Beyond The Spectacle

The spectators sitting motionless in front of the screen is a portrait of the society of the spectacle by Guy Debord,about who has been deeply influenced by the mass media since the 1960 s.As a response to this phenomenon,Moving image art has shown rebellion against the mass media’s narrative hegemonic with many new narrative methods different from cinema and television since it emerged in the western Video art movement in the 1960 s,and is experiencing after three periods of Experimental film,Video art and New media in art,it has become an individual art form in contemporary art with its unique narrative methods.However,in the treatises that discuss the narrative experiment in Moving image art,researchers often out off its native sociocultural context of reforming the media narrative hegemony,and consider this experiment in narrative method purely as an narrative innovation of cinema and television or a response to new media in technology,neglect its criticism of the media narrative hegemony,so that the public’s understanding of Moving image art is still simply focus on the impression of pioneering and experiments.This dissertation focuses on the narrative methods of Moving image art which are different from the cinema and television,puts the experiment of narrative in a thinking of mass media,and tests the narrative experiment of Moving image art on different levels from the text and the spectator’s participation in the narrative activities,and at the same time seeks more new methods for the image production under this new digital media.In terms of the content of the Moving image art,from three aspects,it breaks the appearance of the world which is stereotyped by the traditional narrative.In the first place,the diversity of the real world is released by reshaping the world’s appearance in the traditional narratives;in the second place,the stereotyped impression of time for the new things must in place of the old things also has been replaced by the negative still time in the Moving image art;Finally,Moving image art discarded the goal in life set by the society of spectacle through giving up character’s motivation,and then,provided another template of the world beyond the portrait of mass media.In terms of spectator participation in narrative activities,Moving image art also recovered the spectator’s perception and creativity through the activation of body and mind.It created a group of idle spectator first,changed the people’s habit of sitting in their seats and grasping the world visually;and then,inspired spectators to participate in the organization and writing of narrative text.This changed how spectators receive information and made spectators can swap identities with artists,realized the role shift from viewer to creator.So,to sum up,the narrative experiment in Moving image art can not be simply seen as a kind of objection of the cinema and television’s narrative method,it’s not a machine to destroy the narrative,nor to create another "anti-narrative" spectacle on the opposite side of the existing media spectator,but through the double transformation of the images and the spectators,to change the appearance of the world that is stereotyped by the mass media narrative,so that the images from the screen no longer just an object being viewed,but turn themselves into a tool for creating in the hands of the spectators.Finally,spectators can transform themselves while going beyond the media spectacle’s narrative.