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'Where do you think you're going?' says one of Tony Oursler's typically interrogatory video-projected phantoms. Perhaps more than anyone else, this New York-based artist has helped liberate the medium of video from the gallery wall, sending it in directions both unexpected and unsettling. In an often collaborative practice spanning three decades, Oursler has shown that the medium is the message, whether micro-projected onto effigies or writ large on the landscape, where issues to do with mass media, parapsychology, mimetic technology and surveillance have played out in the artist's own subversive version of son-et-lumiere.

In Sydney he spoke with Michael Fitzgerald about the art of phantasmagoria.

Michael Fitzgerald: For Australasian audiences, your work was most recently encountered as part of 'Centre Pompidou Video Art 1965-2005' at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art and Melbourne's Australian Centre for the Moving Image in 2006-2007, which charted this now ubiquitous medium's coming of age. When you first began making video as an undergraduate at the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, how easy was it for your work to be shown?

Tony Oursler: I was always lucky because somehow I started out with single-channel videos and what happened was that the very first pieces I made, people liked, so they managed to get around. For a very young artist it was a great way to show work. Of course there were no remunerative considerations. But still, you could put the piece of work into an envelope and send it to Japan or to wherever, so early on I was able to show even at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and do a lecture there in 1981. But I was always making physical manifestations too. For those early videos I would make a lot of props and paintings and photos and all sorts of stuff. It was a kind of amalgam for my interests and video was a container for that...

MF: You created a piece for that exhibition called The watching, 1992, which combined sound, video projections and interactive surveillance equipment throughout a five-storey stairwell at the Museum Fridericianum. The watching also included one of your first projections of a human-scale face onto a rounded sculptural form perched high in a room. How significant was this work for you?

TO: It was the beginning of the liminal space for me. People thought that I was put on the staircase because they wouldn't put me in the galleries, but I planned for almost two years to be working in that space and everything was designed for it. Of course it's one of the coolest spaces you can have because you just wind through it - it's very cinematic as your head corkscrews down. It was a media deconstruction of horror and soft-core porn movies, but that was when I did the first projections of what I call spaces and simulacra. So there was a dummy that you could speak through using a very simple system of surveillance. It had a camera and a monitor, so from a distance you could speak through this character, vectoring off these pop psychology tests about empathy and so forth. I set up these situations where someone could be in the very top of the installation and spy on and talk to everybody below. And occasionally they had to shut it down because people would get really nasty. No, it was a lot of fun. But it was the projected dummies that really got me a lot of attention...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art &  Australia's Spring 2008 issue.