Between Now and Other Places: Intermedia Installations as Spatio-Temporal Facilitators of Affect

This chapter examines how the juxtaposition of visual methods in intermedia art exhibitions enhances affect in its actual and virtual dimension within the time–space of their installations based on Brian Massumi’s ideas of virtual synthesis within the dynamics of affect. The discussion aims to generate a web of correspondences through a close reading of intermedia installations with a filmic element experienced in situ in major exhibitions in the early 2020s. The exhibition Heidi Bucher: Metamorphosen at Haus der Kunst in Munich (2021–22) provides a frame of reference as it creates an immensely affective correlation of different haptic realities through the juxtaposition of Bucher’s sculptural latex rooms with films documenting her performative skinning of architectural spaces. Francis Alÿs’s exhibition The Nature of the Game shown at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), Alfredo Jaar’s installation 06.01.2020 18.39 and Kandis Williams’s video installation Death of A., the latter two presented at the Whitney Biennial 2022, provide further case studies. The argument refers to theories of affect, of filmic time including Gilles Deleuze’s crystal image and Raymond Bellour’s concept of l’entre-image, Agnes Pethő’s observations on intermediality, Laura U. Marks’s concept of “haptic visuality” within the filmic image, Rosalind Krauss’s “post-medium condition” and Giuliana Bruno’s consideration of projection and its “environment of relationality” (2022, 12) in the context of filmic art installations.