As video art has matured from its earliest, performance-based roots, artists have embraced an idea-driven process that although still possessing strong performative components, is today more abstract and poetic. Contemporary media artists, freed by advances in digital editing technology, are creating new viewing experiences that are best described as cinematic or immersive.

…cinematic embraces what we commonly associate with traditional cinema: lush images, inventive camerawork and lighting (cinematography), large scale projection, and passive viewing in a darkened theater. It is this last ingredient that is being challenged in video installation. In fact, cinema itself has become an art of video, with celluloid film disappearing at a rapid rate as the preferred medium of filmmaking. Video has claimed the moving image domain. Cinema is now undeniably expanded; installation is prefiguring a new cinematic spectator/image relationship based on interaction. (Michael Rush, “Installation and the New Cinematics,” in Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video, pp )

Mass Ornament (2009) by Natalie Bookchin

Video clip with censored sound: Video clip with “original” sound:

Does the “new cinematic spectator/image relationship” in contemporary video installation also apply to its soundscape—(how) did the modernist soundscape that Emily Thompson described in her book translate itself into an installation space?

The “problem” of reverb and echo in gallery spaces – the need to acoustically “dampen” the space Spatialization of sound: multi-channel, track, station of sound in an installation. Sound becomes localized (as zones or stations within the installation). Electroacoustic soundscape plus experiential (we are meant to move around in our experience of an installation) soundscape

Site-specificity Immersion: surround sound, special effects, virtual reality

Now he's out in public and everyone can see (2012) by Natalie Bookchin