Cinesthesia: Museum Cinema and the Curated Screen

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