This book explores how installation art developed into an interdisciplinary genre in the 1960s, and how its special intertwinement of the visual and the performative has acted as a catalyst for the generation of new artistic phenomena. It investigates how it became one of today's most widely used art forms, increasingly expanding into consumer, popular and urban cultures, where the installations' often spectacular appearances ensure that they fit into contemporary demands for sense-provoking and immersive cultural experiences. Making an important contribution to the development of the critical and theoretical discourse on installation art, Ring Petersen addresses a series of basic questions: What is an installation? What techniques does it employ? How does installation art affect its viewers? How can we explain the rise of installation art in a cultural-historical perspective? Answers to these questions are pursued through analyses of installation art's spatial, temporal and discursive aspects as well as its reception aesthetics and cultural-historical contexts, and through analyses of a large number of works from a variety of sub-genres, including performance installations, video installations, installational exhibitions and recent use of installation in commercial contexts, including by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Pipilotti Rist, Ilya Kabakov, Superflex, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Hoeller, Terike Haapoja and ART + COM.