Nick Kaye: Through its attention to the signs and practices of presence, Oursler’s staging of media entities serves to interrupt and articulate the viewer’s negotiation and performance of media spaces and processes. In this respect, his work makes a phenomenological exploration of the circulation and exchange of the signs of presence, and so of aspects of self and identity, through everyday practices of media consumption. Suggesting that “media space has transposed realism to create a new space of everyday life” (Oursler in Van Assche 2005: 41-5), Oursler’s installations intrude upon the viewer’s sense of their own psychological separation and integrity; their sense of presence before the media. Indeed, one of the roots of these projections’ uncanny effect is their exposure of the mobility of the signs of presence and the close link between presence and simulation. It is an effect reflected in Oursler's proposition that:

Psychologically, one may view media as an evolutionary facilitator of the fractured self. (Oursler in London 1994: 8)

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References

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