The Moving Image as Public Art:

Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of

Enchantment Annie Dell'Aria
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EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND ARTISTS’ MOVING IMAGE

The Moving Image

as Public Art
Sidewalk Spectators and
Modes of Enchantment

Annie Dell’Aria
Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image

Series Editors
Kim Knowles
Aberystwyth University
Aberystwyth, UK

Jonathan Walley
Department of Cinema
Denison University
Granville, OH, USA
Existing outside the boundaries of mainstream cinema, the field of
experimental film and artists’ moving image presents a radical challenge
not only to the conventions of that cinema but also to the social and
cultural norms it represents. In offering alternative ways of seeing and
experiencing the world, it brings to the fore different visions and dissenting
voices. In recent years, scholarship in this area has moved from a marginal
to a more central position as it comes to bear upon critical topics such as
medium-specificity, ontology, the future of cinema, changes in cinematic
exhibition and the complex interrelationships between moving image
technology, aesthetics, discourses, and institutions. This book series stakes
out exciting new directions for the study of alternative film practice–from
the black box to the white cube, from film to digital, crossing continents
and disciplines, and developing fresh theoretical insights and revised his-
tories. Although employing the terms ‘experimental film’ and ‘artists’
moving image’, we see these as interconnected practices and seek to inter-
rogate the crossovers and spaces between different kinds of oppositional
filmmaking.
We invite proposals on any aspect of non-mainstream moving image prac-
tice, which may take the form of monographs, edited collections, and art-
ists’ writings both historical and contemporary. We are interested in
expanding the scope of scholarship in this area, and therefore welcome
proposals with an interdisciplinary and intermedial focus, as well as studies
of female and minority voices. We also particularly welcome proposals that
move beyond the West, opening up space for the discussion of Latin
American, African and Asian perspectives.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15817
 Annie Dell’Aria

The Moving Image as

Public Art
Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment
Annie Dell’Aria
Department of Art
Miami University
Oxford, OH, USA

ISSN 2523-7527     ISSN 2523-7535 (electronic)

Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image
ISBN 978-3-030-65903-5    ISBN 978-3-030-65904-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65904-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Cover Illustration: Projection by Brave Berlin at BLINK Cincinnati festival, 2017,

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 Acknowledgments

This book is indebted to a wealth of formal and informal support over the
past ten years. From Miami University, I have been very fortunate to receive
time to write thanks to an Assigned Research Appointment and a Summer
Research Appointment as well as the PREP Grant to help secure image
rights, the moral support and camaraderie of the Howe Center for Writing
Excellence, and the helpful faculty and staff of the Miami University
Libraries. This project also developed through the support of the National
Endowment for the Humanities, particularly through enriching participa-
tion at the Summer Institute on Space, Place, and the Humanities in 2017
at Northeastern University, as well as from a research residency at Signal
Culture (then in Owego, New York) in 2018. In the early days of this proj-
ect, when it was a doctoral dissertation at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York, I was very fortunate to have the steadfast guidance
and support of my advisor, Harriet F. Senie, as well as generative feedback
from my committee members, Amy Herzog, Mona Hadler, and Margot
Bouman, and the resources of the Mina Rees Library.
I am very grateful for the time and generosity of many of the artists
included in this book, including Judith Barry, Dara Birnbaum, Bill Brand,
Anne Bray, Tiffany Carbonneau, Alex Criqui, Jane Dickson, Rafael
Lozano-Hemmer, Mary Clare Reitz, Dan Reynolds, and Paul St George.
Conversations and correspondence with Desma Belsaas, Anita Bhalla,
Kerry Brougher, Jean Cooney, Steve Dietz, George Fifield, Kevin
Heathhorn, Julia Muney Moore, Maria Niro, Chris Nriapia, Daniel
Palmer, Erin Taylor, and C. Jacqueline Wood have also enriched this

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

book’s development of ideas and perspectives. Research was also aided by

the Creative Time and Public Art Fund archives at the Fales Library and
Special Collections at the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at New York
University and the Special Collections at Stanford Libraries.
Conversations in the classroom with my students continue to fuel my
ideas, and I am grateful for their enthusiasm and intellect. Feedback and
informal conversations with colleagues at Miami, including Ann Elizabeth
Armstrong, Ron Becker, Andrew Casper, Joomi Chung, Jordan Fenton,
Katie Day Good, Mack Hagood, Michael Hatch, Kerry Hegarty, Elisabeth
Hodges, Katie Johnson, Ben Nicholson, Rob Robbins, Pepper Stetler,
and others have also contributed to my thinking as well as my approach to
the book-writing process. Informal conversations with Leticia Bajuyo,
Dave Colangelo, Tim Cresswell, Nicole Fennimore, Nicholas Gamso,
Margaret Herman, Cara Jordan, Sarah Kanouse, Zach Melzer, Sarah Mills,
Andrew Neumann, Morgan Ridler, Rachel Stevens, Andrew Uroskie,
Hyewon Yi, Greg Zinman, and so many more have helped me work
through ideas and develop new ones in countless ways. Feedback from
audience members and fellow panelists at the College Art Association and
Society for Cinema and Media Studies conferences has also been invaluable.
Sections of Chap. 2 appeared previously as articles in Moving Image
Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ) and Public Art Dialogue, and I am
grateful to those editors and publishers for granting permission for me to
reprint revised versions of them here. Nike Dreyer, Grace Hong, Renee
Santos, T.J. Wiltham, Schmidt Associates, and many others were instru-
mental in helping me secure images and check facts about artworks and
exhibitions.
I am grateful to Kim Knowles and Jonathan Walley for their editorial
feedback, as well as that of anonymous peer reviewers. Thanks also to Lina
Aboujieb, Emily Wood, Raghu Kalynaraman, and the rest of the team at
Palgrave Macmillan for their support in helping a first-time book author
through the publishing process.
The personal support and patience of Scott Dimmich and many friends,
as well as the boost to the spirit provided by the 2019 Washington
Nationals, helped me see this project through to the end. Finally, complet-
ing this book would not be possible without my family: my sister Madeline
Dell’Aria, and my parents Mary Logan and Stephen Dell’Aria. I thank
them for years of constant and unconditional support.
 Praise for The Moving Image as Public Art

“Annie Dell’Aria offers a timely and illuminating taxonomy of the prolif-

erating sites, aims, and functions of the moving image in public spaces.
Moving beyond familiar critiques of spectacle and capital, Dell’Aria pays
careful attention to the ways artists, institutions, and communities negoti-
ate the complex goals and utility of art in the public sphere. In doing so,
she prompts us to rethink our continually evolving relationship to the
moving image.”
—Gregory Zinman, author of Making Images Move: Handmade Film
and the Other Arts
“Being outdoors in shared public spaces with strangers has taken on
nuanced meanings of late. It is both a liberating respite from different
levels of lockdown, but also fraught with an invisible risk to our health. It
is therefore prescient when so much of our lives has been increasingly
confined to the digital sphere, that The Moving Image as Public Art con-
siders how outdoor moving image artworks may reconfigure experiential
encounters between strangers, spatial interaction with public space, and
the fabric of cities.”
—Pat Naldi, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Enchantment: Encountering Moving Images on Urban

Surfaces 31

3 Commercial Breaks: Intra-spectacular Public Art 63

4 Screen Spaces: Zones of Interaction and Recognition101

5 The Light Festival Phenomenon145

6 Precarious Platforms: The Paradox of Permanent Moving

Images187

7 Superimposition: Forms of Moving Image Site-Specificity211

ix
x Contents

8 Postscript: Reflections from a Summer Without Public

Space255

Bibliography265

Index287
 About the Author

Annie Dell’Aria is Assistant Professor of Art History at Miami University

in Oxford, Ohio, USA. Her writings have appeared in Afterimage: The
Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, International Journal of
Performance Arts and Digital Media, Moving Image Review and Art
Journal (MIRAJ), Public Art Dialogue, Millennium Film Journal, and
other venues.

xi
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Tony Oursler, Tear of the Cloud, 2018. Multi-channel

installation. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nicholas Knight,
Courtesy Public Art Fund, NY 2
Fig. 1.2 John Slepian, *sigh*, 2012. Installed at Art on the Marquee,
Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Image courtesy
Boston CyberArts 4
Fig. 2.1 Bill Brand, Masstransiscope. 1980. Conceptual drawing. © Bill
Brand. Courtesy the artist 38
Fig. 2.2 Bill Brand, Masstransiscope. 1980. Excerpt of paintings. © Bill
Brand. Courtesy the artist 38
Fig. 2.3 Doug Aitken, SONG I, 2012. Video projection; color; sound.
Running time: 00:34:42; dimensions variable. Joseph
H. Hirshhorn Bequest Fund and Anonymous Gift, 2012,
dedicated in honor of Kerry Brougher’s service to the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2000–2014), 2014.
(Image: Frederick Charles, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden)50
Fig. 2.4 Doug Aitken, SONG I, 2012. Video projection; color; sound.
Running time: 00:34:42; dimensions variable. Joseph
H. Hirshhorn Bequest Fund and Anonymous Gift, 2012,
dedicated in honor of Kerry Brougher’s service to the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2000–2014), 2014.
(Image: Frederick Charles, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden)60

xiii
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 David Klein, New York Fly TWA, 1956. Photolithograph,
40 × 25″ (101.2 × 63.6 cm). Gift of TWA. (Digital Image ©
The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art
Resource, NY) 69
Fig. 3.2 Keith Haring, Times Square Story Board, for Messages to the
Public animation, 1982. © Keith Haring Foundation. Used by
permission74
Fig. 3.3 Jane Dickson, Let Them Eat Cake, 1982. For Messages to the
Public, Times Square, New York. (Photo by Jane Dickson.
Courtesy the artist) 77
Fig. 3.4 Pipilotti Rist, Open My Glade, 2000. 4/6/2000—5/20/2000.
© Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and
Luhring Augustine. (Photo by Dennis Cowley. Courtesy Public
Art Fund) 82
Fig. 3.5 Pipilotti Rist, Open My Glade (Flatten), 2000–2017. © Pipilotti
Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring
Augustine. Screened as part of Midnight Moment, January
2017. (Photo by Ka-Man Tse for @TSqArts. Courtesy Times
Square Alliance) 91
Fig. 3.6 Chris Doyle, Bright Canyon, 2014. Screened as part of
Midnight Moment, July 2014. (Photo by Louis Dengler
Ostenrik for @TSqArts. Courtesy Times Square Alliance) 93
Fig. 4.1 Jaume Plensa, Crown Fountain, 2004, glass, stainless steel,
LED screens, light, wood, black granite, and water. Millennium
Park, Chicago, Illinois. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / VEGAP, Madrid. (Photo by Annie Dell’Aria) 109
Fig. 4.2 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Level of Confidence, 2015. Shown
here: Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Montréal,
Québec, Canada, 2018. (Photo by Guy L’Heureux. Image
courtesy the artist) 123
Fig. 4.3 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Re:positioning Fear, Relational
Architecture 3, 1997. Shown here: Landeszeughaus,
Architecture and Media Biennale, Graz, Austria. (Photo by
Joerg Mohr. Image courtesy the artist) 126
Fig. 4.4 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan, Relational Architecture
11, 2005. Shown here: Brayford University Campus, Lincoln,
United Kingdom. (Photo by Antimodular Research. Image
courtesy the artist) 129
Fig. 4.5 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan, Relational Architecture
11, 2005. Shown here: Castle Wharf, Nottingham, United
Kingdom. (Photo by Antimodular Research. Image courtesy
the artist) 133
 List of Figures  xv

Fig. 4.6 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Sandbox, Relational Architecture 17,

2010. Shown here: Santa Monica, California, USA. (Photo by
Antimodular Research. Image courtesy the artist) 136
Fig. 4.7 Canopy at Summit Park, designed my MKSK, 2014. (Photo by
Scott Dimmich) 141
Fig. 5.1 Foster and Flux, Blink Factory, 2017. BLINK Festival,
Cincinnati, Ohio. (Image courtesy Foster and Flux) 168
Fig. 5.2 Tiffany Carbonneau, Something Worth Remembering, 2018.
Northern Spark Festival, Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by
Tiffany Carbonneau. Courtesy the artist) 170
Fig. 5.3 Lightborne, The Portal, 2019. BLINK Festival, Cincinnati,
Ohio. (Image courtesy Lightborne) 172
Fig. 5.4 Saya Woolfalk, Visionary Reality Threshold, 2019. Mural and
projection for BLINK Festival, Cincinnati, Ohio. (Photo by
Annie Dell’Aria) 178
Fig. 5.5 Inka Kendzia and Faith XLVII, Ad Pacem, 2019. BLINK
Festival, Cincinnati, Ohio. (Photo by Chop em Down Films) 179
Fig. 6.1 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Flow City, 1983–1990. Drawing.
Public art/video at 59th St Marine Transfer Station, NYC
Dept. of Sanitation © Mierle Laderman Ukeles. (Courtesy the
artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York) 192
Fig. 6.2 Dara Birnbaum, Rio Videowall, 1989. Atlanta, Georgia.
National Endowment for the Arts Artists Archive, Smithsonian
American Art Museum 194
Fig. 6.3 Dara Birnbaum, Rio Videowall, 1989. Detail. Atlanta, Georgia.
National Endowment for the Arts Artists Archive, Smithsonian
American Art Museum 195
Fig. 6.4 Schmidt Associates. Rendering of projected digital canvas for
Montage on Mass (now Penrose on Mass) development. 2015.
(Image courtesy Schmidt Associates) 205
Fig. 7.1 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Facsimile, 2004. Moscone Convention
Center, San Francisco, California. (Courtesy Diller
Scofidio + Renfro)217
Fig. 7.2 John Gerrard, Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada), 2014.
Simulation. Installation view, Lincoln Center, New York.
October 3–December 1, 2014. (Presented by Lincoln Center in
association with Public Art Fund. Courtesy of the artist, Simon
Preston, New York, and Thomas Dane, London) 224
Fig. 7.3 Paul St George, Telectroscope, 2008. New York installation.
(Image courtesy the artist) 227
Fig. 7.4 Judith Barry, Adam’s Wish, 1988. Installed in World Financial
Center, New York, New York. (Courtesy the artist and Mary
Boone Gallery, New York City) 231
xvi List of Figures

Fig. 7.5 Tony Oursler, Tear of the Cloud, 2018. Multi-channel

installation. Courtesy of the artist. (Photo: Nicholas Knight,
Courtesy Public Art Fund, NY) 234
Fig. 7.6 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Bunker Hill Monument Projection, Boston,
Massachusetts, 1998. © Krzysztof Wodiczko Courtesy Galerie
Lelong & Co., New York 242
Fig. 7.7 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Abraham Lincoln: War Veterans
Projection, Union Square, New York, New York, 2012. ©
Krzysztof Wodiczko Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York 244
Fig. 7.8 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Monument, Madison Square Park,
New York, New York, 2020. © Krzysztof Wodiczko Courtesy
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York 245
Fig. 8.1 Carrie Mae Weems, Resist COVID Take 6, 2020. For Messages
for the Public, Times Square Arts, Times Square, New York,
New York. Photo by Maria Baranova for @TSqArts. (Image
courtesy Times Square Alliance) 258
Fig. 8.2 Dustin Klein and Alex Criqui, projection onto statue of Robert
E. Lee, 2020. Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia,
USA. Photo by Zach Fichter. (Image courtesy Alex Criqui and
Zach Fichter) 261
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Ghosts haunted the 69th Street Transfer Bridge on Manhattan’s west side
in October 2018. Each night, projected words acknowledging the land’s
longer history and its Indigenous peoples scrolled up the half-sunken,
rusting forms of the industrial ruin jutting out from the Hudson River.
Crawling figures and strange, contorted faces appeared along the horizon-
tal tracks barely peeping out from the water, which glimmered with the
images’ reflection. Moving north on the footpath, a floating, disembodied
head sang out from a willow tree on the river’s banks, beckoning viewers
to continue on to more cinematic projections. Walking up the path, the
image in the tree dematerialized into a three-dimensional abstraction, and
the projection onto the monumental form of the transfer bridge came
more completely into view (Fig. 1.1).
Music and dialogue accompanied an eclectic mix of cinematic vignettes
projected onto the rectangular arch of the transfer bridge. The bearded
king prophesized by the Millerites, a nineteenth-century doomsday move-
ment from upstate New York, made cryptic proclamations against a back-
ground of numbers; the rapid-fire raps of Bronx hip-hop legend
Grandmaster Flash told stories of artist and Nyack, New York, native
Joseph Cornell; the subject of Susan Walker Morse (The Muse)
(c.1836–1837), a painting completed by Samuel F.B. Morse at the same
time he invented the telegraph, appeared to come alive; and a damsel in
distress from The Perils of Pauline (1914), an early film produced by

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
A. Dell’Aria, The Moving Image as Public Art, Experimental Film
and Artists’ Moving Image,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65904-2_1
2 A. DELL’ARIA

Fig. 1.1 Tony Oursler, Tear of the Cloud, 2018. Multi-channel installation.
Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy Public Art Fund, NY

Thomas Edison just across the river, cried out—to name but a few. People
gathered in the readymade theatrical space between the path and the
park’s waterfront railing to take in these shorts, but other distant sounds
and projections prompted them to keep moving on their cinematic
journey.
Continuing down the park promenade onto the pedestrian pier, tall
figures occupied the vertical edge of the transfer bridge, continuing the
themes seen from land. Looking down, more ghosts appeared on the sur-
face of the water itself. The image of Mary Waters, the murder victim
found in the Hudson who inspired an Edgar Allen Poe story, for example,
seemed to reach out from the river’s depths. Looking back toward the city
still more projections appeared on the underside of the West Side Highway,
the barrier between park and city, and in the background rose the glitter-
ing lights of the luxury skyscrapers of Manhattan’s elite—the visual spec-
tacle of the city itself.
This cinematic and peripatetic public art experience was Tony Oursler’s
Tear of the Cloud (2018), a site-specific project located in Riverside Park
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

South. Initially a site for the transfer of railroad cars between the city’s rail
line and cross-river floats, the transfer bridge is now an urban ruin and
protected landmark. Today the park hosts the more leisurely movements
of pedestrians, joggers, and cyclists, and the pier has been narrowed sig-
nificantly from its industrial origins and includes railings and benches for
taking in the sights of the river and the city. Oursler, perhaps one of the
most celebrated American video artists, is known for his transformation of
gallery video projection into a sculptural practice that explores the world
of ghosts and “the Impossible” through the lesser-known spiritualist his-
tories of telecommunication technologies.1 The labyrinthine narrative and
iconographic complexity of Tear of the Cloud and Oursler’s earlier project
The Influence Machine (2000), both realized with the help of the
New York-based non-profit Public Art Fund, brought video installation
art into public space, expanding his work’s audience and participating
within a broader landscape of urban moving images.
A very different type of moving image spectacle dances across another
vertical architectural form in redeveloped South Boston (Fig. 1.2).
Throughout the day, moving image art periodically appears on the monu-
mental 80-foot digital marquee in front of the Boston Convention and
Exhibition Center (BCEC). Amidst a rotation of sponsored advertise-
ments, public service announcements, and convention publicity, artworks
by Boston and regional artists overtake the structure’s trapezoidal high-
resolution LED screen structure as well as the supporting column of
lower-resolution “video sticks.” Abstract digital animations, short silent
films, explorations of landscapes and seascapes of New England, and other
works—each approximately thirty seconds long—cycle through the
screen’s programming every 15–16 minutes and disrupt the marquee’s
regular delivery of ambient advertising and information.
This on-going series is Art on the Marquee, an initiative started in 2012
by the non-profit Boston Cyberarts in collaboration with the BCEC, itself
part of the waterfront transformation of South Boston’s “Innovation
District.” Completely underwater before the city’s landfill projects in
colonial times, this area was further transformed in the turn of the
millennium by the Central Artery/Tunnel Project known as the “Big

1
Tony Conrad, “Who Will Give Answer to the Call of My Voice? Sound in the Work of
Tony Oursler,” Grey Room 11 (Spring 2003): 44–57; Kenneth White, “Until You Get to
Know Me: Tony Oursler’s Aetiology of Television,” Millennium Film Journal, no. 57
(Spring 2013): 74–83.
4 A. DELL’ARIA

Fig. 1.2 John Slepian, *sigh*, 2012. Installed at Art on the Marquee, Boston
Convention and Exhibition Center. Image courtesy Boston CyberArts

Dig” that moved interstate highways underground and supplanted South

Boston’s industrial docklands with the tech industry’s towers of glass. The
form of the marquee fits into this high-tech aesthetic while simultaneously
alluding to earlier transformations in urban moving image culture. The
trapezoidal shape of the marquee was itself an effort by twentieth-century
movie palaces to reach eyes traveling at the increased speed of the automo-
bile.2 Today’s digital marquee simultaneously reaches conference attend-
ees and passersby on the sidewalk as well as motorists driving down city
streets and speeding on and off subterranean interstate ramps. Receiving
the same intermittent glances as the marquee’s many other animations,
the artworks often engage the logic of the display, offering glimpses to a
passerby in motion rather than transporting a spectator in rapt attention.
At first glance, Oursler’s nocturnal, immersive audio-visual experience
and the marquee’s all-day, rotating series of half-minute silent animations
and videos seem to have little to do with each other, especially in terms of

2
Maggie Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie
Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

each work’s technological apparatus, duration, or art world prestige. What

can be gained by looking at these two seemingly distinct phenomena
together? How do they prompt particular modes of experiencing moving
images in public? What do they say about their particular cities and sites,
about contemporary public art, or about the agencies that commissioned
them? Exploring these questions points to a broader intersection of mov-
ing images and public art in urban spaces, one that has occurred with
greater frequency in the last four decades but has received little historical
or critical attention that tries to connect its many different modes. This
book analyzes and theorizes this genre of public art through the types of
encounters artworks engender on the street, arguing that moving images
in public space can be more than mere spectacle, at times prompting
moments of enchantment shared between members of the public in ways
that elude other types of public art.
Utilizing different technologies and evoking distinct traditions and
modes of spectatorship (that of the projected image and that of the digital
display), Tear of the Cloud and Art on the Marquee nevertheless share the
fundamentally attention-grabbing nature of the moving image and employ
it to alter the experience of urban spaces and architectural forms. These
two waterfront spectacles—one that haunted the landmarked relics of a
city’s industrial past, another that continues to dance across the high-tech
surfaces of a city’s present imaginings of a technocratic future—engage
audiences often uninitiated in contemporary video installation or digital
art. Both projects are interwoven within the urban fabric, engaging the
particular rhythms and movements of their sites while simultaneously
evoking illusory images and spaces. This creates a spectatorial position
between the moving image and the city street—a site of rich engagement
in public art of the last four decades.

The Moving Image as Public Art

Since its emergence in the 1980s, moving image-based public art appears
with greater frequency in cities around the world. Whether as part of a
light art festival, a major commission by a museum or public art agency, an
on-going platform realized in collaboration with the advertising industry,
or a spontaneous and illicit means of protest, artists working with moving
images respond to and shape the increasingly mediated public spaces that
define our cities. These projects illuminate, in complex ways, the blending
of public and private space, debates around public art, and the
6 A. DELL’ARIA

transformation of moving image media and spectatorship. Tracing the

presence of moving images as public art within cities not only gives long-­
overdue critical and historical attention to this significant form of public
art but also illuminates important sites where the otherwise separate dis-
courses on moving image spectatorship, public art, site-specificity, and the
transformation of urban space meet.
In this book, I chart the moving image’s entrance into and continued
presence within the field of public art through its encounters with pass-
ersby. I argue that moving image artworks in public spaces do more than
merely distract or decorate; they produce moments of enchantment that
can renew, intensify, or even challenge our experience of public space.
These artworks also offer frameworks for understanding how moving
images operate in public space—how they move viewers and reconfigure
the site of the screen—outside of the critique of spectacle. While attentive
to precedents and genealogies, the structure of this book is not chrono-
logical, but rather based on the types of spectatorial encounters public
moving image artworks engender and how these intersect with the mate-
rial fabric of urban space. Each chapter articulates a mode of address: visu-
ally enticing works that produce a liminal sense of enchantment;
intra-spectacular initiatives in advertising landscapes; screens that spawn
pop-up zones of interaction; projection festivals that re-enchant urban
space in the service of Creative City placemaking; precarious installations
and projects that were planned with permanence in mind; and superimpo-
sitions that connect, complicate, or critique dominant narratives of place.
Each mode uncovers related practices that may use different technological
supports, but all exploit the moving image’s own experiential power.
The moving image hinges on paradoxical tensions. What we see within
them appears to be present, yet we know it is absent. We can even come to
feel as though we are present inside of the world of the image, a state
almost simultaneously accompanied by the sadness or relief that we are
not. Moving images also hinge on a tension between materiality and
immateriality—what may appear to be a tactile surface is actually produced
through immaterial flickers of light. These flickers rely on material sup-
ports—celluloid film, magnetic tape, light emitting diodes, and extracted
resources needed to power the devices that move them. Moving images
also share a space with the viewer while simultaneously presenting them
with or even transporting them into distant or fantastic elsewheres. These
tensions, which I argue are central to the moving image’s very ontology,
inform all of our encounters with it, from the proto-cinematic to the
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

digital. When brought into the discussion of public art, such tensions
open up a number of fascinating possibilities as well as predicaments. As
Catherine Elwes contends, encountering moving images requires a type of
“perceptual doubleness” on the part of the viewer, something moving
image installation art explores and exploits in the gallery.3 What Margaret
Morse calls the “space-in-between”4 evoked in gallery practice becomes
both more complex and more social in public space, opening up to the
unpredictability and contingency of the urban context and incidental
audiences. As this book will illuminate, moving image-based public art can
foster particularly rich spaces-in-between on the street, generating mean-
ingful shared experiences in public spaces.
As Richard Sennett and others have argued, regular spatial and social
contact among people of diverse racial, ethnic, religious, and economic
groups within public spaces is essential to the constitution of a city, cosmo-
politanism, and the production of democracy and civil order. “A city’s
public realm is strong when these strangers can gather and interact; it is
weak when they have no place to gather, or if on the street or in a town
square they are mixed together but do not interact.”5 In some respects,
screen media seem to create situations where bodily proximity does not
lead to interaction—watching a video on one’s phone creates a zone of
privacy in public space, advertising screens dazzle and distract passersby,
and informational screens discipline gazes. Overwhelmingly associated
with publicity and advertising, many scholars view screen technology as
the enemy to public space. According to these thinkers, mobile screens
tether users to the home in a way that prevents them from interacting with
others around them6; large advertising screens doubly privatize public
space by both transforming it into a family TV room and monetizing it7;

3
Catherine Elwes, Installation and the Moving Image (New York: Wallflower Press,
2015), 2.
4
Margaret Morse, “Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-
Between,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally
Jo Fifer (San Francisco: Aperture, 1990), 154.
5
Richard Sennett, “Epilogue: What Happened to the Public Realm,” in The Fall of Public
Man, 40th Anniversary edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), 422.
6
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each
Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012).
7
Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds, and Adam Nash, “Big Screens, Little Acts:
Transformations in the Structures and Operations of Public Address,” in Ambient Screens
and Transnational Public Spaces, ed. Nikos Papastergiadis (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2016), 49–58.
8 A. DELL’ARIA

and programing imperatives for public screen operators anaesthetize con-

tent and transform public space into a theater of commerce between vast
corporations.8 Far from creating a site where strangers can gather and
interact, such critics charge moving images with rendering public space
into a mere image of capital and power. In many instances, this is the case,
but as the moving image’s own ontology attests, this is never without an
internal tension.
My reading of the most inspiring examples of public artworks chal-
lenges these broad cultural critiques of moving images’ impact on the
public sphere, which largely echo the predictions of dystopian science fic-
tion. Instead, these works advance the ideas of more optimistic mid-­
twentieth-­century prophets of technology—practitioners and theorists of
expanded cinema. Stan VanDerBeek’s often-cited Movie-Drome (1965), a
hemispherical, immersive, multiscreen projection environment, was meant
to be a prototype for a kind of communication infrastructure that would
be participatory and liberating.9 Gene Youngblood, author of the influen-
tial book Expanded Cinema (1970), underscored the social in the future
of expanded cinema and intermedia, citing the increased role of “commu-
nal mythic experiences in elaborate intermedia environments” as technol-
ogy advanced.10 The practices discussed in this book bring some of the
aspirations of expanded cinema—intercultural communication, immersive
spectacle, and communal experience—into contact with the role of public
sculpture, complete with its symbolic, spatial, and material presence in
specific urban places.
Public art can facilitate the encounters Sennett views as vital to the
public realm of the city, paralleling how scholars have analyzed the consti-
tution of a public through the shared spectatorial experience of the the-
ater, even the production of the commons.11 Moving images in public
8
Sean Cubitt, “Defining the Public in Piccadilly Circus,” in Ambient Screens and
Transnational Public Spaces, ed. Nikos Papastergiadis (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2016), 81–94.
9
Stan Vanderbeek, “Culture: Intercom,” Film Culture 40 (1966): 15–18. See also Gloria
Sutton, The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015).
10
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (Boston: E P Dutton, 1970), 352.
11
The theater parallel is key to Sennett’s argument in The Fall of Public Man. Elizabeth
Maddock Dillon, in her study of theater in the Atlantic World, looks at how the simultaneous
erasure of the commons as public land through enclosure coincides with the rise of the com-
mons as an abstract political force. The space of the theater in the eighteenth century—what
she dubs “the performative commons”—reveals where the material and abstract commons
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

space prompt passersby to look up, notice, and have a shared experience
with strangers in public, even potentially engaging in exchange, empathy,
or critical awareness. Of course, public art can also be implicated in the
very forces that restrict access to public space or atomize subjects within it.
The moving image in public space, inherently attention-grabbing and
often implicated in spectacle, can serve either of these forces of collective
experience or individual alienation. To distinguish between the two, I call
upon the notion of enchantment. Enchantment entails a type of encoun-
ter that is both unexpected and wondrous, that disturbs our usual disposi-
tion while returning us more completely to the world. I develop this term
further in Chap. 2, drawing upon the work of Jane Bennett,12 and deploy
it throughout this book as a connecting thread between different modali-
ties of spectatorship in public space. Understanding our encounters with
moving images through the concept of enchantment stitches together a
long history of spectatorship, from audiences of the cinema of attractions
to our contemporary screen addictions. Enchantment acknowledges the
tremendous affective and attentional power of moving images while also
creating space for a spectatorship that is emplaced, embodied, and aware.
While I attempt to describe a broad phenomenon, this book contains
two deliberate limitations in scope: a geographic focus on projects realized
in the United States and an omission of public artworks that deploy mobile
media. My limited geographic scope is not to argue for any particularly
national trend or style—this trend in public art occurs in cities all over the
world and the artists I discuss are not exclusively from the United States—
rather, this selection allows me to compare works in cities that have related
audiences, screen infrastructures, spaces, and public art funding systems.
Public funding for the arts in the United States is often quite meager com-
pared to cities in continental Europe, and projects often rely on non-­profits,
corporate sponsorship, or advertising synergy from the private sector. I
examine how public art can negotiate, challenge, or become implicated
within this media landscape while including some discussion of projects
outside of the United States (particularly the United Kingdom, which has
similar funding structures)13 to point to both a broader phenomenon and

are inextricably linked. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative
Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3.
12
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
13
Cameron Cartiere, Rosemary Shirley, and Shelly Willis, “A Timeline for the History of
Public Art: The United Kingdom and the United States of America, 1900–2005,” in The
10 A. DELL’ARIA

contrasting contexts. My second limitation in scope is not to ignore the

many significant projects in augmented reality, location-­based apps, QR
codes, and other forms of mobile media, which I believe warrant another
study. Instead, this omission serves to focus my attention on how the pres-
ence of moving images situated in public and viewable by many people at
once produces particular types of encounters with space, place, and each
other. The shared experience of seeing something at the same time as oth-
ers—or at least a moving image that is beyond one’s personal property and
potentially seen simultaneously with others—is a distinct kind of embod-
ied social experience. Scott McQuire uses the term “urban media event,”
a play on Dayan and Katz’s analysis of the dispersed, televisual “media
event” of domestic media consumption mid-century.14 McQuire’s con-
cept looks to how contemporary urban screens reconfigure public events
by “media on the street…characterized by public viewing and distributed
feedback.”15 Such events often garner attention through the strategies of
spectacle but prompt viewers to look up from individual media and par-
take in an experience shared with an incidental audience of strangers.
At the heart of this study are fundamental questions about moving
image spectatorship, public art, and the city. These fields of inquiry often
exist within their own disciplinary and methodological tracks, to the detri-
ment of moments where they intersect. This book is interdisciplinary by
virtue of its subject and seeks to intervene into each of these intellectual
discourses by building upon recent scholarly connections between them
and advancing new ones through public art. This book oscillates between
deep readings of individual artworks and broader analyses of trends and
curatorial strategies that account for a wider variety of public art practice.
In the close readings, like Alison Butler, I turn often to what can be called
“preferred readings,” meaning I attempt to recreate the sensuous experi-
ence of a work derived from long and repeat visits, close analysis, and
supplementary viewing and reading.16 When possible, in an attempt to
account for the varied audience response of public art, I layer this preferred

Practice of Public Art, ed. Cameron Cartiere and Shelly Willis (New York: Routledge,
2008), 231–46.
14
Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2009).
15
Scott McQuire, Geomedia: Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space (Malden:
John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 45. Italics in original.
16
Alison Butler, Displacements: Reading Space and Time in Moving Image Installations,
Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 22.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

reading with on-site observations and conversations with viewers for works
I was fortunate enough to view in situ. Elsewhere I look to video and
photographic documentation, artist and viewer accounts, spatial and archi-
tectural context, reviews, and archival materials. Returning always to the
structure of particular artworks—especially the forms of enchantment they
prompt with spectators—I employ deep analysis of selected works and dis-
cussion of broader trends to illuminate each chapter’s mode of address and
its implications for the discourses of moving image art and spectatorship,
public art, and urban spaces.

Moving Image Spectators and Audiences

My employment of the term “moving image” in the book is deliberate.
First, referring to the moving image reframes distinctions of medium, as
the term itself refers to an effect rather than a physical apparatus or pro-
cess. Art historical questions of medium and medium-specificity begin to
break down the deeper one delves into the history of artists’ use of the
moving image.17 Though historically the field of experimental film privi-
leged the theater over the gallery context of video art or artists’ film, the
term “moving image” points to how these two discourses are increasingly
conjoined in our present moment.18 In the context of moving image inter-
ventions in public spaces, the impetus to make distinctions based on par-
ticular moving image technologies often needlessly separates related
experiences or too narrowly defines the field of inquiry.19 As the examples
in this book will demonstrate, artists’ use of moving images in public
spaces intersects with cinema, high-tech urban screens, proto-cinematic

17
This is a site of much critical debate, especially stemming from the work of Rosalind
Krauss. Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (1976): 51–64;
Rosalind E. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition
(New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999). See also the introduction to Andrew V. Uroskie,
Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014).
18
Erika Balsom, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 17.
19
Broadly speaking, I mean here to suggest that technological determinism, where tech-
nology overdetermines the interaction, would not be productive. More narrowly, using more
specific technological terms has impeded what little work has been done in this area previ-
ously. For example, one of the few precedents in this field by Catrien Schreuder hinges
largely on one very specific definition of “video art” by Allan Kaprow. Catrien Schreuder,
Pixels and Places: Video Art in Public Space (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2010).
12 A. DELL’ARIA

forms of animation, shadow play, and many things in between, but still
constitutes a related field of artistic practice and viewer experience in the
public sphere. I will at times mobilize terms such as cinema, film, video,
television, message board, and zoetrope, each with its own aesthetic, cul-
tural, and social system of meaning, series of effects, and dispositif.
Nevertheless, I do believe that discussing these processes together—espe-
cially in the context of understanding how they function to engage audi-
ences in public space—is essential to the task at hand.
Second, the term “moving image” is fundamentally experiential,
describing the visual effect of a particular situation or apparatus, emphasiz-
ing “the dynamic element of apparent motion,” as Catherine Elwes
claimed.20 As Arthur C. Danto contended, moving pictures contain an
anticipation of movement embedded within their durational experience.21
Following Noël Carroll, I prefer the term “moving image” to “moving
picture” because the latter unnecessarily references recognizable imagery,
excluding non-representational moving images.22 So what we have with
the moving image is, fundamentally, a condition of anticipation produced
by the element of apparent movement that can occur anywhere.
Responding to claims of the “death of cinema” following the decline of
theatrical exhibition, Francesco Casetti redefines cinema in its many dis-
tributed contexts as primarily experiential. “[W]hat identifies a medium is
first and foremost a mode of seeing, feeling, reflecting, and reacting, no
longer necessarily tied to a single ‘machine,’…born as a technical inven-
tion, [cinema] soon came to be identified as a particular way of relating to
the world through moving images, as well as of relating with these
images.”23 This experiential definition privileges the viewer’s encounter.
How we interact with moving images is spatial, phenomenological, and
social. As Julian Hanich’s phenomenological study of “the audience
effect” articulates, the film experience itself is “triadic,” interlacing viewer,

20
Elwes, Installation and the Moving Image, 5.
21
He uses the case of a projection of a slide versus a film of a static image. Though one
might think they are functionally the same in terms of what is projected onto the wall, the
experience is fundamentally different. This film also, unlike the slide, has a set duration.
Arthur C. Danto, “Moving Pictures,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 1 (1979).
22
Noël Carroll, “Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image,” in Aesthetics: A Reader in
Philosophy of the Arts, ed. David Goldblatt, Fourth edition (New York: Routledge, 2018), 106.
23
Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 5.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

film, and the rest of the audience.24 Looking at moving images in shared
social spaces beyond the theater, such as through public artworks, contin-
ues this important turn toward the audience as co-creator of the cinematic
situation and follows often ignored routes in cinema’s emigration from
the theater.
Theorists have long attempted to understand the force of our encoun-
ter with moving images, for years relying on film history’s “founding
myth:”25 the apocryphal tale of audiences screaming (supposedly) in terror
at the on-coming train featured in the Lumiére Brothers’ Arrival of a
Train at the Station (1895)—a moment that relies on the tensions inher-
ent in the moving image. As historical corrections to this myth have
asserted, spectators’ enthrallment by the moving image should not be mis-
taken for their deception. Early film audiences underwent a sense of
enchantment not unlike the one I describe today; they were aware of the
film’s illusion and reveled in this technological marvel without being
duped by its effects.26 The term “spectator” in film theory often refers to
the subject position generated or assumed by the film itself, whereas “audi-
ence” and “reception” look to how specific people actually encountered
moving image media historically and socially. I use these terms and
approaches somewhat interchangeably, though I expand the construction
of the spectator beyond the film’s images and narrative cues to include a
more dynamic spatial situation in which a moving image is encountered.27
Though spectatorship has perhaps always involved forms of movement
and contingency, film theory long assumed spectators to be both immo-
bile and universal in relationship to the image. The three metaphors used
to describe film—picture frame, window, and (later) mirror—assume a
fixed point of view. At the turn of the millennium, scholars like Anne
Friedberg and Giuliana Bruno removed the spectator from their presumed
immobility, reading postmodern visuality through “the mobilized virtual

24
Julian Hanich, The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 7.
25
Martin Loiperdinger and Bernd Elzer, “Lumiere’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s
Founding Myth,” The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89–118.
26
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous
Spectator (1989),” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen,
Seventh Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 736–50.
27
Kate Mondloch calls this the “viewer-screen interface” in media installation art in the
gallery. Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010), 3.
14 A. DELL’ARIA

gaze” rooted in nineteenth-century flânerie and consumer culture and

mapping pre-cinema, architecture, and installation art onto a haptic, emo-
tional cartography, respectively.28 Franceso Casetti offered three new met-
aphors—the monitor, bulletin board, and scrapbook—to articulate how
our encounters with screens now layer over the world instead of produc-
ing fictional ones that we enter into.29 My study is indebted to these theo-
retical turns toward the spectator in space as well as artists’ concurrent
spatialization of the cinematic situation itself. Phenomenological investi-
gations of the 1970s by artists like Anthony McCall and Dan Graham—
largely invested in a certain disdain for the mass cultural experience of
cinema and television—gave way to the rise of video art in the 1980s that
explored sculptural or performative concepts.30 The following decade’s
paradigm shift saw the emergence of “moving image art very much under
the sign of cinema” in the gallery by artists like Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas,
Douglas Gordon, and Isaac Julien.31 This gallery paradigm—which
extends well into the current century and today—is intermedial and
includes multiscreen and single-channel works made and exhibited inter-
changeably with film, video, or digital technologies.32
While seeming to radically liberate the spectator, the mobility and
viewer-determined duration of moving image installation was neither new
nor entirely liberating. Michael Cowan points to how trade fairs managed
the flow of an ambulatory audience through competing attractions and
stages of “astonishment” in the early twentieth century,33 and as artist

28
Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993); Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and
Film (New York: Verso, 2002).
29
Francesco Casetti, “What Is a Screen Nowadays?,” in Public Space, Media Space, ed.
Chris Berry, Janet Harbord, and Rachel O. Moore (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), 16–40.
30
Chrissie Iles, “Video and Film Space,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation
Art, ed. Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 252–62.
31
Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2013), 12.
32
For an exploration of how distinctions between film and video persist in this intermedial
contemporary art landscape, see Janna Houwen, Film and Video Intermediality: The Question
of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Moving Images (New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2017).
33
Michael Cowan, “From the Astonished Spectator to the Spectator in Movement:
Exhibition Advertisements in 1920s Germany and Austria,” Revue Canadienne d’Études
Cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of Film Studies 23, no. 1 (2014): 2–29.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Kota Ezawa remarked, viewers encountering a looped presentation in

the gallery experience a “return to vaudeville,” engaging the spectatorial
codes of early cinema where viewers would enter and exit the theater with-
out regard or knowledge of the start or end time.34 Dominique Païni drew
a direct connection to consumer culture and flânerie, arguing that
post-­1990s moving image installation “is the result of disappointment at
images that are spectacularly offered yet semantically withheld, like those
consumer items in shop windows that attract us ‘aesthetically’ while deny-
ing us economically.”35 Kate Mondloch also asks whether or not the
mobile viewer of indeterminate duration is not simply a reproduction of
the dominate mode of mass media spectatorship in the age of VCR and
on-demand.36
The turn toward mobile spectatorship in the gallery parallels the expan-
sion of screens more broadly. The proliferation of television screens out-
side of the home, for example, complicates the relationship between
spheres of public and private and concepts of space and place, as Anna
McCarthy argued in her groundbreaking study of ambient television.37
Since the dawn of flat-screen monitors, ambient screens have proliferated
even more, peppering the walls of bars, restaurants, college campuses,
shopping malls, airports, and a host of other public, semi-public, and pri-
vately owned spaces. When expanded to the size of buildings, ambient
public screens in urban centers transform the social and architectural char-
acter of a city. As Francesco Casetti contends, cinema is no longer a het-
erotopic space, “the opening of a ‘here’ toward an ‘elsewhere,’” but rather
a hypertopia, that is “an ‘elsewhere’ that arrives ‘here’ and dissolves itself
in it.”38 Spectators no longer go to the cinema; the cinema comes to them,
at which point, Casetti contends, they encounter a choice: they can stop
to look at the screen and become immersed in it or continue on their way,
only offering a glance.39 The artworks explored in this book, often encoun-
tered in similarly serendipitous ways, offer more than just a dual choice.
They demonstrate how situated moving images can produce new spaces,

34
Kota Ezawa, “Screening Rooms—or Return to Vaudeville,” American Art 22, no. 2
(2008): 11–14.
35
Dominique Païni, “The Return of the Flâneur,” Art Press, no. 255 (March 2000): 33–41.
36
Mondloch, Screens, 58.
37
Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2001), 10–11.
38
Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, 144.
39
Casetti, 57–58.
16 A. DELL’ARIA

construct new modes of attention, and generate varied responses to place.

Moving images leveraged as public art offer us elsewheres to enter into,
but can also create presences in current space, three-dimensional fields of
interaction and movement, and visual flutters and animations facilitated by
remaining in motion.

Art in Public Space

Central to my argument is the notion of public space—that it exists, that
it is an essential component of democratic society and public life, and that
the encounter with art within it is valuable yet fundamentally different
from one inside a museum or gallery. Writers and theorists on public space
primarily organize it along three perspectives: that it facilitates civil order,
that it is a site for power and resistance, and that it stages art and perfor-
mance, both formally and informally.40 The civic, political, and artistic
components of public space are all implicated in how contemporary artists
create public art projects and how audiences engage with them. While in
many ways we can think of movie theaters and museums as types of public
spaces (and museums very much consider themselves as part of the public
sphere),41 I employ the term “public space” in reference to locations
beyond the doors of art and film institutions. These are most often outside
and (most importantly) freely accessible to all members of the public,
especially to passersby not intending to encounter a work of art. Even this
definition becomes blurred, as I consider projects that occur on public
monuments, across privately owned advertising screens, in corporate-­
funded public parks, and on the façades of museums—the literal interface
between museum space and the world beyond. The fluctuations along the
unstable boundaries of public space run throughout my analyses, and I
argue that the moving image, with its own internal tensions between here
and there, becomes an important site for exploring these questions.
While some of the practices in this book have been discussed as “media
architecture,” I prefer the term “public art” and contend that moving
images constitute their own genre within this field of practice. While pub-
lic art historically has been related to architecture in a number of ways,

40
Zachary P. Neal, “Locating Public Space,” in Common Ground?: Readings and
Reflections on Public Space, ed. Anthony M. Orum and Zachary P. Neal (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 4–5.
41
Jennifer Barrett, Museums and the Public Sphere (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

from sculptural adornments to Percent for Art programs, public art can
also be discursive, dematerialized, and unattached to buildings. The field
of public art is itself fluid and contested with a constantly evolving rela-
tionship to site. Traditionally, art placed in public outdoor spaces fulfilled
either the celebratory function of the monument or the commemorative
purpose of the memorial. These official constructions of public memory
largely aligned with the interests of established regimes of power. Obelisks,
triumphal arches, equestrian monuments, and other iconic forms pepper
cities across the globe, making declarations of power, identity, and exclu-
sion in public places, and becoming subject to later controversy, revision,
removal, or iconoclasm. By the twentieth century, the notion of the mon-
ument as a permanent, monolithic cultural statement began to wane as
moving image media assumed dominance. As early as 1938, for example,
Lewis Mumford proclaimed the “death of the monument,” believing its
calcified forms were eclipsed by the speed of photographs, moving images,
and recorded sound.42 Though monuments certainly did not cease to
appear in twentieth-century American cities (and permanent memorials
have even increased in the twenty-first),43 there was a large rethinking of
them and of the broader function of art in public spaces since the middle
of the twentieth century.44
The public sculpture revival of the 1960s, stimulated by the creation of
empty urban plazas in the wake of International Style skyscrapers and the
rise of municipal and federal funding for art in public spaces, removed

42
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1938),
434, 446.
43
Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010). Even these traditional-looking objects of “memorial mania” have ties to screen
culture. The World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for example,
raised funds with the help of a campaign led by movie star Tom Hanks during the run of the
Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan (1998).
44
New Deal work-relief for artists in the United States frequently involved the production
of art for public spaces, such as murals in airports, post offices, and other civic buildings. In
the wake of World War II, the scale of devastation seemed unrepresentable in traditional
sculpture, leading to a lack of traditional war monuments and memorials in the United States
and elsewhere and the creation of “living memorials” or civic centers dedicated in remem-
brance to those lost. Andrew M. Shanken, “Planning Memory: Living Memorials in the
United States during World War II,” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (March 1, 2002): 130–47;
Joan Marter, “The Ascendancy of Abstraction for Public Art: The Monument to the
Unknown Political Prisoner Competition,” Art Journal 53, no. 4 (December 1,
1994): 28–36.
18 A. DELL’ARIA

much of the didactic qualities of the traditional monument in favor of

modernist aesthetics.45 These sculptures, though sought after by patrons
and cities, were decried by some critics as “plop” or “plunk,” having little
to do with their material, social, or historical surroundings. Public sculp-
ture later moved toward site-specificity, part of a broader migration from
the pedestal and into the matrix bracketed by the fields of landscape and
architecture.46 Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981–1989), part of this anti-­
monumental, site-specific trend and located in a downtown Manhattan
plaza, butted heads with public response, spawning a legendary contro-
versy over audience, commissioning processes, and permanence, eventu-
ally being removed/destroyed after a controversy fueled by publicity.47
Site-specific art gradually became “unhinged” from the phenomenologi-
cal site, and public art often turned to the ephemeral, a phenomenon
Eleanor Heartney referred to as the “dematerialization of public art.”48
Following the rise of relational aesthetics and socially engaged art in the
1990s, public art frequently encompassed projects designed with discus-
sion, collaboration, and even social benefits in mind.49 Today public art is
a vast field that includes large-scale sculpture, memorials, murals, gardens,
interactive installations, soundscapes, parties, performances, pamphlets,
food trucks, digital applications, and, as this book explores, a wide range
of moving image practices.
Given the breadth of projects now considered public art, defining it as
a term seems cumbersome or even pointless. Cameron Cartiere argues
45
Zoning regulations mandated that the taller a building was, the further its apex must be
from the streetwall in order to prevent wind tunnels and all-day shadow on the street.
Initially this prompted the tiered forms of Art Deco skyscrapers, but by the middle of the
twentieth century, Bauhaus-inspired International Style architects rejected these sculptural
forms and preferred sleek, monolithic towers of glass and steel. This then led to vast, largely
empty urban plazas. Municipal and later federal Percent for Art programs also started in the
late 1960s, providing institutional funding for public sculpture to populate those empty
plazas. Harriet F. Senie, Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and
Controversy, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1992).
46
Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (April 1, 1979): 31–44.
47
Harriet F. Senie, Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2001).
48
Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004); Eleanor Heartney, “The Dematerialization of Public Art,”
Sculpture 12 (1993): 44–49.
49
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art,
Revised edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Claire Bishop, Artificial
Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012).
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

that this task is, nevertheless, vital for bringing public art in from the art
historical and art critical margins and “to embrace the term public art as
the signifier of a legitimate discipline, a layered practice, an area of study,
and a significant contribution to fine art.”50 Together with Shelly Willis,
she devised a working definition of public art to help define the field:

Public art is art outside of museums and galleries and must fit within at least
one of the following categories:

1. in a place accessible or visible to the public: in public

2. concerned with or affecting the community or individuals: public interest
3. maintained for or used by the community or individuals: public place
4. paid for by the public: publicly funded51

This working definition is useful in its expansiveness and pliability and

in how it recognizes public art as a distinct category that concerns itself
with physical, thematic, and financial accessibility. The works studied in
this book all fit within the first category and varyingly within the others.
Public accessibility does two primary things that make public art distinct:
it opens the work up to the reception of an unpredictable, ever-changing,
and situated audience; and it necessitates (or at least strongly recom-
mends) the consideration of this audience in its conceptual and curatorial
mode of address.
Both of these factors impact how we evaluate and historicize public art.
For some, public art’s address to a broad audience lessens quality, poten-
tially flattening all radical content or challenging forms in order to speak
to the lowest common denominator. The question of public access has, at
first glance, an inverse relationship to notions of quality and rigor. Cher
Krause Knight combats this frequent critique by developing a theory of
public art that considers its physical, aesthetic, and conceptual accessibility
as intrinsic to its mission rather than a burden. “First, accessibility is not
the parent of mediocrity; one does not have to ‘dumb down’ art or avoid
challenging content to be accessible. Second, speaking concurrently with
many potential publics, some specialized and others nonspecific, is quite

50
Cameron Cartiere, “Coming in from the Cold: A Public Art History,” in The Practice of
Public Art, ed. Cameron Cartiere and Shelly Willis (New York: Routledge, 2008), 15.
51
Cartiere, 15.
20 A. DELL’ARIA

different than talking at a single, monolithic audience.”52 For Knight, the

measure of art’s public accessibility is not that everyone gets the same mes-
sage or even likes the work, but rather “the quality and impact of its
exchanges with audiences…on the art’s ability to extend reasonable and
fair opportunities for members of the public to understand and negotiate
their own relationships with it.”53 In keeping with Knight’s consideration
of the exchanges between viewer and artwork, I structure my study around
the kinds of encounters artworks prompt. Similarly drawing from Knight,
I defend the possibilities of the popular, calling upon the concept of
enchantment as a way to mine the moving image’s more pleasurable com-
ponents for progressive potential.
Together with the explosion of biennials as engines of economic
growth, contemporary public art often becomes an instrument of devel-
opment, leading many critics to imply that public art should take up a
deliberately critical stance.54 While being careful to situate public art in
relationship to various stakeholders, I argue against this kind of proscrip-
tive approach to political messaging in public art. Political theorist Diana
Boros describes three main ways public art can “create, support, and
enliven both communal spaces and feelings of community”: beautifica-
tion, protest, and a “politically indirect” way that creates a new ways of
seeing the world by “restructuring the everyday.”55 This third form can
also be understood through enchantment—encounters where we are
jolted out of our everyday rhythms not with a counter-discourse that dis-
sects the world around us but with a renewed intensity of experience.
Philosopher Fred Evans similarly finds greater nuance than the somewhat
reductive dyad of complicit/critical in public art through his reading of
public art’s capacity as an act of citizenship. In Public Art and the Fragility
of Democracy, he maintains that art is democratic insofar as it invites and
maintains the co-presence of multiple voices. He considers forces like capi-
tal or spectacle to be “oracles,” forces which threaten to overtake the

52
Cher Krause Knight, Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism, 1st ed. (New York:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 23.
53
Knight, ix.
54
Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998);
Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City (New York: Routledge, 1997).
55
Diana Boros, Creative Rebellion for the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Public
and Interactive Art to Political Life in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 15.
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

multitude and proclaim to be “non-revisable and universal truths.”56

Public art can be democratic by not allowing an oracle to overcome the
multitude of voices that make up Evans’s three interdependent political
virtues of democracy: solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity.57 Through
Evans’s reading, we must be mindful (even wary) of oracles, but their
mere presence does not discredit a work of art, nor does it necessitate an
overt political message on the part of art voices to counter it.

The City and Its Ways of Seeing

The works of art explored in this book also occur within cities. Though an
urban context is often assumed in discussions of public art, public art-
works do appear in small towns, rural settings, and natural landmarks
(even ones that incorporate the projected light and moving images). While
the cities and types of sites engaged and imagined by artworks vary, as
evidenced by the contrast between the industrial ruins illuminated by
Tony Oursler’s projections and the high-tech LED marquee in redevel-
oped South Boston, the broad concept of the urban stitches these works
together. This book describes an urban phenomenon where the shifting
role of public art within the city (as ornamentation, civic good, tourist
branding, or laboratory for experimentation), modes of seeing and mov-
ing unique to cities, and moving image media intersect.
Moving images have at various historical moments been linked to cen-
tripetal and centrifugal flows in relationship to the city. Many early exhibi-
tion venues, such as vaudeville theaters and nickelodeons, were urban
phenomena, and early film contained many distinctly urban visual forms,
such as the Lumiere “actualities” of the late nineteenth century and the
city symphony films of the 1920s.58 Outside the theater, flashing signs and
lit façades signaled that a city was modern and dynamic, a phenomenon

56
Fred Evans, Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 170.
57
Evans, 179. Evans even suggests that the presence of an oracle-like capital is almost
unavoidable in the public art landscape of the United States, where public funding is far more
scarce than in many countries in Europe, necessitating various constellations of public-pri-
vate partnership. Evans, 180.
58
Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), a single shot of the titular action, comple-
ments Arrival of a Train at the Station in its factual look at urban movement. The most
oft-cited city symphony films are Manhatta (Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, 1921) and
Berlin Symphony of a Metropolis (Walter Ruttman, 1927).
22 A. DELL’ARIA

alluded to in our current, allegedly “post-cinema” era by the seemingly

haunted marquee light sculptures of Philippe Parreno. In the second half
of the twentieth century, television’s temporal and spatial distortions were
in many ways linked to the decline of both theatrical cinema and the city
and its public spaces. Scott McQuire cites proclamations by architects
Robert Venturi and Rem Koolhaas that argued television transformed
public and private space to the point that piazzas were “un-American” and
the public domain “lost.”59 Much of the narrative of suburban sprawl in
the postwar decades, along with the corresponding decline of inner cities,
incorporates the collapse of spatial distance and the dissolution of distinc-
tions between public and private spheres brought on by television and the
automobile.
The rise of mobile media, smart cities, and CCTV in redeveloped urban
centers redirects flows back into cities and blurs distinctions between pub-
lic and private spheres, reconfiguring cities through the surveillant gaze.
Sennett sees the collapse of public and private heralded by the age of smart
phones and social media less as an end to privacy than a continuation of
the “tyranny of intimacy” brought on by transformations in the nine-
teenth century that reduced social reality to the terms of the personal and
resulted in the fall of the public realm.60 In many ways we can see how the
proliferation of media in urban spaces can fracture, discipline, and distract
people within them, but as McQuire and Nikos Papastergiadis remind us,
the increasingly public consumption of media can create moments of
shared experience and even intercultural exchange and contestation,
potentially reversing screen media’s supposed effects on the public sphere
and engendering genuine, public encounters among strangers.61 These
moments can happen through a variety of media that share the moving
image’s capacity to enchant, from simple animation to responsive
interfaces.

59
Scott McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (Los Angeles:
Sage, 2008), 130. Venturi argued, “Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they
should be working at the office or home with the family looking at the television.” Robert
Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition (New York: The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, 1977), 131.
60
Sennett, “Epilogue: What Happened to the Public Realm.”
61
McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, 154; Nikos
Papastergiadis et al., “Mega Screens for Mega Cities,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 7–8
(December 1, 2013): 325–41.
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

On an experiential level, public art and moving images in the city are
often encountered serendipitously, by sidewalk spectators moving through
urban space on daily business, leisurely walks, or tourist promenades. The
visual and sensory experience of moving through the city has been one of
the primary sites of historical reflection and theorization of urban experi-
ence since modernity. The well-established figure of the flâneur points to
a mobile visual experience marked by nearly unlimited yet disengaged
access to spaces of capital and spectacle. According to Charles Baudelaire,
“the perfect flâneur” or “passionate spectator…set[s] up house in the
heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst
of the fugitive and the infinite.”62 Though reveling in anonymity and com-
fortable in the ebb and flow of the city, the flâneur was a class position,
most often understood to be a white, middle-class male that “demanded
elbow room” amidst the crowd.63 Considering the female flâneuse points
to the ways in which public spaces are not always open and accessible to all
members of the public, destabilizing the flâneur as a neutral ideal.
In this book, I prefer the term “passerby” over flâneur or flâneuse for
discussing serendipitous encounters with public art. Though sometimes
used synonymously with flâneur, passerby does not signal a class or gender
position, nor does it necessarily suggest that the subject is detached or
wandering without direction. What it signals instead is some form of
motion, most often walking. A passerby could be on their way somewhere,
out for a stroll, experiencing a place for the first time, on daily business, or
moving through the city in any other number of ways. The passerby is
more of a stranger (at least initially) than an ideal, anonymous subject
position, defined more by their circumstantial presence in a particular
place than in their freedom to move throughout the city. What the pass-
erby shares with the flâneur is a lack of attachment to the particular art-
work at hand—the thing that is literally being “passed by.” Reading public
art through the passerby implies considering how effectively an artwork
attracts attention and what it does with that engagement, as well as how it
operates within the complex movements of people through space. At what
point does a passerby become a spectator or join an audience? What other

62
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne,
2nd Revised ed. (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 9.
63
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, first Schocken paperback edition (New
York: Schocken, 1969), 174.
24 A. DELL’ARIA

transformations can occur at this point of contact? What are the social pos-
sibilities inherent in constructing an audience in such a fashion?
Movements through urban spaces, be they serendipitous or not, are
also shaped by varying speeds and scales. The works in this book are pre-
dominantly encountered at the speed of walking, which Rebecca Solnit
refers to as the pace of thought and a state where “the mind, the body, and
the world are aligned.”64 Though walking is often the idealized or desir-
able form of mobility within the city, it is predicated on various types of
access and contrasted with the mechanized movements of cars and transit.
The relationship between speeds of urban movement, open spaces, and
the scales of signs and symbols was central to the landmark study of an
urban space deeply engaged with flashing and moving images, Learning
from Las Vegas by architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi in
the 1970s.65 The shifting and simultaneous scales that Las Vegas unpacks
also informed Michel de Certeau’s famous reflections upon viewing
New York from the World Trade Center. De Certeau distinguished
between the experience of walking in the street and the voyeuristic gaze
from the top of the skyscraper. Compared to the lived and embodied
movements on the street, the top-down vantage point “transforms the
bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before
one’s eyes.”66 This is the city of the planner, not of the passerby. At its
thorniest moments, public art can also become implicated in this transfor-
mation of the city into a text or (as I describe in Chap. 5) into an image,
something legible from a distance and digestible as a commodity. My
study is mindful of the speeds and scales learned from Las Vegas and shifts
between the vantage points in de Certeau’s essay, looking at both the
ground-level experience of public art projects that have the capacity to
“possess” us on the street and their top-down planning and broader impli-
cations for the image of the city. To this end, I fold analyses of the institu-
tional and curatorial processes that enabled, prohibited, impeded, or

64
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 5.
65
Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas: The
Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, Revised Edition (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1977). They also argued that the monumental sign systems on the surfaces of structures
changed more rapidly than the buildings behind them, a point also applicable to the ephem-
erality of monumental moving images and the rapid obsolescence of many media
technologies.
66
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, 3rd ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 92.
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

resuscitated various projects into my discussions of particular spectatorial

situations on the street.
The presumption that urban space is a fixed entity, often a foundation
of critiques of urban screens, is challenged by human geographers’ under-
standing of place as an assemblage. Doreen Massey’s “global sense of
place” argues that time-space compression produced through accelera-
tions of informational and media flows does not abolish place but rather
transforms it from introverted to extroverted. She instead looks to “meet-
ing places,” nodes or assemblages that defy fixed boundaries and are per-
petually in a state of flux.67 Nigel Thrift’s non-representational theory
turns to affect and the shifting ways bodies move in cities. He contends
that affect has become part of urban design as “a form of landscape engi-
neering…producing new forms of power as it goes.”68 Moving images
would seem to contribute to the manipulative “infrastructures of feeling”
described in Thrift’s ontology of affect,69 but they can also produce
moments of enchantment that disturb or rewire dominant messages.
These affective lines of force in public space can even, as I discuss in my
postscript, be deployed in moments of political protest.
Much of the existing scholarship on urban screen media focuses on
what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls “global cities,” major metropolises
where the processes and headquarters of a globalized economy coalesce
and redefine urban space.70 Work in this arena, such as Nikos Papastergiadis’s
look at the proliferation of high-definition LED screens in transnational
urban spaces, has made significant strides in understanding how urban
screens can create moments of cosmopolitan encounter, but largely omits
how moving images operate in quieter neighborhoods or smaller cities.71
Though I consider artworks within one of the most iconic global city cen-
ters—Times Square—in this book, I also look closely at moving images

67
Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” in Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 146–56.
68
Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (New York: Routledge,
2007), 187.
69
Clive Barnett, “Political Affects in Public Space: Normative Blind-Spots in Non-
Representational Ontologies.,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33, no. 2
(April 2008): 190.
70
Saskia Sassen, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept,” The Brown Journal of World
Affairs XI, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2005): 27–43.
71
Nikos Papastergiadis, ed., Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces (Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016).
26 A. DELL’ARIA

projected onto abandoned buildings in Cincinnati, Ohio, screened on

buses in the sprawling Los Angeles transit system, beamed onto a figura-
tive sculpture in the quiet end of Union Square in New York, or projected
onto the sands of a Santa Monica beach. Just as the concept of the urban
is expansive and elastic, so too are the types of places engaged by artworks
examined in this book.

Situating Moving Image Artworks in Space and Place

Building out from the moving image’s central tensions, the chapters in
this book are structured around the notions of space and place. According
to Yi-Fu Tuan, space connotes a sense of movement and freedom, whereas
place connotes stasis and specificity,72 though this concept becomes trou-
bled by later theories and critiques such as those by Massey and Thrift.
This conceptual dyad between movement and pause mirrors the moving
image’s own internal tensions between movement and stasis, presence and
absence, here and there that undergird the “perceptual doubleness” that
defines our encounters with it. My study builds upon this tension to con-
sider how moving images produce space and make place in public art.
Close readings along the way illuminate each mode of address and explore
the intertwining of artwork with urban space, public art policies and pro-
grams, and audiences. Most of the projects I discuss at length are what I
consider to be valuable additions to the public art landscape, though I also
critique some works that got stuck in the middle ground between art and
commerce, either failing to produce moments of enchantment or facing
insurmountable practical challenges.
Chapter 2 opens my discussion through close analyses of two public
artworks that develop my concept of enchantment in moving image spec-
tatorship. This term builds upon Jane Bennett’s work and describes the
ability of moving images to jolt viewers out of their everyday routines
through sensory experience that both carries them away and returns them
to a deeper engagement with the world. This reading counters dominant
claims of spectacle and distraction and provides a theory for understand-
ing meaningful encounters with moving image artworks. I turn to Bill
Brand’s Masstransiscope (1980), an early example of this kind of

72
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Fifth Edition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001). These terms are also somewhat inverted in Michel de
Certeau’s delineation.
 1 INTRODUCTION 27

enchanting public art whose story points to the origins of this mode of
spectatorship in early and proto-cinematic technologies and raises ques-
tions about audience, preservation, and the city that run throughout the
book. The chapter concludes with a close analysis of Doug Aitken’s SONG
1 (2012), an emblematic example of monumental outdoor cinematic pro-
jection. I read this work through the notion of enchantment and Roland
Barthes’s essay “Leaving the Movie Theater,” which revels in the pleasures
of the spectator’s liminal position between the illusory space of the mov-
ing image and the physical cinematic situation.73
Chapter 3 turns to curatorial initiatives to bring art into mediated
advertising spaces. My discussion centers on a historical narrative of inter-
ventions in New York’s Times Square from the 1980s to the present to
consider how and if art can produce meaningful moments of encounter
within an overwhelmingly commercial space. Beginning with Messages to
the Public in the 1980s and concluding with Midnight Moment in the
2010s, I argue that these initiatives develop a kind of intra-spectacular
practice that works within a shifting screen landscape that may be within
the domain of advertising and development but finds ways to productively
point to its edges. I then briefly discuss an array of practices that appropri-
ate the curatorial models of Times Square and conclude by backtracking
to Jenny Holzer’s Sign on a Truck (1984), a mobilization of advertising
technology that developed out of the artist’s iconic Times Square inter-
vention and began to explore the space in front of the screen as a social site.
Chapter 4 considers how moving images generate new social spaces and
encounters in front of the screen—horizontal zones of interaction and
recognition created through a variety of high- and low-tech means. I first
look at Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain (2004) in Chicago’s Millennium
Park as a ludic space or “magic circle” between two monumental, spitting
video portraits of unnamed Chicagoans. I then turn to artworks that
explicitly engage interactive technologies to allow viewers to see them-
selves on screen. A close reading of selected moving image public works by
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer that employ mirroring and responsive interfaces
examines how viewers enter into webs of recognition. This chapter
73
Earlier versions of my readings of Masstransiscope and SONG 1 appear in two journal
articles: Annie Dell’Aria, “The Enchanting Subway Ride: Bill Brand’s Masstransiscope,”
Public Art Dialogue 5, no. 2 (2015): 141–61; Annie Dell’Aria, “Cinema–in–the–Round:
Doug Aitken’s SONG 1 (2012), the Hirshhorn Museum and the Pleasures of Cinematic
Projection,” Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) 3, no. 2 (December 1, 2014):
208–21. They appear here with the permission of both journals and publishers.
28 A. DELL’ARIA

concludes with a brief discussion of a parallel phenomenon: architectural

interventions that act as paracinematic projectors onto the ground,
expanding playable city principles beyond interactive technology. The hor-
izontal planes produced by artworks in this chapter evoke a longer history
of places of public mixing and contestation from public fountains and
pools to disco dance floors.
Chapter 5 looks at how moving image-based public art is implicated in
the social and economic marketing of Creative Cities and the neoliberal
remaking of urban public spaces through urban light festivals. With a close
reading of BLINK in Cincinnati and other similar projects, I examine how
the light festival phenomenon that exploded in the 2010s walks a thin line
between producing meaningful encounters with art and merely rendering
the city into a playground and an image for consumption. This chapter
examines the role of marketing, technology, and design in the production
of these events as well as individual artistic practices within them. I argue
that light festivals become interfaces within which the relationship between
the material and projected city is continually negotiated.
Chapter 6 continues this discussion of placemaking to explore frequent
failures of projects aspiring to permanence. I open with a comparison of
Dara Birnbaum’s Rio Videowall (1989) in Atlanta and the shifting screen
landscapes in a suburban development in northern Virginia to examine
how demographic changes and screen histories impact the lives of public
screens. I then narrate the brief life of the BBC Big Screens, a ten-year
project in the UK that created an innovative platform for public art, but
whose precarious balance between national and local control led to its col-
lapse. I close with a discussion of a promising yet failed initiative to create
a permanent public screen for media art in Indianapolis. These narratives
of public art failures expose both the vulnerability of moving image screens
in public spaces and the moving image’s own precarious position between
the realms of advertising and art.
Chapter 7 looks to the notion of superimposition in site-specific art-
works that take an approach to place that challenges the assumptions of
placemaking initiatives. This chapter begins with projects that puncture
their sites with windows or wormholes into other places, including those
by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Dan Graham, John
Gerrard, and Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. This chapter then
turns to the intertwining of place and memory to explore forms of haunt-
ing, discussing the work of Judith Barry and returning to the introductory
project by Tony Oursler. Recent figural projections by Krzysztof Wodiczko
 1 INTRODUCTION 29

expand the artist’s heralded architectural practice to produce human-­

scaled apparitions that demand a right to appear for marginalized people.
I conclude by examining works produced against the grain of public art
organizations in the spirit of Situationist détournements and street art.
Superimpositions employ the moving image’s enchanting properties not
to escape the screen’s surroundings, but to produce transformations of
our understanding of place and intensifications in the experience of the
here and now.
Chapter 8 concludes with a brief postscript written from the perspective
of the spring and summer of 2020, a year where the very concept of public
space underwent major upheaval and contestation. Exploring how mov-
ing images continued to appear as public art during the COVID-19 pan-
demic and Black Lives Matter protests, this postscript attests to the
resilience of moving images as public art and considers their future.
The artworks discussed in my chapters do not constitute an exhaustive
catalog of this wide-ranging public art practice, and indeed that is not the
project of this book. Instead, I map out how and why moving images
continue to pop up in cities under the guise of public art and examine
what occurs between the screen, spectators, and urban space. These art-
works lay out types of spatial encounters that draw upon the moving
image’s inherent power of attraction to prompt increasingly specific rela-
tionships to place. This book also seeks to rethink our relationship to mov-
ing images through enchantment. Moving image-based public art can do
more than merely distract passersby. In fact, these artworks can engender
complex and meaningful engagements within their sites of exhibition, not
despite the moving image’s inherent ephemerality, but perhaps because of it.
Though my examples weave a rather optimistic tale of public art,
throughout the book I consider how these practices can be implicated in
structures of power and capital through issues of funding, realization, and
preservation. This does not necessarily discount from the progressive
potential of artworks made within the mainstream, but nevertheless calls
our attention to the sites of contestation that these projects frequently
become. The tension between our physical encounter with the screen and
the mimetic forms within it is itself a continuing site of renegotiation
within the public realm—one that is almost always haunted by the specter
of publicity and spectacle, but is also never without the capacity to enchant
and move us in profound ways.
 CHAPTER 2

Enchantment: Encountering Moving Images

on Urban Surfaces

Navigating public spaces that are filled with moving images involves a
constant negotiation between attention and distraction and between rep-
resented and actual space. On the most immediate level, moving images
and illumination prompt at least momentary attention, activating our
instinctual peripheral vision. One way of conceptualizing the experience of
navigating heavily mediated public spaces would be through the critique
of the “society of the spectacle” and the sublimation of the real in favor of
the illusion of the screen.1 In these critical frameworks, spectators and
occupiers of urban space are rendered passive and powerless to the screen,
barring the occasional transgressive act of culture-jamming. The presence
of screen technologies seems to invert established spheres of public and
private and threaten the social and material fabric of public space. While
this critique offers important insight into the spatial politics of capitalism,

1
This critique stems from Guy Debord’s theses on the society of the spectacle and runs
through the later writings of theorists like Jean Baudrillaud and Paul Virilio. Virilio more
explicitly maps this critique onto the spaces of the city in referencing how gateways and tra-
ditional architectural monuments have been replaced by “an electronic audience system.”
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone
Books, 1994); Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-Aesthetic:
Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, The, 1998), 145–54;
Paul Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” in The Paul Virilio Reader (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), 84–99.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 31

Switzerland AG 2021
A. Dell’Aria, The Moving Image as Public Art, Experimental Film
and Artists’ Moving Image,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65904-2_2
Another random document with
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transversely, the vessels of the lumbar region are compelled to describe a
somewhat prolonged vertical course before reaching their point of
distribution. From these circumstances, even transitory congestions in the
circulation of the cord are easily followed by irreparable injury of its
delicate elements.
133 Loc. cit., Path. Trans., 1884.

Finally, in all discussions on pathogeny must not be forgotten the doctrine

of Leyden134 that infantile paralysis, also progressive muscular atrophy, is
a disease which may begin at the periphery and extend to the centres, as
well as the reverse. It must also be remembered that, as yet, only very
scanty evidence exists to support this, in itself, plausible theory.
134 See loc. cit., ut supra.

COURSE OF INFANTILE PARALYSIS.—The most ordinary course of infantile

paralysis is that already described as typical—namely, extremely rapid
development to a maximum degree of intensity, then apparent
convalescence, retrocession of paralysis, atrophy, and ultimate
deformities in limbs in which paralysis persists.

Several variations from this typical course are observed. Complete

recovery may take place, as in the so-called temporary paralysis of
Kennedy135 and of Frey.136 These cases are very rare. But their possibility
seriously complicates the estimate we may make of the efficacy of
therapeutic measures.137
135 Dublin Quarterly Journal, 1840.

136 Berlin. Klin. Wochensch., 1874. I have described one such temporary case in the article
already quoted. These cases seem about as frequent in adults. (See Frey, loc. cit.; also case
of Miles, etc. etc.)

137 As of the case of complete recovery, the only one the author had seen, related by Dally,
Journal de Thérap., 1880, 1, vii.

On the other hand, there may be a complete absence of regression; and

this is observed sometimes in cases where the paralysis is originally
limited; sometimes where it is extremely extensive, involving nearly all the
muscles of the trunk or limbs;138 or muscles or limbs originally spared may
become involved in a fresh attack. Laborde relates cases of this kind. In
Roger's first case paraplegia occurred under the influence of scarlatina
two months after paralysis of one arm.
138 Thus in Eulenburg's case, quoted ut supra.

The form of anterior poliomyelitis most frequent in adults is the subacute,

and after that the chronic. Both are extremely rare in children, the latter
excessively so. Seeligmüller and Seguin139 both admit the possibility of a
chronic form in children, and the latter has kindly communicated to me
one case from his private practice:

Miss N. D——, æt. 15, paresis in both legs, first at age of nine, increased
at age of twelve, when weakness of vision first noted. At fourteen both
feet in rigid pes equinus, and both tendons achilleis cut, without benefit.
Hands became tremulous, without paresis. On examination at age of
fifteen found moderate atrophy of muscles of both legs. Tendo Achillis
united on both sides, and equinus persists. Voluntary movement exists,
both in anterior tibial and in gastrocnemius muscles, but diminished in
anterior tibial. Faradic contractility diminished in both sets of muscles;
examination difficult from extreme sensibility of patient. In both hands
interossei, muscles of thumb, and little finger show tremors and fibrillary
contractions. Thenar eminences small, abductor pollicis nearly absent,
not reacting to faradic current. Optic nerves slightly atrophied. Mind
enfeebled, memory poor; articulation not affected. Five years later the
motor paralysis and mental enfeeblement had still further progressed, but
no exact notes exist of this period.
139 Loc. cit. (ed. 1877).

Erb140 relates a case that he considers unique at the time in a girl of six.
The paralysis began insidiously in the right foot in July; a fortnight later
had extended to the left foot; complete motor paralysis existed in August,
without any lesion of sensibility: after electrical treatment, then instituted,
first return to motility to peroneal muscles in November; by January child
able to walk again and electrical reactions nearly normal.141
140 Brain, 1883.

141 In the same number of Brain, A. Hughes Bennett quotes cases of so-called chronic
paralysis in very young children which are evidently cases of general paresis from congenital
 cerebral atrophy. The children were defective in intelligence, could not sit up nor hold up the
head; the electrical reactions were preserved. I have seen a great many such cases: they
are indeed not at all uncommon. Much more so is Bennett's diagnosis.

COMPLICATION WITH PROGRESSIVE MUSCULAR ATROPHY.—Raymond142 and

Seeligmüller describe some rare cases where progressive muscular
atrophy declared itself in persons previously affected with infantile
paralysis in other limbs. Both observers infer a gradual and chronic
extension along the cord of the originally acute anterior poliomyelitis.143
Similar cases have much more recently (1884) been quoted by Ballet as
tending to modify the prognosis which has usually been pronounced
favorable quoad life and further spinal accidents. (See infra.)
142 Gaz. méd., 1875. No. 17.

143 It seems to me that Seguin's case, above quoted, might be an example of such
complication(?). But I have not seen the patient myself, and describe the case according to
the views of the author.

PROGNOSIS.—The prognosis of atrophic paralysis, quoad vitam, is, as is

well known, extremely good. The prospect of recovery from the paralysis
is variable. It cannot be estimated either by the extent of the initial
paralysis or by the severity of the fever or attendant nervous symptoms.
The electrical reactions alone are of value in the prognosis, and their
value is very great. Duchenne first formulated their law: “All the cases of
infantile paralysis which I have seen where the faradic contractility was
diminished but not lost, and which could be treated by faradic electricity
within two years after the onset of the paralysis, have completely
recovered.”144 This encouraging statement must be read as applying
rather to individual muscles than to cases as a whole. Few complete
recoveries of patients are claimed even by so enthusiastic an electrician
as Duchenne; who nevertheless affirms his not unfrequent success in re-
creating entire muscles out of a few fibres saved from degeneration.
144 Loc. cit.

The persistence of galvanic irritability in muscles which fail to contract to

the faradic current has been shown by Erb to belong to the degenerative
reactions. Hammond, however, without alluding to the qualitative changes
in the galvanic contractions, sees in them the elements of a relatively
favorable prognosis, even when faradic contractility is lost. Thus, out of
87 cases, in 39 of which the paralyzed muscles contracted to the galvanic
but not the faradic current, 14 were entirely cured, 28 greatly improved,
30 slightly improved, 15 discontinued treatment very early.145
145 Loc. cit., p. 482.

Examination of fragments of living muscle obtained by Duchenne's

harpoon, though useful, should not be allowed to exaggerate an
unfavorable prognosis. Much fat may be found in such fragments when
the muscle is as yet by no means completely degenerated and can be
made to contract to one or the other current. Erb, however, admits that
the results of treatment have not, in his hands, been brilliant; but adds
that he has had no opportunity to treat any cases which were not of long
standing.146
146 Loc. cit.

Volkmann147 considers the paralysis entirely hopeless, and advises the

concentration of all effort upon the prevention or palliation of deformities.
147 Loc. cit.

It seems probable that at the present moment sufficient data do not exist
for formulating a fair prognosis; nor will they until a much larger number of
cases than hitherto have been submitted to all the resources of a complex
and persevering system of therapeutics from the earliest period of the
disease.

SPECIAL PARALYSES.—Among the paralyses, some exercise a more

unfavorable influence on locomotion than others. Thus, paralysis of the
muscles of the trunk is more difficult to palliate, either by apparatus or by
the efforts of the patient, than any paralysis of the limbs. Similarly,
paralysis of the upper segments of a limb is more crippling than when
confined to the lower. Partial paralysis of the muscles surrounding a joint
is often (but not always) more liable to lead to deformity than total
paralysis.

Influence of Neglect.—Apart from the influence of treatment in curing the

paralysis, must be estimated in the prognosis the effect of care and
watchfulness in limiting the disease and in averting many consequences,
even of those which are incurable. The rescue of muscles only partially
degenerated may often serve to compensate the inaction of those which
are irretrievably ruined.

Ballet148 has recently called attention to the fact that in certain cases
persons who had been attacked with an anterior poliomyelitis in childhood
became predisposed to different forms of spinal disease. Four have been
observed: (1) transitory congestion of the cord, causing paralysis of a day
or two's duration; (2) an acute spinal paralysis of the form usually seen in
adults; (3) subacute spinal paralysis; (4) progressive muscular atrophy.
The author relates cases under each of these heads, and further quotes
one related by Dejerine in 1882.149 The patient, a carpenter aged fifty-five
and with an atrophic deformity of the foot, became suddenly paralyzed in
the four limbs, trunk, and abdomen. The paralysis was complete in a
month, was stationary for three months, then began to improve, and at
the end of six months from the onset of the disease recovery was
complete.
148 Revue de Médecine, 1884.

149 Revue de Médecine, 1882.

The observations of progressive muscular atrophy in persons bearing the

stigmata of an infantile paralysis are quite numerous.150
150 Charcot, Soc. Biol., 1875, and Gaz. méd.; Seeligmüller (4 cases), in Gerhardt's
Handbuch, 1880; Hayem, Bull. Soc. de Biol., 1879; Vulpian, Clinique méd. de la Charité,
1879; Pitres, new observation, quoted by Ballet in 1884.

The prognosis cannot be the same for cases where everything is done to
avert malpositions and for those where all precautions are neglected.
Thus, prolonged rest in bed favors pes equinus; the use of crutches
necessitates flexion of the thigh and forced extension of the foot;
locomotion without support tends to displace articulations by
superincumbent weight, causing pes calcaneus, genu-recurvatum. Finally,
compensatory deformities must be averted from sound parts, as scoliosis
from shortening of the atrophied leg, equinus from passive shortening of
the gastrocnemii through flexion of the leg, etc.

ETIOLOGY.—Concerning the etiology proper of infantile paralysis little

definite is known. It is probable, as has been already noticed, that
traumatisms have a much more decided influence than is generally
assigned to them. Leyden particularly insists on this influence, and on the
facility with which a traumatism relatively severe for a young child may be
overlooked, because it would not be recognized as such for an adult. It
must be noticed, however, that children are much more liable to have the
arms wrenched and pulled violently than the lower extremities; yet in a
great majority of cases the lesion is situated in the lumbar cord.

It has been shown that the myelitis, though so limited transversely, is

often far more diffused in the longitudinal axis of the cord than might be
supposed from the permanent paralyses. This fact corresponds to the
initial generalization of the motor disturbance. It seems possible that the
traumatic irritation, starting from the central extremity of the insulted
nerve, diffuses itself through the cord until it meets with its point of least
resistance, and here excites a focal myelitis. That this point should most
frequently be found in the lumbar cord would be explained by its relatively
less elaborate development, corresponding to the imperfect growth and
function of the lower extremities.

A second cause of anterior poliomyelitis is, almost certainly, the presence

of some poison circulating in the blood. The frequent occurrence of the
accident in the course of one of the exanthemata is one indication of this;
other indications are found in such cases as that related by Simon, where
three children in one family were suddenly attacked—two on one day,
one, twenty-four hours later.151 The same author relates a case of motor
paralysis in an adult, followed by atrophy of left lower extremity, and which
occurred during a fit of indigestion caused by eating mussels.152 The
acute ascending paralysis of Landry, with its absence of visible lesion,
has been said to strikingly resemble the effects of poison. Hydrophobia
and tetanus are again examples of the predilection exhibited by certain
poisons for the motor regions of the cord.
151 Journal de Thérap., 7, vii., 1880, p. 16. These children belonged to an American family,
but were seen by several distinguished French physicians.

152 P. 357.

The evidence that infectious diseases may constitute the immediate

(apparent) causal antecedent of acute poliomyelitis has led, not
unnaturally, to the theory that all cases of acute infantile paralysis are due
to a specific infecting agent, some as yet unknown member of the great
class of pathogenic bacteria. It may be noticed, however, that the
occurrence of the spinal accidents after the ordinary infectious diseases,
as scarlatina and measles, should as well indicate that a specific agent
proper to itself was at least not essential to its development.153
153 Perhaps the occurrence of diphtheria in the course of scarlatina and typhoid should
indicate a similar lack of real specificity in the morbid agent of the former disease.

The influence of exposure to cold, which seems to have been sometimes

demonstrated, must probably be interpreted, as in the case of
rheumatism and pneumonia, as effective by means of some poison
generated in the organism when cutaneous secretion, exhalation, or
circulation has been suddenly checked.

DIAGNOSIS.—The diagnosis of the acute anterior poliomyelitis of childhood

is usually easy, but unexpected difficulties occasionally arise.

Typical cases are markedly different from typical cases of cerebral

paralysis, but in exceptional cases these differences disappear. This is
shown in the following table:

SPINAL PARALYSIS. CEREBRAL PARALYSIS.

Hemiplegic, (rule). Monoplegic as residuum of
Paraplegic or monoplegic (rule). hemiplegia or as consequence of solitary tubercle
(exception).
Hemiplegic as residuum from paraplegia, or
original and involving facial nerve (very
exceptional).
Intelligence free (rule). Intelligence depressed (rule).
Intelligence depressed (when spinal paralysis Intelligence free (exception, especially with solitary
has affected imbecile children). tubercle).
Disposition lively. Disposition apathetic or cross.
Initial convulsion unique; general symptoms Convulsions repeated; pyrexia prolonged several
of a few hours' duration (rule). days or weeks (rule).
Convulsion repeated during two to three
weeks before paralysis; fever a month (rare
exceptions).
Sensibility intact (rule). Sensibility intact after initial period.
Occasional hyperæsthesia (exception).
Reflexes cutaneous, and tenderness lowered
Reflexes intact.
or lost (rule).
Reflexes preserved when only single
muscles in groups paralyzed.
Associated movements of hand absent Associated movements frequently observed in
(Seeligmüller). hand.
Extensive and rigid contractions of upper extremity
No rigid contractions of upper extremity.
very frequent.
Atrophy of paralyzed muscles and arrested
Atrophy very slight.
development of limb, very marked.
Faradic contractility diminished or lost;
Electrical reactions normal.
degenerative galvanic reaction.

Rather singularly, the diagnosis from transverse myelitis is less liable to

error than that from cerebral paralysis:

ANTERIOR
TRANSVERSE MYELITIS.
POLIOMYELITIS.
Fever brief or absent. Persistent fever.
Sensibility intact. Hyperæsthesia, then anæsthesia.
Decubitus absent. Presence decubitus.
Reflexes lost. Reflexes increased.
Atrophy of muscles. Atrophy of muscles sometimes as intense.
Electrical muscular Loss of electrical contractility, but not proportioned to sensory and motor
contractility lost. disturbance; less rapidly completed.

The diagnosis from hæmatomyelitis is almost impossible, and practically

useless. For if the hemorrhage be severe, the child dies at once, as in
Clifford Albutt's case. If less severe, it excites a myelitis, and the history
becomes identical with that of the disease we are considering; or if the
clot beyond the anterior cornua, it is identified with a vulgar myelitis of
traumatic origin.

Progressive muscular atrophy is extremely rare in childhood, but is

occasionally seen under hereditary influence (Friedreich's disease). In
adult cases confusion is not only easy to make, but often difficult to avoid,
especially with the rare, chronic form of poliomyelitis. The basis of
distinction is as follows:
 ANTERIOR POLIOMYELITIS. PROGRESSIVE MUSCULAR ATROPHY.
Onset sudden; maximum of paralysis at the March very gradual; maximum of disease
beginning. not attained for years.
Faradic contractility not lost until atrophy
Faradic contractility lost almost at once.
complete.
Shortening of limbs and atrophy of limbs (in
No arrest of development of limbs.
infantile cases).
Functionally associated muscles frequently Capricious selection of muscles, but frequent
associated in paralysis: hand rarely affected. wasting of these at eminences.

Paralysis from lesion of a peripheric nerve closely imitates anterior spinal

paralysis.154 It is distinguished by closely following the distribution of the
injured nerve, and, usually, by concomitant lesions of the sensibility and of
cutaneous nutrition.
154 The importance of this fact has been shown in the section on Pathogeny. (See also
quotations from Leyden and remarks on lesions of peripheric nerves.)

The pseudo-paralysis sometimes observed in syphilitic children as a

consequence of a gummatous infiltration of the bones at the junction of
the epiphysis and diaphysis155 might easily be mistaken for a spinal
paralysis. But it is an affection peculiar to the new-born; the electrical
reactions of the paralyzed muscles are intact; careful examination will
show that the movements of the muscles are not impossible, but
restrained by pain; often other syphilitic affections are present.
155 Parrot, Wagner.

The diagnosis from diphtheritic paralysis is embarrassed, from the fact

that true anterior poliomyelitis may develop in the course of diphtheria as
of other infectious diseases. The paralysis of the soft palate, preservation
of faradic reaction, absence of atrophy, and the usually rapid recovery
must establish the differentiation.

In spinal paralysis there is loss of the reflexes,156 and also of faradic

contractility, both of which are preserved in hysteria. In hysterical
paralysis, also, there is no wasting of the affected muscles.
156 See Gowers's monograph on “Spinal-Cord Diseases” for an excellent summary of the
spinal reflexes.
Various diseases of the bony skeleton or articulations may simulate spinal
paralysis. Congenital club-foot, caused by unequal development of the
bones and cuticular surfaces, is to be distinguished from the paralytic
variety by the date of its appearance,157 by the deformity of the tarsal
bones, and by the extreme difficulty of reduction.
157 Though in some cases paralysis of the muscles of the foot seems to take place during
fœtal life, and a club-foot result which is both congenital and paralytic.

Caries of the calcaneum, leading the child to walk on the anterior part of
the foot to avoid pressure on the heel, may leave after recovery such a
retraction of the plantar fascia as to cause a degree of equinus and varus,
with apparent paralysis of the peroneal muscles. I have seen one such
case.

Congenital luxation of the hip may simulate paralysis; indeed, by Verneuil,

it has been attributed to an intra-uterine spinal paralysis. There is,
however, no change in the electrical reactions of the muscles surrounding
the joint.

In coxitis, however, Newton Shaffer158 has demonstrated a moderate

diminution of faradic contractility in such muscles, and a corresponding
degree of atrophy; and this fact might complicate the diagnosis of
paralysis from arthritis of the hip-joint. Gibney159 has called attention to
the facility with which this confusion may arise, and Sayre160 relates cases
of infantile paralysis mistaken for coxitis.
158 Archives of Medicine.

159 Am. Journ. Med. Sci., Oct., 1878.

160 Orthopædic Surgery.

In a case observed by myself, which had been previously diagnosed as

coxitis, the mistake was all the more interesting as the paralysis which
really existed seemed to have been caused by a meningitis rather than
primary myelitis of the cornua.161 It thus corresponded to the meningo-
myelitic case related by Leyden.
161 The details of this case are as follows: C. P——, aged 11, ten months previous to
consultation suffered from febrile attack, accompanied by retraction of head, severe pains
 diffused through body and intense at nape of neck; unconsciousness for thirty-six hours;
vomiting; no convulsions. Case diagnosed as cerebro-spinal meningitis by attendant
physician. Convalescence in a week, but with pain in lumbar region of back, predominating
on right side, so aggravated by standing or walking that both acts impossible. Coincidently,
pain in right calf; exquisite tenderness to pressure even from stocking. No complaint in
recumbent position. Child could not get from floor to bed, nor raise right leg from ground. As
pain subsided walking became possible, but right leg dragged. Chronic twitchings on left
side, face, arm, leg. These symptoms lasted ten or twelve weeks, but at end of nine weeks
patient could walk up stairs. In ten months power of walking almost recovered, but there
remained a certain amount of lordosis and oscillation of pelvis, which is jarred on the left
side while the right leg is swung forward. Recumbent, all movements executed equally well
on both sides and passive motion of the hip-joint perfectly free. Circumference of right thigh
and leg diminished from one-half to one inch as compared with the left. Faradic contractility
diminished on the right side in the gluteal muscles, vastus externus, and rectus, and in the
gastrocnemii. The sacro-lumbalis muscle was, unfortunately, not examined, but from the
lordosis was probably affected. The remaining muscles were intact. Pain on pressure
persisted over right side of second, third, and fourth lumbar vertebræ. Diagnosis was made
of a limited meningeal exudation, with compression of anterior part of cord or of a portion of
the lumbar and of the sacral plexus.

Scoliosis, which may be caused by the relatively rare unilateral paralysis

of some of the muscles of the trunk, may also be simulated by paralysis
with shortening of one lower extremity. To compensate the shortening, the
trunk is bent over on the paralyzed side; hence a lateral curvature, easily
reducible, but easily leading into error.

It would seem easy to distinguish traumatic cases of subluxation of the

humerus from those due to paralysis of the deltoid. Yet sometimes only
the history will serve to establish, and that somewhat doubtfully, the
diagnosis.162
162 A child of four was brought to me with a stiffness and rigidity of the shoulder-joint which
could only very partially be overcome by passive motion, and not at all by voluntary effort.
The mother stated that several months previously the child had, without apparent cause,
become suddenly unable to move the arm. After two months' delay it was taken to a
dispensary, and told that the arm was out of joint, and had it reset under ether. From this
date the stiffness had gradually developed. The deltoid was atrophied, with marked
diminution of the faradic contractility. Question: Were these signs merely symptomatic of an
arthritis consequent on a dislocation, or was the latter the result of a spinal paralysis of the
deltoid?
THERAPEUTICS.—The treatment of anterior poliomyelitis embraces two
stages. In the first it is directed against inflammation of the spinal cord
and the paralysis of the muscles; in the second period the spinal lesion
has run its course and the paralysis is considered incurable. Treatment is
then directed to the prevention or palliation of deformities or toward
facilitating the functions of the limb in spite of them.

These two periods are not, however, rigidly separated from each other in
chronological order. From the very outset it is important to take certain
precautions to prevent deformities, and while palliating these with
orthopædic apparatus it is important for years to continue treatment of the
paralyzed muscles in the hope that at least a remnant of them may be
saved. To abandon the case to the orthopædic instrument-maker, or to
neglect the problem of dynamic mechanics while applying electricity and
studying the progress of fatty degeneration, are errors greatly to be
condemned.

The treatment of the initial stage is necessarily purely symptomatic for the
fever and convulsions, since the diagnosis cannot be made out until these
have subsided.

As soon as the diagnosis is clear, however, certain measures should be

adopted to diminish the hyperæmia of the spinal cord. Dally163
recommends the ventral decubitus; almost all modern authorities advise
ice to the spine and ergot internally or subcutaneously. Thus, Althaus164
makes hypodermic injections of ergotin in doses of one-fourth of a grain
for a child between one and two years old; one-third of a grain between
three and five; and one half grain from five to ten; and these doses
repeated once or twice daily. The only objection to this treatment is the
degree of local irritation it can hardly fail to occasion. Hammond, who
“affirms ergot to be of great service, the only medicine capable of cutting
short the disease or of limiting its lesions,” recommends the internal
administration of the fluid extract—ten drops three times a day for infants
of six months, half a drachm for children between one and two years.165
163 Journ. Thérap., t. viii., 1880.

164 On Infantile Paralysis.

 165 I have elsewhere quoted one case of early recovery under the use of ice and ergot; or
was this a case of temporary paralysis?

The belladonna treatment, at one time so warmly praised by Brown-

Séquard, retains to-day few adherents.

Simon advises cutaneous revulsives to divert the circulation to the

surface; thus, hot-air baths, mustard powder sprinkled on cotton
enveloping the limbs. Ross advises mercurial inunction along the spine,
followed by iodine and blisters. At the same time, iodide of potassium
should be given internally in large doses. The action of this drug upon
inflammations of the nerve-centres seems, within certain limits, to be
indisputable, but its mode of action is certainly very obscure. Where the
lesion can be attributed to a meningo-myelitis,166 the iodide may be
expected to facilitate the absorption of the exudation. In these cases it
should be continued for a long time.167
166 As in Leyden's first case, and my own.

167 Binz explains the local action of iodine by an exudation of leucocytes which follows the
dilatation of blood-vessels. These elements break down the exudation into which they are
poured, and thus facilitate its absorption.

Electrical treatment may be begun by the end of the first week after the
paralysis. At this stage Erb recommends central galvanization as an
antiphlogistic remedy for the myelitis. For this purpose a large anode
must be placed over the spine at the presumed seat of the lesion, while
the cathode is applied over the abdomen. By a slight modification of the
method the cathode is placed over the paralyzed muscles. The
application is stabile, and, according to Erb, should last from three to ten
minutes; according to Bouchut, several hours daily. Erb's method is
intended exclusively as a sedative to the local inflammation. When the
cathode is placed on the muscles it is hoped that the descending current,
replacing the lost nervous impulses, may avert the threatening
degeneration of the muscle and nerve.

Faradization cannot modify the inflammatory lesions of the cord. As a

means of averting degeneration in completely paralyzed muscles it is
inferior to galvanism, and should not therefore be used in those muscles
which refuse to contract under its stimulus. Its immense utility, however, is
as a stimulus to muscles imperfectly paralyzed, but liable to degenerate
from inaction and to be overborne by their antagonists. The excitation of
contractions in such muscles is a powerful local gymnastic, helping to
maintain nutrition by artificially-excited function.

For the same purpose, muscles inexcitable to the faradic current should
be, when this is possible, made to contract by the interrupted galvanic
current. After this treatment has been prolonged during several months,
the faradic contractility often returns, and the current then should be
changed (Seguin).

The value of electrical treatment has been very differently estimated. Erb
remarks that “its results are not precisely brilliant.” Roth, whose testimony
perhaps is not above suspicion, since evidently prejudiced, insists that
numerous cases fall into his hands which have submitted for months to
electrical treatment without the slightest benefit. On the other hand,
Duchenne, as is well known, has expressed almost unbounded
confidence in the therapeutic efficacy of faradization, declaring that it was
capable of “creating entire muscles out of a few fibres.”

The sensitiveness of children to the electrical current, and their terror at

its application, seriously interfere with its persistent use; as, if the
patience of the physician is maintained, that of the parents is very likely to
fail in the presence of the cries and resistance of the child.

It is very probable that some of the failures of electrical treatment are due
to the attempt to rely upon it exclusively, instead of suitably combining
both electrical methods with each other and with other remedial
measures. With our present knowledge it is safe to assert the desirability
of persistent electrical treatment during at least the first two years
following the paralysis. The currents must never be too strong—the
faradic, at least, never applied for longer than ten minutes at a time. The
muscles should be relaxed by the position of the limbs (Sayre). If the
muscles continue to waste, and especially if they become fatty, the
electrical response will grow less and less, and finally cease altogether.168
In the contrary case the galvanic contraction will become normal in
quality, and the faradic contractility will return and increase, while the
atrophy is arrested and the muscle regains its bulk and voluntary powers.
Sometimes, as already stated, the latter is regained, while faradic
contractility remains greatly diminished.169
 168 Passing through three stages: faradic contractility diminished, galvanic contraction
increased; faradic response lost, galvanic degenerative; absence of contraction to either
current.

169 Sayre (loc. cit.) has noticed cases in which the muscle would contract several times
under faradism, then refuse to do so for a day or two. This observation, if valid and not due
to unequal working of the battery, is a most curious one.

A succedaneum to electricity that is highly prized by some authorities is

strychnia, especially when subcutaneously administered. Pelione170
relates the cure of two cases in children of four and five years, after three
and four years' duration of the paralysis, by strychnia—one-half
milligramme daily. None should be given to children under six months, but
over that age one-ninety-sixth of a grain may be given (Hammond). It
should not be given subcutaneously more than two or three times a week
(Seeligmüller).171
170 L'Union médicale, 1883.

171 Duchenne relates a case of a paralysis general at the outset and remaining so for six
months. It was then treated by strychnine for five or six months, and at the end of that time
had become limited to the lower extremities (Elect. local., ed. 1861, p. 278).

The incidental action of electricity in attracting blood to the paralyzed

muscles may be sustained by several other methods.

Among these the external application of heat, either dry or in the form of
hot douches, alternating with cold, is an adjuvant remedy of real
importance. Beard has suggested tubing, malleable to the limbs, for the
conduction of hot water. It is desirable to employ massage immediately
after cessation of the hot applications.

On the value of massage and passive gymnastics opinion is even more

variable than in regard to electricity. Roth, a specialist in orthopædics,
places it at the head of all remedial measures, and denounces electricity
in comparison. Many professional manipulators, ignorant of medical
science, continually claim wonderful triumphs over regular physicians
obtained by means of systematized massage. Volkmann, on the other
hand, dismisses the pretensions of the Heilgymnastik with considerable
contempt, declaring that faradization is the only method which can really
secure exercise to paralyzed muscles.
The Swedish movement cure consists in passive movements imparted to
a limb by the manipulator, at the same time that they are strenuously
resisted by the patient. From the nature of this method, and its aim in
stimulating the voluntary innervation of the muscles, it is admirably
adapted to hysterical paralysis. Theoretically, it is difficult to perceive the
applicability of this method in organic atrophic paralysis, especially in
young children, whose voluntary efforts cannot be commanded. There
are, however, several real indications for passive gymnastics in the
treatment of infantile paralysis. Surface friction and deep massage have
some influence in dilating the blood-vessels and causing an afflux of
blood to the cold and wasting muscles. A probably more important effect
may be produced upon the contraction caused by malposition and
adapted atrophy of certain groups of muscles. It is these contractions
which formerly constituted the special objection of the orthopædist, and
were treated almost universally by tenotomy. They are in any case the
proximate cause of deformities; and, generally existing on the side of the
joint opposite to the most severely paralyzed muscles, they keep these
over-stretched and prevent them from receiving the benefit of the
electrical treatment. Muscles which will not contract to the faradic current
while thus stretched will often begin at once to do so when the rigidity of
their antagonists has been overcome.

Persevering stretching by the hands will often overcome this rigidity as

completely, and even more permanently, than will the tenotomy-knife. It is
in this part of the treatment that entirely ignorant and even charlatan
manipulations do, not unfrequently, achieve remarkable results.172
172 Of course many of those on record, and to some of which I have been a witness, relate
to hysterical contractions, hysterical scoliosis, etc.

It is the retracted tendo Achillis and plantar fascia which most frequently
require this manipulation. In the paralytic club-foot of young children all
authorities agree in the value of repeated manipulations and restorations
of the foot as nearly as possible to a position where it may be retained by
simple bandaging. While turning the foot out it becomes perfectly white,
but on releasing hold of it the circulation is restored, after which the
manœuvre may be repeated (Sayre).

This principle of intermittent stretching by seizure of the segments of the

limb above and below the joint applies to all forms of paralytic contraction.
In the trunk the pelvis should be held by the mother, while the
manipulator, seizing the thorax of the child between both hands, moves it
gently but forcibly to and fro in the required direction. Great care is
required in these manipulations—not merely to avoid exhausting the
muscles, but even to avoid fracturing atrophied bones.

It may be laid down as a positive rule that tenotomy should never be

performed in the contractions of spinal paralysis until the resources of
manipulation have been exhausted. It is to be remembered that the
rigidity depends on no active contraction of the muscle, but on its elastic
retraction. The manœuvre of stretching does not appeal to the force of
contractility, which may have been lost, but to the force of elasticity, which
remains and can be made to act in a reverse direction. Finally, in the
cases where the retracted muscles have not been originally paralyzed,
but have lost the power of contracting during the process of shortening,
this power may be restored if the muscle regain its normal length.

The operation of tenotomy, apparently a far more heroic measure, is often

a less efficacious means of arriving at the results. Unless followed by the
application of apparatus which permits motion in the joint, section of
contracted tendons is only of brief utility.

Though the edges of the cut tendon have been kept apart until the
intervening space is filled by new tissue, union is finally effected by the
latter, and retraction through elasticity is again imminent. Often, therefore,
the deformity is repeated in spite of repeated operations; when it is not,
the happy issue is due to the fact that, with increased freedom of
locomotion immediately after the tenotomy, the patient has been enabled
to bring the influence of weight to bear in such a manner as to fix the limb
in a new and more convenient position. Thus, after section of the tendo
Achillis for pes equinus, if the patient begins at once to walk on the
paralyzed foot, the weight of the body, pressing down the heel, may keep
the tendon stretched. So walking immediately after section of the
hamstring muscles will have a tendency to produce genu-recurvation by
the same mechanism which produces it in total paralysis, and the original
deformity will not recur.

Besides the tendo Achillis, the parts which may be occasionally submitted
to tenotomy are the plantar fascia, the peroneal muscles, very rarely the
anterior tibial and extensors, the hamstrings, the thigh adductors. Section
of the external rotators of the thigh or of the tensors of the fascia lata
could hardly ever be required, and among these operations Hueter173
rejects that on the plantar aponeurosis as inadequate. The excavation in
the foot it is designed to remedy depends upon alteration in the form of
the tarsal bones, and can only be cured by means of forcible pressure
exerted on their dorsal surface. Section of the peroneal muscles, often
recommended by Sayre, is considered by Hueter to be superfluous after
section of the tendon achilleis. Paralytic contraction of the hamstrings or
of the hip flexors is rarely sufficiently severe to demand tenotomy.
173 Loc. cit., p. 416.

From what has preceded it is evident that maintenance of locomotion is of

great importance, in order to avoid the deformities which are threatened
by prolonged repose. Locomotion, however, can only be safely permitted
with the assistance of apparatus capable of restraining the movements
liable to be produced by the weight of the body. The supporting
instrument which restrains movement in certain directions must, however,
facilitate it in others: immovable apparatus, such as is not infrequently
applied after tenotomy, is always injurious.

In young children unable to walk, the development of pes equinus may

often be prevented by drawing down the foot to a sole splint made of thin
wood, gutta-percha, or felt, and fastening it with a flannel bandage. The
point of the foot may be drawn up toward the tibia by a strip of diachylon
plaster. If the equinus has already developed, a splint of gutta-percha or
of felt (Sayre) may be modelled to the leg and foot while the latter is held
forcibly in dorsal flexion. The splint is attached by means of strips of
adhesive plaster. It should extend as far as the knee, and be suitably
padded (Seeligmüller).

In children able to walk a sole splint of thin metal, to which the foot had
been previously attached by a flannel band, should be inserted in a stout
leather boot. On the outer side of this boot should run a metallic splint,
jointed at the ankle and extending to a leather band surrounding the leg
just below the knee. A broad leather band, attached to the outer edge of
the sole anterior to the talo-tarsal articulation, also passes up on the
outside of the foot, gradually narrowing until, opposite the ankle, it passes
through a slit in the side of the shoe, to be attached to the leg-splint. This
band tends to draw the point of the foot outward, and thus correct the
varus (Volkmann). Sayre174 has improved on this shoe by dividing the sole
at the medio-tarsal articulation, in which lateral deviation takes place, and
uniting the anterior and posterior parts by a ball-and-socket joint,
permitting movement in every direction.
174 Loc. cit., p. 88.

The orthopædic boot for the treatment of calcaneo-valgus is constructed

on the same principle. But the splint runs up the inner side of the leg, and
the leather strap passing to it from the edge of the sole draws the point of
the foot inward and raises its depressed inner border (Volkmann).
Essential to the treatment of this deformity, however, is the elevation of
the heel. This is effected by means of a gutta-percha strap which is
attached below to a spur projecting from the heel of the shoe, and above
to a band encircling the leg. If, by rare exception, a paralytic calcaneus
exists in a child unable to walk, a simple substitute may be found for the
shoe in a board sole-splint projecting behind the heel, attached to the foot
by a strip of adhesive plaster, which finally passes from the posterior
extremity of the board up the back of the leg, and is there secured by a
roller bandage.

The device of the gutta-percha elastic band to replace the gastrocnemius

muscle illustrates a principle of wide application in orthopædic apparatus.
The suggestion to replace paralyzed muscles by artificial ones was first
made by Delacroix175 in an apparatus designed for the hand. The
suggestion was repeated by Gerdy;176 and in 1840, Rigal de Gaillac
proposed to exchange the metallic springs hitherto used for India-rubber
straps. Duchenne elaborated the suggestion in a remarkable manner,177
using delicate spiral springs as a substitute for the lost muscles, and
taking the greatest pains to make the insertion-points of these to exactly
correspond with the insertions of the natural muscles. This was effected
by means of sheaths, imitating natural tendinous sheaths, sewed to a
glove or gaiter in which the hand or foot was encased.
175 Article “Orthopédie,” Dict. des Sciences médicales, quoted by Duchenne.

176 Traité des Bandages, 2d ed., Paris, 1837, quoted by Duchenne.

177 See chapter on “Prothetic Apparatus” in his treatise De l'Électrisation localisée.

At the present day the prothetic apparatus the most employed is that
contrived by Barwell.178 The principle is the same as Duchenne's, but the
artificial muscles are made of India-rubber, to which a small metallic chain
is adjusted, and they are attached to the limb by means of specially-
devised bands of adhesive plaster and pieces of tin bearing loops for the
insertion of the muscle. In this apparatus the artificial muscles do not
attempt to imitate the situation of the natural muscles with the precision
which Duchenne claimed for his. Barwell's own dressing for talipes valgus
consists of two rubber muscles which pass from the inner border of the
foot, one to the inner, the other to the anterior, part of a band which
encircles the leg just below the knee. For talipes calcaneus another band
is required behind the leg, passing to the heel, as in Volkmann's
apparatus, already mentioned. For talipes varus a rubber band should
pass on the outside of the foot; for equinus, one or more from the anterior
part of the leg to the sides of the anterior part of the foot.
178 A tolerably minute account of the Barwell dressing is given by Sayre, loc. cit., p. 84.

Sayre endorses Barwell's dressing as entirely adequate for the treatment

of any form of club-foot, but modifies it by substituting a ball-and-socket
shoe for the adhesive plaster which should encircle the foot. The artificial
muscles are then passed from the sides of the shoe to a padded leather
girdle encircling the leg. A straight splint, jointed opposite the ankle, runs
up from each side of the foot to this girdle, and from it two lateral upright
bars, jointed at the ankle, pass to the heel of the shoe; and from below
the joint passes forward on each side a horizontal bar reaching the point
of origin of the artificial muscles and giving attachment to them.

In equinus it is necessary to bind the heel of the foot down firmly in the
heel of the shoe; and this is accomplished by means of two chamois-
leather flaps which are attached to the inside walls of the shoe and lace
firmly across the foot.179
179 “The aim of the dressing or instrument is simply to imitate the action of the surgeon's
hand; accordingly, any apparatus combining elastic force is far superior to any fixed
appliance; and, moreover, that is to be preferred which is the most readily removable.
Shoes, therefore, are better than bandages or splints. A proper shoe must have joints
opposite the ankle and the medio-tarsal articulation; it must permit the ready application of
elastic power; and it must not so girdle the limb as to interfere with the circulation” (Sayre,
loc. cit., p. 91).