Two Women; On the Cinematic Experience in Installation Art

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-07

Two Women; On the Cinematic Experience in Installation Art documents the research and practice underpinning the installation art piece Two Women, a multimedia video and sound installation with kinetic machines. The research focuses on replicating the cinematic experience in the realm of installation art, by addressing the perceptual and physical experience of the moving image in space. With the use of new media technology, experiencing the moving image becomes progressive and interactive. The research covers aspects of the theoretical meaning of ‘the cinematic’, the history of embodiment and the senses, expanded cinema in the 1960s and 70s, contemporary cinematic art in the gallery as well as the theater, and the relationship between cinema and new media. Two Women is practice-based research which utilizes a hybridization of film, installation art, electroacoustic composition, algorithmic narrative, and kinetic machines. The piece thematically addresses the invisible crisis of an old Korean woman in a framework of fictional narrative, and a database of historical news archives. Two Women attempts to depict multiple layers of imagination, memory, and history in a physical space. In the piece, time is experienced as a fragmented, spatially distributed, and non-linear concept. Two Women investigates the research trajectories which constitute the technical, artistic, foundations and process for the artwork.