Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation - Restricted Access (SIA Only)

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Contemporary Art

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how artists have constructed structures of surveillance and observation among audiences, artworks, and exhibitions through the evolving technologies of the screen. From CRTs (Cathode Ray Tubes) to flat panels and LED mesh screens, the screen has continually reconfigured both the media environment and the conditions of exhibition, thereby transforming the modes of perception and visual experience of audiences.

As Jonathan Crary argues in Techniques of the Observer (1990), seeing is not a universal capacity but a historically regulated practice shaped by technologies and institutions. In this sense, the screen functions not merely as a medium of transmission but as a device that produces specific modes of observation and particular kinds of observers. Building on this critical awareness, the study defines the screen not as a mere visual medium but as a key device that organises the conditions of observation and attention, and examines how technological transformations, in conjunction with exhibition environments, have led to shifts in the structure of the gaze.

Rather than reducing technological development to artistic progress, the dissertation foregrounds the specific exhibition conditions and modes of audience experience that emerge through each shift in screen media. In doing so, it demonstrates how the transformations of screen technologies have reconstituted the conditions of observation, surveillance, voyeurism, and the gaze in contemporary exhibitions, and proposes a new perspective for video art studies that integrates technological change with the theorisation of visuality and the gaze.

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