In this thesis, I explore the experience of disorientation within projective moving image installations as informed by the emergence of queer affects in the relatively conventional space of art galleries and museums. Despite limited forays into this field, the literature on the uses of projection in a contemporary art context indicates this experience as disorientating. Nevertheless, current research stops short of providing evidence regarding what it means to be disorientated in an art context and exploring possible forms of materialising this experience in academic writing. Consequently, the research question posed in this thesis is: How can disorientation facilitate an understanding of queer affective experiences within projective moving image installations? To investigate this question, I employed a queer phenomenological and autoethnographic methodology to explore these fleeting disorientated moments. This is to account for an analysis that considers elements such as first-person voice, self-narration, and autobiographical notes as queer methods appropriate
to approaching disorientation as a queer affective experience.
This thesis is designed as a multiple case study, composed of an experimental critical analysis of six artworks or exhibitions in which disorientation was a direct result of my experiences in the art galleries. The first part of each analytical chapter is composed of an affective orientated description of my live encounters with the case studies, intended to capture the disorientated moments via self-narration. The second part integrates description and theory to analyse the relationships between disorientation and the queer affects that emerged in the encounters with the artworks. These chapters are organised around the three core experiences that result in disorientation described by Sara Ahmed (2006), called zooming in, becoming an object, and disturbing the others, and explore the key concepts of camp, cruising and besideness that are specifically related to each of the case studies.
My original contribution to knowledge in the field of moving image art criticism is a demonstration that projective moving image installations are disorientation devices due to the magnetising aspects of projected moving images, which lead the bodies in the gallery to gather around whilst experiencing fleeting moments of disorientation that destabilise binaries used to describe the experience in the gallery, such as wandering and absorption.
Consequently, this process is characterised as a queer affective experience informed by a fluid movement between queer kinaesthetic engagements and the histories and sedimentations of bodies.