What are the circumstances in which video mapping appears?

The proliferation of screens

Experiments with light projection and even with the projection of images onto something other than screens, were conducted long before the dawn of the 21st century. Without going as far back as ancient shadow theatres (the first shadow ‘shows’ took shape, by all accounts, on uneven surfaces), we might consider the phantasmagoria of Etienne-Gaspard Robert (alias Robertson) in the early 19th century, which were ‘lively’ and immersive in nature. Using his refined version of the magic lantern (the ‘Fantascope’), Robertson projected images onto the side walls of the theatre and among the spectators, on wax masks and clouds of smoke. Another example, from a more recent century: between 1890 and 1895, the dancer Loïe Fuller inaugurates a spectacular new device: she dances between filament lamps fitted with parabolic reflectors, in front of which multi-coloured glass discs rotate. These colours, projected onto the folds of her white dress, highlight the volume and movements. And of course, as we move further through the iron age of mapping — which this Loïe Fuller spectacle began, to some extent —, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between these non-screen projection experiments and what we would now call ‘video mapping’: ‘Volux’ and ‘Topoprojections’ by Hans-Walter Müller are perfect examples of this.

But firstly: for an artistic practice and/or spectacle to be considered a non-screen projection, the screen as we perceive it nowadays would have to exist and its use would need to be widespread. Now, the word ‘screen’ was late to adopt the contemporary meaning of “medium dedicated to the projection or diffusion of images”, which clearly reflects the secondary, or even dispensable nature of this accessory, from the perspective of the first magic lantern artists. As shown in 19th-century etchings, the magic lantern was not necessarily used on a ‘screen’ — and certain engravers from that time took pains to highlight the folds of the sheets onto which the images were projected.

The 2000s were also a cultural context where screens began to proliferate, everywhere, on both a collective (advertising and information screens, signage, etc.) but also and above all individual scale (PCs, tablets, smartphones). It was against this background that video mapping made its breakthrough and really began to explode, by contrast — which explains its identification by artists and the public, and its rise: unlike other forms of contemporary audiovisual expression, video mapping is an animated image projected onto something other than a screen. The emergence of criticism of screens as a barrier between us and the world, between each of us and the surrounding physical and social reality, in all likelihood boosted the consideration and recognition of video mapping.

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