Attention and Distraction: On the Aesthetic Experience of Video Installation Art

This article aims to examine the interrelationship between attention and distraction in the reception of video installation art, a genre which is commonly associated with "immersion" and an intensified feeling of presence in the discourses on new media art and installation art. This tends to veil the fact that behaviour of many visitors is characterised by a certain restlessness and distraction. The article suggests that, in hat, in contradistinction to traditional disciplines of art like painting and sculpture, video installations seem to stimulate a "reception in distraction" (Walter Benjamin) that is at odds with the ideal of a reception in concentration that governs institutions fine art as well aesthetic theory. It intends to demonstrate how the experience of vide installation art can only be understood by recognising that the close connections between, on the one hand, video art and, other cultural formations of television, film and computers have fundamentally re-configured "aesthetic experience."