Blog - Lumlux Art

1 Sep 2026 Cinema Escaping Into the

Cinema Escaping Into the Museum

Isaac Julien rarely asks us to watch a film on one screen.

His installations distribute moving images across several screens so that editing begins to happen spatially as well as temporally. A character may disappear from one image and appear somewhere else in the room. Two events can run simultaneously. The viewer has to decide where to look.

Museum Dreams, currently at gres art 671 in Bergamo until 4 October 2026, brings together five large-scale installations spanning more than two decades of Julien’s work, including Once Again… (Statues Never Die) and Lina Bo Bardi: A Marvellous Entanglement.

What changes for me in multi-screen cinema is the loss of the perfect edit.

In an ordinary film the director controls exactly which image follows another.

In an installation, the spectator can look away.

Another screen can become more interesting.

Two sequences can accidentally combine because of where you happen to be standing.

That sounds like a loss of control, but it creates another kind of authorship.

The filmmaker composes possibilities rather than one compulsory sequence.

It has something in common with electronic performance.

A set of carefully prepared elements exists, but their relationship becomes partly dependent on space, timing and attention.

Cinema stops being only something projected in front of us.

It becomes architecture we move through.

https://gresart671.org/en/2026/04/10/isaac-julien-museum-dreams/

#IsaacJulien #VideoInstallation #MovingImage #ExpandedCinema

Cinema Escaping Into the Museum gres art 671 ISAAC JULIEN gres art 671 Isaac Julien rarely asks us to watch a film on one screen. His installations distribute moving images across several screens so that editing begins to happ…

30 Aug 2026 Expanded Cinema

A Film Screening Became a Light Show

In the late 1950s, Jordan Belson worked with composer Henry Jacobs on the Vortex Concerts at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium. Rather than projecting a conventional film onto one rectangular screen, they used the planetarium environment for combinations of abstract imagery, electronic music and spatial projection. The Center for Visual Music considers the Vortex events important precursors to expanded cinema.

This feels remarkably close to contemporary audiovisual performance.

The audience was no longer simply looking forward.

Images could occupy the dome and surround the listener while electronic sound transformed the same space acoustically.

That changes what editing means.

In ordinary film, one image replaces another in time.

Inside an immersive projection environment, several images can coexist in different parts of the viewer’s field of vision.

The audience decides where the cut happens by turning its head.

Modern projection mapping, VJ software and immersive installations have made these techniques technically easier.

Belson’s work is useful because it reminds us that immersive media did not begin with powerful projectors.

It began with the desire to escape the rectangle.

https://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Belson/

#JordanBelson #ExpandedCinema #VisualMusic #LiveVisuals

A Film Screening Became a Light Show centerforvisualmusic.org Jordan Belson In the late 1950s, Jordan Belson worked with composer Henry Jacobs on the Vortex Concerts at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium. Rather than...

26 Aug 2026 Culture Before Video Oskar

VJ Culture Before Video

Oskar Fischinger was experimenting with multiple projected images before electronic video existed.

During the 1920s, his Raumlichtmusik performances used several film and slide projectors simultaneously to create abstract moving environments. Elsewhere he explored single-frame animation, scratching directly onto film and even experiments in drawn optical sound.

This is where experimental-film history begins to overlap surprisingly well with modern VJ culture.

A contemporary VJ can run several video layers, blend them, map them onto architecture and synchronise them with music in realtime. Fischinger had none of that digital flexibility. Every additional projector was another physical machine, another film path and another alignment problem.

Yet the artistic question was already there.

Why should cinema consist of one rectangular image directly in front of a seated audience?

Once several projections begin occupying space, the screen stops being only a window. Light itself becomes material.

Fischinger later became famous for tightly synchronised abstract animation, but I find these earlier multiple-projection experiments even more interesting today.

The technology is obsolete.

The idea is not.

A century later, Resolume, projection mapping and immersive audiovisual performances are still exploring what happens when moving images escape from a single screen.

https://centerforvisualmusic.org/Fischinger/

#OskarFischinger #VisualMusic #ExpandedCinema #VJCulture

VJ Culture Before Video centerforvisualmusic.org Fischinger - CVM pages Oskar Fischinger was experimenting with multiple projected images before electronic video existed. During the 1920s, his Raumlichtmusik...

26 Aug 2026 Expanded Cinema

When Film Invades the Room

Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Cloud of Unknowing begins as moving image but refuses to remain simply a film on a wall. Created for the Singapore Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, it was filmed inside a public housing block shortly before demolition. Eight characters encounter different manifestations of a mysterious cloud, with references ranging across Eastern and Western art history.

But the installation extends beyond the image.

Multiple screens, multichannel audio, theatrical lighting and smoke transform the viewing space itself. The cloud can effectively leave the projected world and appear to enter the room occupied by the audience.

That interests me from a VJ and expanded-cinema perspective.

Projection normally creates a clear border: reality here, image there.

Smoke destroys that certainty because projected light suddenly has volume. A beam that was invisible in the air becomes a physical-looking object.

The simplest atmospheric effect can therefore change the grammar of cinema.

The image stops being something we look at.

For a moment, we are standing inside it.

https://www.chanel.com/us/chanel-next-prize/ho-tzu-nyen/

#HoTzuNyen #ExperimentalFilm #VideoInstallation #ExpandedCinema

When Film Invades the Room chanel.com Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Cloud of Unknowing begins as moving image but refuses to remain simply a film on a wall. Created for the Singapore Pavilion at...

25 Aug 2026 Cinema Escaping the Rectangle

Cinema Escaping the Rectangle

Toshio Matsumoto did not limit experimental film to unusual images inside a conventional cinema screen. During the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked with expanded cinema, questioning what his retrospective material describes as the standard “one projector, one screen” relationship between film and audience. For My Crushed Right Eye from 1968 could be presented with three simultaneous projections, while Space Projection Ako in 1970 pushed the idea further into spatial presentation.

This interests me much more from a VJ perspective than simply synchronising a video to music.

Once several projections occupy a space, editing no longer happens only in time. It happens across walls, screens and the viewer’s field of vision.

The audience effectively performs part of the edit by deciding where to look.

Modern projection mapping and realtime visuals have access to technology Matsumoto could never have imagined, yet the underlying question remains surprisingly current:

Why should a moving image stay inside one rectangle?

The moment that rectangle disappears, cinema begins behaving like architecture.

https://www.imageforum.co.jp/matsumototoshio/

#ToshioMatsumoto #ExpandedCinema #ExperimentalFilm #LiveVisuals

Cinema Escaping the Rectangle ??????? ??????????????????-??????? ??????? ??????????????????-??????? ???????? ??????????????????-????????2017?12??????????????????????