Projected presence: Revisiting the cinema object of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Paradise Institute

This article examines how the blurred boundaries of cinema and the art gallery centre the spectator in a participatory and destabilizing aesthetic experience. Using Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s iconic The Paradise Institute (2001) installation, the article performs a material analysis of the cinematic and gallery conventions that frame spectatorship. By creating moments of disrupted recognition, the installation produces a tension between conventional expectations and the viewer’s individual memory. These physical and mental experiential ‘gaps’ must then be filled by the spectator in order to understand and engage with the artwork. It is a process that prompts an active form of engagement that can no longer rely on the habitual conventions of the exhibition environment and force the viewer to develop new forms of engagement with the artwork, the exhibition space and with other viewers. Drawing together theory and practice, this author outlines the ways that the artists use spectatorship itself as a creative material.