Yet another art form?

The Journal des Arts article, “Le mapping, entre spectacle et forme d’art”, is thus published in 2020, i.e. seventeen years after the first video mapping work we have identified in France (2003). The parallel with the history of cinema is instructive. The famous essay by Ricciotto Canudo “The birth of a sixth art” was released in 1911: sixteen years after the date considered to be the invention of the cinematograph (1895). From the very beginning, video mapping has shown a willingness to draw on existing domains: VJing, contemporary arts, large-scale light and ‘son et lumière’ scenographies — in the same way as the cinematograph took over from cabarets, fairgrounds and attractions, then theatres. It draws clear inspiration from several arts: cinema but also architecture, music, design, graphic design… Lastly, institutional video mapping has come into being over the last few years alongside projections on monuments, characterised by a certain ‘façadism’. With regard to the dichotomies — between art and spectacle, art and commerce, art and engineering, art and media — with which video mapping confronts us, in the same vein as early cinema, drawing a parallel between them may be of interest.

And what about another look at the chronology? The year 2023, for video mapping, would correspond to 1915 for cinema: cinematography was 20 years old, and its audience had gradually come to understand that a film was not just a series of conjuring tricks or more or less emotional sketches, without any internal structure. This audience may be compared to those expressing a certain ennui with video mapping today, in the face of repeated ploys to impress (the so-called ‘wow effect’): hyperrealistic dragons emerging from a window and breathing fire (like a train arriving at a station), ivy which rapidly coils around a wall, the unexplained collapse and disappearance of an entire façade. 1915 is a reference year in the history of cinema: it saw the release of The Birth of a Nation by David W. Griffith and The Cheat by Cecil B. De Mille. These two films are famous for having focused on making film-makers, production studios and audiences aware of the means of expression and storey-telling that are specific to cinema (editing, close-ups, variation of camera angles, reverse angles, etc.), thus fostering the creation of something other than an illusionary spectacle: a way of making sense, a narrative.

Of course, we should not exaggerate the comparison between early cinema and the mapping of today. The context of the emergence of cinema among the arts is very different from that of video mapping currently. Moreover, there is no certainty that mapping has become so institutionalised that it will benefit, in the long term, from a specific venue for its diffusion, just like cinemas (movie theatres) in the 1910s. The reason for this is inherent to video mapping, a non-screen-based audiovisual experience: it is an animated image designed according to an uneven projection surface, the shape of which may vary (and that is its strength).