Off Screen

Even as video rectangles proliferate across the vast Internet, in the more finite space of real life, video sometimes breaks free of the linear screen. It aspires to be architectural and three-dimensional — not as an illusion, but by borrowing mass and importance from the walls, ceilings, and waterfalls it is projected on. It takes on the job of paintings and plaster, artifacts and animatronic robots.

The Themed Entertainment Association has announced the winners of the 15th annual THEA awards. With these awards, the association continued to acknowledge the growing role of video in tangible environments such as theme parks and especially museums.

In those settings, video is both dramatic and impermanent, an ever-clean slate — one tantalizing element that can be infinitely revisited and updated. It can be costly to do that. (Universal Studios just spent millions to replace the once-ingenious video-based Back to the Future ride with the virtuosic The Simpsons ride). But at any price, video is still cheaper and less resource-intensive than all-new bricks and mortar. As a way of changing your mind, message, or environment, there is no greater bang for the buck. Better than new paint and pillows.

Museum designers in particular now understand this. Carpenters are still some of the most important people in an unfinished exhibit hall. But less so now. Designers have taken up the white-box theory that was once confined to museums of modern art, leaving more space available to be filled with moving images.

In addition to honoring The Simpsons ride (How could they not?) and the opening ceremonies of the summer Olympics (again, of course), the association singled out four museums that relied on imaginative video presentations: the New Orleans' Audubon Insectarium; the Forces of Nature exhibit at the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix; the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Va.; and the video extravaganza that is The Newseum in Washington, D.C.

The modestly budgeted Forces of Nature exhibit includes imagery displayed on a 360-degree globe and a weather-immersion theater that puts visitors at the center of storm-chaser footage. The other three museums all include what is called in the trade “4D theaters” — 3D video combined with the old-fashioned tactile experience of moving seats. Even the elegant Newseum has some moving seats in the Annenberg Theater that punctuate the efforts of Nellie Bly and Edward Murrow to burst off the screen in Cortina Productions' 3D film. So it's not all virtual video — yet. Even so, the liberation of video from the shackles of the linear plane is underway and it can't be stopped.

Best wishes for a peaceful holiday season and a prosperous 2009, however you may measure it.