On Hijacking LED Walls

Abstract

In recent years, the LED walls originally used in outdoor spaces by advertising companies to extend the consumption of images in our daily life have been appropriated by artists and installed in gallery spaces. When viewed nearby or when walking around them, LED walls become in some way dysfunctional: The images fade, points and color distortions appear, and the spectacle of the machine interruputs our habitual viewing patterns. This article focuses on three recent works which disrupt immersive viewing regimes through what I call “hijacking” advanced LED technology. Lucy Raven (Tucson, AZ, USA), Demolition of a Wall (Album 2), 2022. Eija-Liisa Ahtila (Helsinki, Finland), Potentiality for Love, 2018. Marco Fusinato (Sidney, Australia), Desastres, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2022. These three artists use the sculptural and spectacular effect of freestanding LED walls to call attention to our habitual capitalist relation to LED technology. Through performative or narrative pieces, these artists deploy poetic and artistic effects to explore the politics of technological immersion in capitalist societies.

To dive into the history of the moving image necessarily involves diving into an archeology of media, from Portapak to HD cameras, from Bolex to I-Phones. Artists have often worked with medium specificities, and especially in the case of the moving image, as art historian René Berger notes in 1977: “The technoculture we have entered is no longer satisfied with traditional explanations; it brings out a type of creativity linked solely to technical transformations”1. For example, Franco-Peruvian experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder studied the mechanism of Bolex cameras to create films image by image, intertwining the shots and locations by leaving some images unexposed (Les Tournesols colorés, 1983, Quiproquo, 1992). She comes back to the unexposed images later, editing within the camera, exposing black parts by way of a very precise and exhausting manipulation of her camera’s mechanism. Lowder’s poetics of film interconnects with her way of playing with the mechanics of the Bolex, a poetics also visible in the scores-drawings she created at the same time in her notebooks. Another interesting example is Bridgit (2018) by Scottish artist Charlotte Prodger, filmed during a year between Glasgow where she lives and different parts of Scotland where she has worked, paying attention to travel and the in-between moments of life. While the I-Phone has duration limitations, the format allows for true spontaneity, which is crucial to this project based on friendship and self-introspection. Her relation to her I-Phone is, of course, part of the narrative.The attention given to media specificities has also been developed in the projection step by playing with monitors and real-time based films in gallery spaces since the 1960s. Monitors have often been displayed, included in sculptural elements, used in a similar way to props, and, in the case of Joan Jonas’ environments or Peter Campus’ installations, have become clearly part of the plot. A monitor is used to diffuse a film, but its materiality is often taken into account: Displayed, overturned, linked to other elements. As artist Vito Acconci pointed out: “Looked at from the viewpoint of art, furniture is analogous to sculpture. Just as furniture fits into a room and takes up floor space inside a house, sculpture fits into and takes up space in an art-exhibition area”2. When moved into an exhibition space, a monitor could express its sculptural dimension, as seen in Nam June Paik or Shigeko Kubota’s works. Since the 1990s, monitors have largely disappeared, substituted by video projectors which, in contrast, are deliberately obscured. Most of them are unnoticed, hung on the ceilings or in the back of gallery spaces to help keep the viewer’s focus on the videos and films themselves. New technologies have largely improved the quality of image definition and sound, immersing the viewer who forgets the device, as in the cinema. In recent years, however, this logic of disappearance has been interrupted by the introduction of freestanding LED walls into exhibition spaces and art installations. This artistic repurposing encourages us to think beyond the walls’ initial association with advertising, to look at them as technical apparatuses with their own specificities, and to reflect upon the ways we consume images in our daily life. This article focuses on artists who use LED walls to both explore their visual possibilities and to question their effects on viewers’ sensibilities. This technology is still quite expensive and difficult to afford for an artist, but the selection we made is very meaningful of this attempt of “hijacking” LED walls. Hijacking is a revolutionary terminology which echoes the historical context of the 1960–70s when artists used video as a way to infiltrate and overthrow the domination of television, to work against it, and to use social struggle strategies, as Anne-Marie Duguet (Duguet 1981) analyses in her book Video: la mémoire au poing3. Activism is an integral part of early video-art history and continues today in the way artists take ownership of capitalist technologies, such as LED walls and repurpose them into anti-capitalist statements. Facing ambiguity, artists, such as Hito Steyerl, explore military vocabulary to digest and hijack the logics of indoctrination of the society of the spectacle, as famously described by Guy Debord4. “Is a Museum as a Battlefield?” (2013), “The War According to ebay” (2010) are examples of Hito Steyerl videos titles which bring anti-capitalist issues through using very sophisticated technologies of images. To hijack LED walls, as we will see, is a way to take the control of these machines and dramatically change their direction, significantly similar to a hijacker that forcefully reroutes a vessel5.

1. Spectacle of De-Realization

LED wall technology was developed by advertising industries to increase the consumption of images in our daily life, to captivate the passer-by in a mall or on the street. Used for retail, sport, and media events, they offer high brightness, seamless images from any angle, both indoor and outdoor, and even in daylight. The technology was first used only for projections visible from a large distance, due to the large pixel pitch, but the pixels are now smaller and allow for new possibilities for inside use. While the first LED advertisement walls appeared in the 1990s, it took a long time before these displays were introduced in exhibition spaces as LED equipment, in contrast to video projection equipment, cannot be hidden. Another interesting aspect is that LED walls do not provide sound diffusion. When used in an installation, it is necessary to combine LED with a sound system in a specific installation, offering multiple opportunities to play with perception, movements, and sound spatialization.

Each technological device has its own specificities that artists like to explore, opening up unfolded fields, often in opposite directions from the ones developed by companies. If LED screens are usually placed at a distance to enhance their immersive effect, in exhibition spaces they tend instead to be installed in real proximity with the audience, allowing them to move closer and approach the backside of the illusion. In fact, it seems that artists prefer the electronic parts to remain visible, as the technology is almost never hidden. From a close distance, and walking around them, LED walls become in some way dysfunctional: The images fade, points and colour distortions appear, and the hypnotic relation to what is seen is always interrupted by the spectacle of the machine. A representative example is Philippe Parreno’s video No more reality (1991), which was shown on a monumental curved LED screen at the entrance of his exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere out of the world at Palais de Tokyo in 2013. The video inspired by Twin Peaks (1991) by David Lynch questions the intertwined relations between fiction and reality, following a group of children in a garden demonstrating against reality. Filmed in low resolution, the video is completely reinterpreted by the device, de-realizing the presence of the children, making it increasingly spectral, while the viewer passes the screen to continue through the exhibition. Parreno has used LED screens quite often, exploring their ability to offer intermittently immersion and distancing, such as at Fondation Pinault in Paris (2022), where he brought back to life the character of Ann Lee on a monumental LED wall, playing with its effects of magical appearance and disappearance with flickering lights. The vertical screen was welcoming the visage of Ann Lee, directly addressing the viewer in a deeply moving way before disappearing. However, rather than leaving the space empty, such as when a projection switches off, here the machine remained in the centre of the room, exposed as a sculptural element. The melancholic atmosphere of this project also reaches the machine, which is no longer a brilliant new technology, but a relic of a consumption-based world of thrown away images, voices, and technics.

In a similar way, Lucy Raven uses very precise visual effects and LED technology to revisit the American landscape, its labours and myths, and to explore our human conditions of perception and de-realization. She combines research on cinema’s prehistory of projection with advanced technologies, examining how those technological developments shape our perception of reality. She has experimented a considerable amount with the optical dimension of vision, for example, by separating the eyes in Curtains and coming back to the first historical 3D technology: The stereoscope. Dividing vision rather than joining the efforts of our optical potentialities breaks the rules that we are used to by opening up the visual field and diminishing our attentive concentration. The images are seen in a complex situation which places the viewer at a distance. Her recent work Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) (2022) (see Figure 1 and Figure 2) continues this approach but with a totally different use of technology.

Entering the space at WIELS Art Centre in Brussels, the viewer is immersed in a concrete and invasive soundscape (composed by Deantoni Parks), facing an aluminium bleacher installed in front of a freestanding LED wall. Short sequences are diffused, each beginning with a quiet view on a desert landscape in New Mexico. Next, sound and flashing light interrupts the stillness, and the detonation of explosives at a ballistics range extends its tremor to the exhibition space. The LED walls explode in a myriad of points, opening up the field of vision by using the LED’s pointillism as well as high speed camera revealing what human perception cannot see. Seventy thousand images per second were used to record the intensity and complexity of an explosion, and are then slowed down, offering an unseen perception of reality and inverting black and light. If the image is first interpreted as visual effect, we then discover that it is not. Nevertheless, revealing what is unseen does not bring us closer to the real, but rather makes the human construction of reality visible. Coming back to its technical trajectory grounds the perception of Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) in a non-human experience of nature. On both sides, shooting and projection, Lucy Raven uses image technologies to affect us through an orchestration of sensory effects. The pressure felt by the earth during an explosion extends its waves to our own inner bodies. Stoked by the sound and by the explosion of image, we feel the distress of a devastated land, which tragically fails its original name, “Socorro”. Meaning “aid” or “help”, this name was given in the 16th century by Spanish colonizers as a token of gratitude: As the Spaniards emerged from a very barren stretch of desert, native Piro Indians offered them food and water. Nowadays, this land is used for atomic bomb testings and hypersonic weapon research.

Lucy Raven graduated in sculpture and not in film studies, and even if she was influenced a considerable amount by films, such as “Blade Runner” and artist pioneers in experimental video, such as Joan Jonas, James Benning or Michael Snow, her ambition was to work within real space, in a post-medium condition where film and sculpture are rendered fluid, but also mixed with scenographic issues. Exhibiting her films is taking part of the construction of the narrative, and thinking and designing how and where the public will sit to look at it is part of the work itself. If receiving image and sound is today as normal as accessing water and electricity, as Lucy Raven notes in a conversation with Barbara London6, by interrupting it, the artist tries to trouble habitual passive viewing. Since the beginning of video art, the issue of making the viewer more active by creating environments has been prominent. For example, in her analysis of Michael Snow’s installation Two Sides to Every Story, Kate Mondloch argues that the show Projected Images in Minneapolis Walker Art Gallery in 1974 offered an experimental site for installations problematizing relations between screen and space. Regina Cornwell argues in a similar direction that further supports our analysis of Lucy Raven’s work: “Environmental or installation media work, by calling attention to the ‘projective situation’, automatically rendered their spectators engaged participants and, just as proposed by the European theorists associated with Film as Film, she assumed that this condition is necessarily a progressive critical intervention”7. The use of LED walls contributes to this critical strategy as it brings a consumerist model of receiving images inside an art space, troubling the frontiers between two worlds which are normally completely discrete, and offering the viewer a possibility to have a distance with his own way of seeing. Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) is a very immersive film, with spectacular images and sounds, but seen from this LED wall, it keeps the viewer awake, making him/her wonder about the origins of what is perceived, on their ambiguous fascination for the sublime and for buried levels of understanding images: Stories about appropriation of lands, domination of man over nature, etc. It associates a process of abstraction from the real, questioning what is perceived, what is blurred, and what is left from human consumption of lands, but the installation also activates a considerable amount of sensations and emotions by troubling vision and influencing viewers’ bodies in the space. Far away from the myth of an outside and virgin land, Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) shares a contrasted reality of a desert which bears the trace of multiples stories, even if the most recent ones threaten to erase the others.

2. Overwhelmed

The omnipresence of screens in our everyday life, from private homes to public spaces, provokes a visual hypertension and general exhaustion. Entering the Australian pavilion in Venice in 2022 by Marco Fusinato offered a shock, but also a kind of logical continuity of our urban perceptions (see Figure 3). A giant freestanding floor-to-ceiling LED wall was standing in the space, showing images of disaster, and a wall of amplifiers (six 100-watt full stacks) continuously diffused an electronic noise performed by the artist, sited in a corner, alone with his guitar. He had spent hours and hours during the very long Australian lockdown sourcing them on the internet via a stream of words, selecting them by looking for ambiguity and tension in the associations. Then, he shared this personal relationship with the audience every day by the coming of the biennale to improvise in front of the images with an experimental noise. The atmosphere was dark, excessive, violent, but also hypnotic and alive, which is important for the artist who tries to activate the audience by sharing a pulse and scale. In this endless parade of dark images of history, gestures of anger and revolt mingle with expressions of suffering, giving free rein to the re-appropriation and interpretation of an archive that is placed back into play every day by the presence of visitors invited to share a sound and visual intensity with the artist. The LED was precisely chosen by Marco Fusinato as an “industry standard for stadium acts”, and “opposed to, say, using a video projector or a screen”8. Working between experimental music and visual art, both on stage and in galleries, Marco Fusinato is quite considerably concerned with the hierarchies existing between different spheres of art, and often mixes art history into his experimental pieces. DESASTRES directly quotes Goya’s famous prints, and many other references which we see occasionally full-frame, but often in a mist produced by the juxtaposition of images, fragmentation, and the technical qualities of the LED screen. We are overlooked by the dispositif, bombarded by images, struck by nearly unbearable slabs of noise, in a dramatic tension that evokes the intimidation and mental coercion provoked through the huge LED screens used in the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, as recently occurred in China. The industry is developing these huge technical devices to enhance psychologic manipulation, from individual desires to political propaganda. Fusinato’s use of LED screens is not neutral; it is a deliberate choice to install ambiguity, to allow the viewer not only to be overwhelmed by the situation, but also to feel free to move, to question one’s perceptions, and to avoid being manipulated. A document at the exit of the pavilion implies that this strategy worked well: On a handwritten note, the artist answered questions received everyday from the visitors. Present in the performance but without communicating, immersed in a visual and sonic trance that is between ordeal and ecstasy, Fusinato, nevertheless, felt the need to have a direct relationship with the wide audience of the Venice Biennale by offering these answers. Indeed, after feeling deeply moved by DESASTRES, the viewer usually wants to move closer to the artist’s motivations, to approach him playing guitar, to look at the oil painting hung on a wall, to observe others’ immersion, and to understand the relation between the projected images and the sound performance. While the monumental projection first imposed a distanced and passive viewing relation, the viewer eventually emerges from the state of overwhelm and feels free to move, to question, and to express his/her emotions.

3. An Ecology of Proximity

Since the 1990s, Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila has developed multiple screen installations, initially inspired by street billboards in the United States, which moved her to think about expanding forms of moving image display. The anecdote is interesting here since it communicates something about the fertile dialogue of artists with electronic devices and commercial display techniques, questioning the way we perceive images in our daily life, from intimate relations with domestic screens to passive consumption in public spaces. By manipulating immersive technologies, and by working with space to create environments, artists engage these issues. Eija-Liisa Ahtila usually writes scripts, collaborating with actors and film production crews, but the films themselves are exhibition based: They include the gallery spaces in their mise-en-scène, use screens, walls, windows, rails, including what is between images, to produce a specific atmosphere for each work. Her films clearly reject the domination of human perception and try to re-orchestrate the diversity of living and non-living realities. By welcoming coincidences and natural light, Ahtila takes an interest in mirroring where and how images come from, while encouraging the viewer to find his/her own path within the narrative’s expansive possibilities. Time is also a main issue of Ahtila’s work, influenced by Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll thinking on human and non-human umwelt9, and she explores multi-screen installations as a philosophical and political device to express parallel words.

Her most recent works explore human perception, rejecting situations which imply domination over nature. Examples range from Ecology of Drama, an immersive four-screen installation with a voice-over, which inspires the viewer to consider his/her relationship to the images and to his/her own position, to Horizontal, an eight-projector installation, made entirely without language. Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s earlier works tended to have a strong narrative and to play precisely with words. In Horizontal and Potentiality for Love, both of which focus on the necessity of a paradigm shift to dispose of anthropocentrism, she decided not to use language, which has served humans as a tool of domination. Potentiality for Love10 is composed of two tables with attached “monitor/mirrors,” a vertical single channel projection, and an angular video sculpture of twenty-two DIP LED modules (see Figure 4 and Figure 5). This complex environment, deeply influenced by eco-feminism, questions how humans relate to feeling, personal identity, and the animal realm. Inspired by her reading of Elisabeth de Fontenay, Eija-Liisa Ahtila creates tricks that play with our expectations: A standing chimpanzee is filmed from the back, turning around from time to time but never as a reaction to our presence. On the research tables, which invite the viewer to take part as in an interactive piece, the chimpanzee arm engages the viewer to move accordingly, to feel the connection between human and animal. Troubled by this relation of sharing with a non-human, he/she is then attracted by a freestanding LED wall, composing a fragmented image with different elements. We are projected in outer space, far away from the planet Earth and its gravity, in an infinite sky. From this infinity of obscurity and stars, a body enters our vision, comes closer, reaching us with a smiley face and a t-shirt with a “LOVE” message. Looking frankly at us and making us a sign, the women comes into our space as she was in presence. However, even as she resembles us, she is also foreign to us, belonging to another dimension, even more distant than the one where the chimpanzee stands. This scene may be a dream or an omen; the atmosphere incorporates some science fiction elements, and sticks strongly in the mind. The “Love” message, smiling face, and welcoming sign are engaging and do not directly suggest anything negative. Nevertheless, we feel troubled and alone in Potentiality for Love, more distanced than ever from others.

The woman’s body levitates in a decontextualized space, emerging out of the LED walls while moving closer, in a fragmented atmosphere. Similar to the inaugural scene of Persona from Bergman, when the boy tries to reach his mother, a famous actress, and is rejected by the screen of her projected image, in Potentiality for Love the presence is leading to disappearance and leaves us in a state of loneliness. The love message floats with no physical contact, no hug, no caress, in a disembodied world. The LED lights reinforce this effect as the images become more pixilated as we move closer, reinforcing the frustration. Eija-Liisa Ahtila had experienced LED walls in a previous exhibition and knew precisely their effects. She arranged two benches in the gallery space to offer two visions, one from afar, and one from close, where we see “this huge electric body formed by the LED machinery-the image would be gone and replaced by electric modules forming the LED sculpture”11. The LED wall assemblage also gives the impression that some parts of the image are missing, that we are left behind, similar to the time when we try to return to older memories. The starting point of this film is a personal memory of the artist, an engram (memory trace) which brings back a resurgence of an infantile scene of her mother taking her in her arm and disappearing as an image. The goal was then to create an artwork metamorphosing “a rendering of a memory image to a moving image sculpture”. In the construction of the personal identity, this engram refers to the Lacanian mirror stage, in which the baby progressively feels the difference between his own body and her/his mother’s. This act of separation, central to the occidental conception of subjectivity, is the foundation to our forms of living and knowledge, leading to the dominating understanding that what we look at from a distance is not us. However, in this moment of personal construction, the possibility for love also occurs: Possibility for the love of others, for care, for empathy. Being separated is how we can learn to feel from the outside, to collaborate with other modes of sensibility, to create relations without domination. Facing our differences and specificities, we can explore the fascinating paths that move from ourselves to others, from human conditions of perception to non-human modes of being in presence. When the mother moves closer to the camera, she opens her arms and lap, and “her inviting gesture is what the children reacts on”. The mise-en-scene clearly points to the responsibility from the already present human to engage with new ones in a love mode in order to make them feel in return. Occasions of being moved by others, human and non-human, are quite rare today, and very precious, which is why they tend to be engraved in our memories. Even if memory is often mixed with a feeling of loss, of absence, in a similar way to in this engram, it also suggests how we can be connected to other temporalities and livings. Returning to them and exploring how this potentiality is inscribed in everyone is a very encouraging reflexive gesture.

As we move closer to the LED wall, we are struck by the machine, by the technological location where the image comes from, but also dazzled by the luminescent dots. We are troubled, as when the chimpanzee looks at us, as it asks us to return to these inaugural memories. There is some similarity with Rosa Barba’s installations where she disrupts cinema technologies by playing with fragmentation and expansion between cameras, projectors, and screens. In both cases, working with the technologies of the image, whether older or newer ones, serves as a way to interrupt ways of looking and living. Rosa Barba notes: “The significance of these interventions in the operation of the machines is that they may break the grip of utilitarian and functional definitions of the world and introduce new possibilities and shades of meaning and experience” (Barba 2021). Accordingly, Eija-Liisa Ahtila distorts the utilitarian relation to LED walls, removing them from their capitalist uses and desires and re-appropriating them to create an ecology of proximity. Potentiality for Love engages the viewer to reckon with the instrumentalization of emotions that the t-shirt emphasizes, and to explore his/her capacity to experience the world by being both separated and bound. To move closer to the LED, one loses the image to achieve the physical experience of lights and colours, and then moves forward, in an hypnotic movement. Projecting in a mental space full of desires and questions without the reassurance of a clear narrative, this installation is attractive and immersive, but also full of frustration. This double movement is very common in Ahtlia’s works, using spatialization to create this both mental and physical situation, as well described by Mieke Bal: “We sit or stand, physically unable to remain abstract and distant. Whatever our critical reflections this dispositif intimates and makes us experience, we cannot disentangle ourselves from what we critique”12 (Bal 2013).

4. Hijacking and Emancipating the Machine

Talking about immersion, one thinks immediately of augmented reality, 3D, or using virtual reality headsets, such as those we see increasingly often in exhibitions. LED walls have an important advantage over these technological devices as they are not individual: Immersion is collectively addressed, and visual effects are noticeable from different points of view. Perhaps unsurprisingly, LED walls are very popular and mostly unnoticed in urban environments, malls, and stadiums. Deciding to use LED walls in an artistic project is not easy, as the technology is thoroughly imbricated in this capitalist relation to images. As we have seen in the examples of Lucy Raven’s Demolition of a Wall (Album 2), Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Potentiality for Love, and Marco Fusinato’s Desastres, one recurrent way that artists work with and disrupt LED walls is to show the device and its technology, keeping the space around the walls open and the electric wires visible, even if covered by dust or plaster from the gallery walls13. To expose a device when using it often seems a good way to help the viewer to become an active agent of his/her perception, to be conscious of how easy it is to manipulate one’s desires, emotions, ways of seeing and thinking through immersive technologies. However, distancing may also occur in immersion, in a back and forth movement associating feeling and reasoning. Experiencing an artwork engages different senses, triggers multiple reactions, and a vast range of desires. As we have seen in the series of works explored above, but also in many others, LED walls may be hijacked and brought in an artistic sphere, where meanings become open, consciousness emancipated from normative consumption models, and narrative built through complexity, poetics, and ambiguity. This important artistic gesture provides a way of emancipating the machine from its origin, building a new relation to LED walls by giving them high visual and conceptual abilities imaginatively freed from simplicity and dogmatism, consumption and domination. By using LED walls, artists completely reverse our relation to this technology, and, in the process, extend the porosity between aesthetic emotions and everyday life.