Affecting the Audience: Anthony Discenza, Aurélien Froment, and Dora García

The three works selected for Affecting the Audience: Anthony Discenza, Aurélien Froment, and Dora García affect the audience directly or psychologically—they emphasize the construction of images and effects as a fundamental experience in the cultural domain: Discenza’s A Viewing (The Effect) immerses the visitor in a seductive acoustic environment as he compiles a series of fragments of text found online through a Google search, all of which include the specific phrase “and the effect is,” into a single narration read aloud by a professional speaker; Froment’s film Pulmo Marina consists of a single shot of a jellyfish in an aquarium, with a voiceover that draws attention to the conditions of display; and García addresses the audience as the subject in Instant Narrative, as performers write a continuous narrative about visitors in real time that is projected within the same space.

The third season of UMMA’s new media exhibitions, guest curated by Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, will focus on the notion of performativity in contemporary art. Affecting the Audience: Anthony Discenza, Aurélien Froment, and Dora García is the second of three exhibitions presented in the upcoming season.