience-controlled process art. Moving from early interactive video environments to recent pieces that make use of touch-screen interfaces, this chapter charts a progression from communal audiovisual participation to the more interiorized experiences that characterize many contemporary video works.

Keywords: video art, intermediality, spatial merging, installation art, happenings, audiovisual, reactive, immersion, process, space

Holly Rogers

Holly Rogers is senior lecturer in Music at the University of Liverpool and a Fulbright Scholar at the Cinema Department of San Francisco State University. She has published on a variety of audiovisual topics including music and experimental cinema, visual music and composer biopics. Recent research fellowships at University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin enabled her to complete her monograph Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (OUP), in which she argues that video is as much a musical genre as it is a visual one. Holly is currently investigating the interactions between sound and art in the galleries of San Francisco as part of a larger project on video intermediality.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.