From the Simulacral Head to the Everyday Field: The Media Turn and Affective Mechanism in Tony Oursler's Video Installations

Abstract

This paper examines the development of Tony Oursler’s video installation practice since the 1990s, focusing on how the artist persistently detaches the moving image from the fixed screen and relocates it onto effigies, readymade objects, everyday environments, and urban surfaces, thereby transforming the image from a flat pictorial entity into a spatial, material, and affective event. Analysing three major phases-Object Projection, Video Installation, and Outdoor Imaging-the study identifies four core creative strategies that evolve across these stages: head-centred projection, the integration of video and found objects, the installation of everyday materials in quotidian space, and the sound-driven construction of personified emotion. By tracing how these strategies shift from object adherence to spatial narration and ultimately to environmental intervention, the paper argues that Oursler develops a distinctive affective installation language marked by uncanny plausibility, proportional dislocation, virtual–real interpenetration, dark humor, and sensorial absurdity, reshaping the viewer’s perceptual behavior by transforming viewing from a stable act of looking into an embodied process of encounter, adjustment, and emotional negotiation. The study concludes that Oursler’s practice exemplifies a broader post-medium transformation in contemporary video art, wherein the moving image acquires material presence, spatial agency, and environmental permeability, and suggests that as the image increasingly intervenes in public space and everyday experience, Oursler’s work offers a crucial lens through which to understand how contemporary visual culture redefines the boundaries of image, object, emotion, and reality.