Article released: Wednesday, 16 April, 2008

Jill Bennett’s T-Visionarium: A User’s Guide is a comprehensive analysis of the ground-breaking T-Visionarium media art project developed by Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel at the iCinema Centre, Sydney, in collaboration with ZKM, Karlsruhe. It reveals how this immersive interactive environment generates new insights into the workings and consumption of televisual media, extending the boundaries of both art and media studies.

Using contemporary theory to analyse gesture and emotion in art and media, Jill Bennett’s text explores the dynamics of new media narratives, demonstrating how both TV and media art operate in a transnarrative dimension where media images take on their own life. Situating T-Visionarium in terms of wider cultural shifts, the book is a ‘user’s guide’, both to T-Visionarium, and to screen culture in general.

Jill Bennett is Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, and Associate Dean (Research) at the College of Fine Arts.

What others have said about T-Visionarium: A User’s Guide

Jill Bennett’s ‘guide’ to the kinds of discoveries possible in the complex space created by T-Visionarium opens up questions about what media art can do. Drawing in particular on knowledge of the televisual genre of forensic detection, and of affect and gesture, Bennett traces the lineaments of T-Visionarium, with unpredictable and often unimaginable results.

Associate Professor Anna Gibbs, School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney