“The Cinematic Turn in the Arts”section is devoted to three investigations of
artistic strategies connected to the cinematic turn within the art scene. In“Stop/
Motion”, Thomas Elsaesser initially gives a broad overview of some of the most
discussed artists and works in this trend, before moving on to discuss the more
complex issues facing both cinema and the museum when they marry.“One of
the most powerful forces at work in bringing museum and moving image into a
new relation with each other is the programmatic reflexivity of the museum and
the self-reference of the modern art-work”, Elsaesser writes. Entering a museum
is like crossing a special kind of threshold, of seeing objects not only in their
material specificity and physical presence, but also in understanding this‘there-
ness’as a special kind of statement, as both a question and a provocation. This
‘produced presence’of modernist art is both echoed and subverted by moving
image installations, often in the form of new modes of performativity and self-
display that tend to involve the body of the artist.
In After“Photography’s Expanded Field”, George Baker revisits his very in-
fluential essay,“Photography‘s Expanded Field”, to extrapolate on the forms
and possibilities opened up by the expansion of the medium of photography
and its relationship to motions and emotions as forms of subjectivity. He speci-
fically investigates the motivations for why so many contemporary artists posi-
tion their practice between mediums, or engage in the cinematic opening of the
still photograph. Another way of stating this radicalization would be to say that
Baker’s concern today is less with the‘objective’or structural mapping per-
formed in his earlier essay; the interpenetration of forms, the expansion of med-
iums like the photograph also has a“subjective”logic, and thus Baker turns to
the desiring politics of the expansion of photography.
In“OnOn Otto: Moving Images and the New Collectivity”, Ina Blom inves-
tigates the German visual artist Tobias Rehberger’s ambitious‘film’projectOn
Otto,which is not really a motion picture, but a project that involves all of the
production steps and competences of a normal‘Hollywood’movie, including
roles for, among others, Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito, Willem Dafoe, Justin
Henry and music composed by Ennio Morricone. Blom considers this project as
part of a series of works in the field of contemporary art that explore media
apparatuses as complex systems intimately intertwined with the practices of
life and labor. Blom rethinks or recontextualizes the questions of stillness, cin-
ematic motion and collective emotion through the multiple cinematic materials
in the projectOn Otto, which are displayed, not primarily on screens, but in an
architectural/sculptural environment that addresses social structures in a new
way.
The fourth section,“The Algorithmic Turn”, revisits some of the topics from
the first section and explores how the logic of the computer generates a new
audiovisual culture. While the first section discusses the issues in a more phe-
20 Eivind Røssaak