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Abstract
A significant challenge for new media installation art is how to avoid overwhelming the audience with multiple modes, media, genres and interaction options that lack meaningful organisation and how to encourage critical engagement with social issues, with other audience members and with new media installation art itself. This project addresses these questions by extending to new media installation art montage as a principle for making meaning developed by the 1920s constructivist Soviet film directors Kuleshov, Einsenstein and Vertov and meta-art as art that draws critical attention to itself. This is achieved through Compass II, a new media installation art work, and through this thesis.
Compass II (2003 2010) is an interactive multi-channel new media video installation and has a database comprising nine stand-alone video works and segments from various stages in each work s development. It shows two distinct geographic and socio-cultural environments Australia and Bulgaria and uses revolutionary/propaganda and traditional/folk songs. Compass II employs montage to create meta-art at all its levels of organisation (cinematic, installation and new media) and provides different opportunities for audience engagement with and within the art work, from passive to active observation, involuntary participation, and intentional navigation. It thus seeks to encourage the audience to reflect on the concept behind, construction of and assumptions built into the art work and on the issue of art s potential to stimulate social engagement which the work seeks to raise.
This thesis develops a set of categories for describing physical and represented space in the cinematic, installation and new media organisation of a new media video installation, which incorporate insights from film and new media studies, semiotics, architecture and philosophy. Using these categories, it demonstrates that montage can be employed beyond film to create meta-art. This is achieved through examples from the work of a range of film, installation and new media artists and the analysis of Compass II s ability to encourage critical reflection on the issue of social engagement and on itself as an interactive new media video installation.