Output details

Expanded cinema. (Performance and chapter in book. "Monitor live" at 'Activating the space of reception', Tate Modern, April 17th-19th 2009; "A kick in the eye, video and expanded cinema in Britain" in 'Expanded cinema: art, performance, film'. Edited by David Curtis and Al Rees. Tate Publishing, London, 11 May 2011, pp 136-147.)

Realised through research conducted through the AHRC funded project (£192,594): 'Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema', 2007-10, (Original P.I. Dr. J.Hatfield 2007, Partridge P.I. 2007-9).

The term 'Expanded Cinema' encompasses film, video, performance and multiple-projection. While video in the gallery has received much attention, expanded cinema includes many kinds of experiment beyond the gallery space.

Partridge's PDRA Dr Hatfield initiated the project before taking over on her death. He was member of steering committee which invited scholars from Europe and North America to trace expanded and multi-screen cinema from its origins in early abstract cinema and the Bauhaus era, to post-war happenings and live events in the first video and multi-media experiments of the 1960s, the fusion of multi-screen art with sonic art and music from the 1970s onwards. It situates expanded cinema in the context of the radical arts and reveals how artists challenged the conventions of spectatorship, the viewing space and the audience – to explore a new participatory and performative cinema beyond the single screen.

Partridge's performance was a practice-led response to the project by re-contextualising an original video from 1975. The original work was a series of 'live' performances interleaved with successive playbacks within the television frame, like the russian dolls, one image within another. Space is simultaneously conveyed as virtual, within the video feedback loop, and actual by the live performance and anachronistic technology. Performance online at: http://www.rewind.ac.uk/expanded/Narrative/Tate_Doc_Live_Medium.html

Partridge’s chapter explores videoart as Expanded Cinema, through an interrogation of seven major works as case studies. Concludes that digital convergence, combined with performance and the non-media specificity of original term, 'cinema' probably points towards videoart as a subset of expanded cinema and that medium specificity is no longer relevant a digital domain. Other Chapters by David Curtis, Al Rees, Malcolm LeGrice, Duncan White, Chris Meigh Andrews.