Installations – and the Life of Image

ABSTRACT – The paper asks whether we can vindicate a sense of installation art beyond ‘experience economy’ (Foster) and any ‘prescriptive approach to art’ (Bishop). The advent of social practice in art (under names as relational aesthetics, new public art etc) marks a move toward a reconsideration of the productive and receptive terms on which the artwork occurs. I suggest an analysis of installation art experience not reduced to context awareness or environmental feeling. I wish to argue for the benefits of applying Bernard Stiegler’s idea of ‘technological individuation’ to installation works and Theodor Adorno’s model of ‘image-experience’ as a technical and evaluative-mimetic experience of the energy contained in an artwork to last generation of multimedia installations Where organic life and technological life can merge and give way to a new ‘eloquence’ of art, through dischronia and distraction.