Knowra Spectatorship Spectatorship Spectatorship is the relationship between an artwork and the position or activity of its viewers. It includes how works address, position, and involve those who encounter them.
Gaze : A way of looking shaped by relations among viewers, images, and power. The gaze names how an artwork’s looking relations position viewers and subjects.
Audience : A group of people gathered or addressed as recipients of a performance, artwork, or communication. Spectatorship describes relations between artworks and the people who encounter them.
Laura Mulvey : A British feminist film theorist whose 1975 essay analyzed gendered looking in classical cinema. Her account of the male gaze made the viewer’s position a central problem in film theory.
Cinema : The art and technology of producing and exhibiting moving images. Its fixed screen, framing, and exhibition setting have shaped major theories of spectatorship.
Passive spectator : A model of viewing in which audiences receive a work without substantially changing or contesting it. This model contrasts with accounts of spectatorship as active interpretation or participation.
Interpellation : The process by which an ideology addresses individuals and positions them as subjects. An image can address viewers as particular kinds of subjects, not merely show them things.
Representation (arts) : The making of images, signs, or performances that stand for people, objects, or ideas. Spectators encounter artworks through forms of representation rather than unmediated reality.
Apparatus theory : A film theory approach linking cinematic technology and conventions to ideological effects on viewers. It treats cinema’s viewing setup as a force that constructs spectatorship.
Interactive art : Artworks that change in response to actions by participants or viewers. It makes the viewer’s choices directly affect the work’s unfolding.
Active spectator : A model of viewing in which audiences interpret, connect, and produce meanings from a work. It challenges the assumption that artworks dictate a single meaning to their viewers.
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