The (Inter)medial Qualities of Videomapping

Abstract

This thesis explores the medial and intermedial qualities of videomapping, trying to answer the question ‘‘How can videomapping be seen as an intermedial performance?’ Videomapping is an artform where projections are often casted directly on their surroundings, instead of on a screen. Three examples of videomapping performances are used to illustrate the specific characteristics of videomapping. In order to look at intermedial qualities, it is important to first explore the medial qualities of videomapping. Lars Elleström’s modalities recognizes media to be build up from four modalities, which are then put into context by their qualifying aspects. The spatiotemporal modality seemed to be of great importance for the realization of a videomapping performance. In other words: videomapping performances use static backgrounds and add the dimension of time by projecting moving images. In Chiel Kattenbelt’s words, causes videomapping a “temporalization of the space”. Mapping the projections very precisely blurs the border between the immaterial beams and the material background. This paradox has also been recognized by Anna Friedberg when looking at spectatorship in cinematics. After looking at the medial qualities of videomapping, theories on intermediality are deployed to look at the way videomapping is connected to other media. Irina Rajewsky’s categories of intermediality and Jens Schröter’s models of the intermedial discourse were connected to similarities that stood out from analyzing the three artworks. Both theorists departed from the notion that all media stand in connection to other media, and there are indeed many ways in which videomapping connects to other media, for example through a strong similarity of both aesthetics and creation of the work Keys of Light and abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky. This striking example is therefor analyzed in a more detailed way. The research concludes by emphasizing that videomapping is intermedial in many ways, but maybe mostly by how it very close to cinema, yet differentiating itself by how videomapping transforms the static background, making it part of the performance instead of using a white screen to merely display content.