Whereas Paul Pfeiffer’s frozen basketball players represented the interior ecstasy of the players before the audience, Fleming’s film works outward into its receiving audience mirrored in its screens. And like Doug Aitken’s use of commercial-production’s affective means as the product itself, Fleming’s immaculate visual spectacle produces a seductive and blinding spell, absorbing its religious imagery into the enrapture of theater. The PR interview names this visual-trance by the psychology term “Flow” in which one is “fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity,” the activity here of its viewing. Yet the full involvement of the quad-channel jumbotron here does more to dislocate the viewer entirely from the it with the hypnosis of its virtual replacement, a dislocating amnesia, like 356 Mission’s other film spectacular, Sturtevant’s FINITE/INFINITE, in its grinding visual takeover of the viewer. But whereas Sturtevant’s film continually ejected the viewer every 11 seconds from its theatrical suspension, Fleming’s virtual supplanting of a continuous and unending “flow” might find its ultimate potential of enraptured viewership in the eponymous fictional film of Infinite Jest, a deadly and ultimate terror.
