Review: The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment, by Annie Dell’Aria

In The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment, Annie Dell’Aria examines moving images as public art in relation to how they engage viewers—not as spectators of spectacle—but as potential participants in unplanned and surprising encounters, involving mediated images, physical infrastructure, and strangers. She defines such encounters as “enchantment,” sometimes transforming public spaces into shared moments of visceral pleasure and other times altering perspectives on these spaces. Dell’Aria uses the term “moving image” to reframe “distinctions of medium,” often formalist (animation, sculpture, video), noting that “the term itself refers to an effect rather than a physical apparatus or process” (11) and is “fundamentally experiential” (12). Viewers approach moving images through “constant negotiation between attention and distraction and between represented and actual space” (31). Moving images in public attract “glances and incidental attention rather than absorption” (33), as theatrical film was theorized in the 1970s. Moving...