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The goal of this article is to discuss and analyse viewer-sensing artworks and the reversed situation that occurs in the exhibition space when artworks 'look' at the viewers or sense them by other means. This helps answer the following questions: do we have here a new spectator paradigm in which the artwork is active and no longer simply an object under observation? Can we talk about the 'gaze' of the artwork? To answer these questions I firstly examine the topics of machine vision, computer vision, biovision and the evolution of vision. Dividing interactive artworks into four categories (distant, contact, bio-based/symbiotic and chance-based interaction) enables me to illustrate the developments in feedback systems which became evident in recent decades. These categories exemplify how the artwork's 'gaze' approaches the body of the viewer until it penetrates its surface and reaches 'under the skin'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early American video history is often characterized as difficult and heterogeneous, and this is in part due to the conflicting theoretical approaches to the notion of 'medium'. In early 1970s New York, there were two major strands of discourse on video: one saw and described video through a techno-utopian lens based on Marshall McLuhan's media theories, and the other, still steeped in the legacies of Clement Greenberg, treated video as though it was a static, flat and plastic medium. Neither was able to adequately articulate video's unique aesthetics, but they nonetheless dominated the American language of video during the early 1970s. These opposing views on video eventually came to a head in 1974 at the Open Circuits conference at the Museum of Modern Art, where practitioners of early video, such as Frank Gillette and Douglas Davis, faced hostility from other artists and critics such as John Baldessari and Robert Pincus-Witten. They clashed around the concept of 'medium', with each side accusing the other of being formalist, and these dialogues spill out onto various publications throughout the same year. The article will argue that this conflict lies at the root of American video art's difficulty with articulating its own history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the ways authors Philip Roth, Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko have explored reanimated ghost in their novels. Description of the physical rendering of dead into life; Theme of the authors' novels; Influence of cultural history on the writings of three authors.