From: CTHEORY Editor [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 3:45 PM
To: ctheory
Subject: Event-Scene 95: Site Unseen -- Seeing, Mapping, Communicating
____________________________________________________________________
CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 24, NO 1-2
Event-Scene 95 01-02-01 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
____________________________________________________________________
Site Unseen -- Seeing, Mapping, Communicating.
==============================================
~David Cox~
Demographs
----------
Property has eyes. As John Berger in _Ways of Seeing_ argued to see
is to own, and conversely to own is to be able to see. Underscoring
the particular privilege of the Renaissance man was always to be
afforded the right to lay a claim to his own individual, private and
unique point of view; to have a constant personal vanishing point.
This Enlightenment legacy is still essentially the guiding principle
behind economic rationalism, the idea that society is not the basis
for human shared experience. Rather people are imagined and
encouraged to view themselves as sovereign, discreet economic units.
Advertising, urban planning and the nexus between the mainstream
media and everyday life underscores the perpetually reinforced notion
that the basic defining aspect of people is their personal purchasing
power; consumption.
The notion that society can be broken down into socio-economic
"demographics" -- literally 'people-pictures' reflects the idea that
audiences are not pre-existent, but rather like maps, made.
Popularized in the late 1960s, the process of making TV shows for
assumed demographic sectors of society marked the rise in the
importance of the advertisers in the development of popular culture.
Executives were concerned to map and chart and infer the overall
nature of their audiences as part of market research for advertisers.
Try to See it My Way - Subliminals
----------------------------------
Pierro De La Francesca, the famed Renaissance painter and architect
built arcane secrets into his pictures. Trained in the then very new
technique of perspective painting, Pierro integrated systems of
Euclidean geometry into the formal composition of his paintings. He
even included 'secret' messages into the subject matter, such as five
sided pentangles and so on which to those in the know at the time
related to the presumed relationship between man, God and the
universe. In some pictures, only recently developed techniques have
enabled scholars to unlock some of the secret messages embedded in
his paintings. The pictures were ciphers -- cryptograms which
referred back to the social conditions under which they were made in
order to flatter those who could identify those codes. These
conventions were considered part of what it meant to be an educated
Renaissance artisan.
The cryptographic geometric and perspectival cosmologies integrated
into his work and that of others around the same time -- Leonardo Da
Vinci, and Giotto were those of high levels of mathematical
abstraction, themselves at the time 'redeemed' from Greek antiquity.
Using a system which would today be called 'ray tracing' and which
would be done using 3D graphics software, Pierro was able to
calculate the appearance of objects in 3D space by numerically
transposing positions of say parts of a human head tilted at an
angle. The extraordinary feat was to be able to mathematically
conceptualize the body as a fluid dynamic system whose spatial and
positional appearance on the canvas could be represented by numbers.
The numbers then could be used, quite separate from their real life
referent to calculate the appearance of the same subject from any
angle.
Just as computers now are used as much as cameras to deliver moving
pictures to our screens, the common conceptual link between the two
technologies is that of the abstract 'plane' upon which the
perspectival image is imagined to fall upon. One of Pierro's most
famous images is that of a tilted head; a detail from his painting
~The Flagellation~. The position of the head was one of many he could
have settled on when he painted the picture, the subject of the
picture was not present when it was painted. Rather the image of the
subject had been abstractly transposed numerically by Pierro first
into his memory, then onto paper and from paper onto canvas. A
computer graphics artist can choose to show a 3D model of a dinosaur
or space ship from any angle and because the computer 3D graphics
rely on the centrality of the perspectival view of the universe, any
graphic can be made to co-habit the perspectival domain of
photography.
What seldom gets examined or analyzed as much as it could in
contemporary popular culture is the legitimacy of that perspectival
interpretation of reality. The Enlightenment and its giddy claims to
the sole 'take' on the human condition are reinforced with every
computer generated urban planning layout, every blockbuster movie --
particularly those with elaborate computer graphics and most other
representations which seek to privilege the individual as a
sovereign, isolated subject.
Encasement Wish
---------------
The myth of the encased fighter pilot, the completely technologically
mediated man was the famous subject of the Roland Barthes
"Mythologies" essay "The Jet Man". Barthes could easily have been
writing about the hardcore aircraft fighter simulator freak, or the
racing car simulation videogame enthiusiast. The often physically
restrained VR encumbered shackled to his scuba like equipment
resembles closely the look and feel of many S&M gear on sale in
leather sex fetish shops the world over. The very British sexual
thrill known as "encasement wish" finds expression in much of the
language and apparel of virtual reality, and immersion fantasies of
all kinds. A bit of BBC folklore has it that the men whose job it was
to operate the Dalek robot machines in the "Dr Who" show were often
reluctant to get out of their dalek outfits, so closely had they
identified with the role...!
If Looks Could Kill
-------------------
This insistence upon the film plane as evidence of events passed,
found chilling expression in the 1990 Gulf War--the 'Nintendo War'
where 'the eye of the bomb' televised its trajectory to the world.
The crossing line here showed that for US foreign policy as well as
domestic that the gamble of the Gulf War for Bush at least paid off;
he was re-elected. As the bomb took the viewer with it into the side
of the bunker, the fact of the bomb's technological/political
trajectory was also carried across into political certainty on TV at
home. No one could refute the meaning of that image, even if they had
lost on its outcome. It spelled its message out loud and clear. The
United States had the technological might and means to dominate world
economics. Things had not always had been so deliberately
unequivocal.
In the 1972 film ~Letter to Jane~ by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Pierre
Gorin the soundtrack's narrator deconstructs an image of Jane Fonda
on a trip to North Vietnam cavorting with an 'enemy' artillery piece.
During the Vietnam War images and sounds circulated freely from the
war zone to the United States. The more images flowed the less
meaning they seemed to convey.
In ~Letter to Jane~ another image shows Fonda being talked to by a
North Vietnamese official. Fonda's expression is serious, concerned.
As the film's soundtrack's deadpan narrator explains, the movie star
(Fonda) is in focus, but the Vietnamese army troops behind her in the
picture are distant and blurry. The film goes on to explain that in
reality the purpose and role of the United States in Vietnam is, like
the image of the Vietnamese troops, blurred. In reality however the
aims and objectives of the Vietnamese themselves the narration
continues is quite clear, and so the way a picture appears serves to
convey the opposite of its literal appearance.
Sharp Cuts
----------
Film montage emerged from a certain vantage point, a peculiarly 20th
Century vantage point. The idea of disjointed clashing meanings was
in common circulation in Europe in the early 20th Century. The
political payload which accompanied the aesthetics of montage was
powerful indeed. The photomontage images of John Heartfield in
Germany in the 1920s were culture jams in the extreme. The
proliferation of photographs in print publishing enabled political
satire to find expression through the surgical cuts of scalpel on the
photograph and to cut and paste and rework still images had its
parallel in the development of film editing in Russia. The
Eisenstienian technique was to make images clash up against each
other and in colliding, give rise to combatant new images. This art
of montage was the aesthetics of context migration. With film editing
new meanings could be divined from the intersection where images
collided in time. With photomontage the spatial field of the
photograph itself rather was the terrain of a clash of opposites,
where powerful hybrids of image with image could occur.
Planes of Thought
-----------------
Linking these technologies was the idea that spaces could be
traversed without effort, or that technology could mediate space.
Photography and cinema have the aim of placing the viewer somewhere
other than where they actually are -- transporting them in fact.
Cinema and photography both employ spatial fields of view; the
Euclidean geometric breakdown of space into geometric forms. Inside a
camera, light falls on the film plane, is recorded photochemically,
by means of a mechanical shutter. The technology of limits capture.
Adjustments of physical limits to effect chemical processes
Aircraft are similarly about the manipulation of forces, which in
turn are therefore relatively simple to translate into code for the
purposes of making a simulation. Variables like thrust, pitch, yaw,
elevation, speed, flow represent the chaos of the movement of air
over the wings, of the propeller through the air. Affording a view of
the surroundings cartography mapping Empirebs make maps before
invading. The British Empire's first step prior to setting up India
as a giant cheap manufacturing and supply colony was to divide the
country up into triangle shaped segments, the better to map it.
Conceptual ownership longitude.
Getting High: Space Race and LSD
--------------------------------
The Space Race and the Cold War represented the fusing of political
and technological imperatives toward a unified Imperial assertion of
Superpower supremacy. The quest for space took on a religious
overtone in both the USA and the USSR; both elevated space
exploration as the pinnacle expression of modernist progress; to
boldly go and get "launch fever". It is no accident that Tom Wolfe
should valorize the extremes of 1960s expansionism on both the left
and right. _The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test_ is essentially the same
quest as that pursued by those with _The Right Stuff_; Americans
going the furthest, one way or the other. Trajectories of superpower
aerospace were largely ground oriented; the relationship of earth
based bureaucracy running smoothly contrasted with counter-cultural
claims to anti-bureaucracy. In actuality the counter-culture was
often highly organized and operated under the auspices of a similar
technology worship -- drugs -- "better living through chemistry" and
later of course the personal computer revolution.
The central view predominated in the 1960s much as it had done since
the Renaissance. The privileged point of view of the Medici-funded
artist was paralleled 400 years later by the NASA or USSR backed
astronaut. The prize brought back to civilization from the Space Race
was that of the unique view the space photograph of the earth, the
moon panorama taken from space suit or Lunar Module cockpit. Neil
Armstrong as Michealangelo's David. Officialdom needs time and space
measured, divided, controlled.
Light Hackers
-------------
Photography -- Joseph Nicephore Niepce (creator of the first fixed
photo) was something of a photochemistry hacker as an experimenter
using cameras, chemicals and surfaces. Exposure to light and the
chemical fixing of the camera obscura's image was the aim of the
first photographers. The very first 'fixed' photo was of his own
courtyard. Niepce needed to leave the camera somewhere where it could
be left.
Babbagea's *Difference Engine* (though it did not work) had already
been built when the first fixed photo was made. Computers have long
been closely linked to the conceptualisation of space -- Charles
Babbage's famous unfinished prototype for a computer, the analytical
engine developed in the 1830s was developed in response to a request
from the British Government to generate better navigational charts
for mercantile shipping. The Colossus computer developed in the UK to
crack Nazi radio codes, found itself mainly decoding co-ordinate
information of Atlantic submarine positions, and the like.
The miniaturization of electronic components which resulted in the
development by counterculture hippies in the mid 1970s of the
personal computer, was itself the result of the need by the military
industrial complex for small parts for use in missile navigation and
space travel. Mapping, architecture and urban planning also play a
large role in the development of video games, whose elaborate
labyrinths of play and dynamics in turn find eerie expression in the
layout and appearance of the contemporary themed shopping precincts
of our major cities.
Game Plans for Utopia
---------------------
Strategy and games both require abstractions of space, and the
dynamics, which take place within them. The Situationist
International's project was that of reclaiming a rapidly modernizing
Paris after its liberation in 1945 from the clutches of
commercialization. Against sterile rationalist planning of inner city
housing and retail areas they proposed radical alternative uses for
cities, which emphasized a sense of free play, and which advocated a
system of activities in art and architecture, film and writing which
would ultimately render work and all forms of social control
obsolete.
The mediascape as we may call it now dominates the public
imagination. The mediascape or spectacle is that set of vectors
defined by mainstream broadcast television, electronic systems of
retail and police enforcement, expansionist freeway construction
regimes, centrally owned commercial print publishing advertising, and
public relations organisations.
In addition, to the S.I. a sister idea to the derive was the notion
of ~detournment~ -- literally detourning -- signs, images, sounds,
video, film. More contemporarily known as ~sampling~ and ~culture
jamming~ -- detournment has enjoyed a solid place within contemporary
art practice throughout the 20th Century.
It is the dream of many to live in a world where work itself has been
abolished. This simple desire flies in the face of a world where
public space is replaced by the leased holding. Where our "future
dreaming is a shopping scheme" to quote Johnny Rotten.
Saucy Sorcery!
--------------
Early parlour toys dallied with sex and the licentious -- zoetropes
and praxinoscopes and other visual tricks often were delivery
mechanisms for lurid porn fantasies and devil images, rather like the
proliferation of video recorders in the early 1980s. The boom in
inititial VCR sales stemmed largely from the newly created ~home
porn~ video market. The industrial revolution was starting to result
in identifiable domestic scientific entertainment forms -- the home
microscope ( a latter day home computer) offered ~views~ into other
worlds -- the microscopic and the microphotographic. Microphotographs
were tiny photos to be viewed through microscopes.
These images are ghostly, even phantasmagoric. At the Sony Center in
San Francsico recently, my wife and I were able to have a hologram
made of us kissing. The image of us turning and kissing moves as one
angles the card on which it is mounted from side to side under a
light. To take the hologram, a video camera on a kind of four foot
long conveyor belt scanned our faces over a period of five seconds as
we kissed. The resultant frames were then processed in an adjacent
lab, which converted the digital frames into the reflective white
light hologram moving image the size of a large postage stamp. In a
sense the technology of the space/time based arts like cinema and the
space recording arts like photography have converged to enable moving
holograms which record events, albeit short span ones, and to present
those events in movie like images which can be seen in ordinary white
light.
C3 Command Control, Communication
---------------------------------
Communications, military strategy, and the control of land and sky
have always been intertwined. To this end the themes of secrecy and
encryption have found expression in works whose message was often as
hidden as explicit since the Renaissance. Then as now military power
is synonymous with Imperial, national economic power. A recent TV
documentary shown in Australia included an aboriginal woman's
description of the Pine Gab base in northern Australia "It's the eyes
of America" she said.
Alan Turing and his team of encryption experts helped build the
"Collossus" device in England during World War II as well as other
computers to decrypt enigma encrypted nazi radio signals. These
encrypted morse code messages usually were co-ordinates on maps of
locations and maneuvers of such things as Luftwaffe bombing targets
and directions for fleets of U-boats to torpedo merchant shipping.
The Situationists often made use of guerrilla iconography in their
artwork, the most famous of which is the "Naked City" image from the
collage book by Asger Jorn and Guy Debord. In this image, curved
arrows link cut up maps of Paris to indicate those regions considered
the most amenable to play and liberty. These were described as
'ambient unities'. The convention of the arrow on a map is, of
course, strategic in origin. It shows the movement of artillery,
personnel and so on -- the opening sequence of the early 1970s show
set during WWII, "Dad's Army", parodied the direction of the arrows
on a map of Europe.
Guy Debord's work included, toward the end of his life in 1994, a
board game whose surface was a grid, and the pieces of which, were
markers. The aim of the game was to roll a dice and to occupy space.
The iconography of the symbolic re-taking of cultural space was thus
'detourned' from its origins in Imperialist wargame culture.
War games play a main role in the mindset of those whose job it is to
conceptualize a videogame's possible set of outcomes. RPGers or Role
Playing Game writers are usually deeply conversant in the syntax and
conventions of military strategy. The premise for them is often 'we
are always at war', a state of affairs no doubt shared by many who
view themselves in opposition to mainstream life in general.
The 1990 Gulf war began not long after the finalization of the
virtual mapping of the Persian Gulf region for use in the onboard
memories of cruise missiles, pilotless, ~smart~ weapons which can
find their targets within 5 meters over thousands of kilometers.
The abstraction of space and land and the making of maps seem
inseparable from attendant notions of ownership and domination. The
twin gestures of both looking and seeing are about controlling the
cartographically consolidated, abstracted space.
The fact that the Internet was designed as the last lines of
communication for besieged post-nuke war military brass is widely
known. The network was a way of decentralizing control. The
centralized nature of modern urbanism meant that if the Soviet Union
were to nuke American cities, power would have to reside outside
centralized locales of political and administrative institutions.
Decentralization as a survival strategy found its way into the
development of such innovations as Buckminster Fuller's geodesic
dome. Embraced in the 1960s by both the counter-culture and the
military, the famous geodesic dome was emblematic of, on the one hand
the rationalist notion of maximizing efficiency with minimum
resources, and, on the other "communal" self support, the efficiency
of which was no less appealing.
Designed to withstand the devastating effects of nuclear war, the
truism goes that the Internet "interprets censorship as ~damage~ and
re-routes around it". Imperviousness to commercial co-optation may
prove somewhat more difficult. In the relatively early days of the
Internet, the early 1990s, to get on-line required something of a
knowledge of the Unix operating system. True to the tenets of Unix,
if you were unable or unwilling to teach yourself the language, it
was assumed you had little interest in learning about the systems
upon which it was based.
Gameplay -- the Abstraction of Engagement
-----------------------------------------
The various genres of games -- 'shoot-em--ups' which reward fast
finger action, ~simulators~ which privilege the level of
representational similarity to the real world system being simulated
and role playing games all create for the player self--contained
cosmologies. The level of resemblance to the 'real' world matters
less than the level of engagement for the player. This level of
engagement is known in the trade as gameplay, and is so abstract a
concept that defining it is less understood as felt. The prime test
of a game's gameplay is of course the popularity of the game in the
marketplace as an addictive experience.
The first web site I saw in 1992 was based at the same department and
showed a 'virtual tour' of the corridors of that department. In those
days most people understood the net as a primarily and uniquely
public entity. Anything commercial at all was frowned upon as
contrary to netiquette. To sell your CDs via email was considered
inappropriate and to multiple send anonymous ads was considered so
deeply offensive, that the sender was likely to have his or her
'Spam' returned in spades, the attempt to crash the server of the
spammer.
If an imagined war-hungry Soviet Union were supposed to have been
unable to overthrow the Internet's original purpose as a military
communications channel, then supposedly years later the big
corporations were expected not to have face the same type of
restriction.
There are those who entertain a rather cryptic notion that the
Internet has grown to such a size that it is conceivable that it may
have developed characteristics of a sentient entity. Indeed for even
those who know little about the Internet, using it successfully for
the first time must echo the feelings of those who picked up the
phone receiver when that invention was new. This eerie sense of
telepresence -- being somewhere without going there -- continues to
define the themes of the techno underground movement. Dance clubs and
dance tracks often refer to contact with outer space, with other
dimensions.
I met Erik Davis in San Francisco in 1999. He had just finished
writing an article about pinball machines for _Wired_ magazine. We
talked about the philosophy underpinning many of the developments in
electromagnetic technologies over the past century. He appears in
Craig Baldwin's latest film _Spectres of the Spectrum_ which in
science fantasy form, dramatizes the overlap between the battle for
control of the electromagnetic spectrum by corporate and government
interest versus ordinary 'hacker' individuals. Nicola Tesla, the
eccentric and superstitious inventor of radio control and alternating
current power, and Philo T Farnsworth, the inventor of television,
both met with an ill fate at the hands of the large organizations
which essentially stole their ideas and left them with nothing.
Davis' book _Techgnosis_ examines the inter--related themes of
spiritualism and technology -- particularly that of electronics. The
invisible energy source whose origins like in the magnetic nature of
bodies in the universe resembles for many who have learned to benefit
from it aspects of an imagined parallel dimension. In all of these
types of inquiries, certain elements remain consistant. The seen and
the unseen dance a complex waltz around those spaces where the body
and the machine exchange faculties. The highly organised global
systems of official entertainment has now joined that other age old
official project, the command and control of earthly and outer space.
With war as its natural fuel and starting point, the demands of
commerce continue to shape what is seen, and what is left unseen. Our
technological imperatives now stem directly from a kind of official
curiosity whose manifestations can only increase in complexity, even
if those same imperatives stem from the basest of human instincts --
to dominate, to subjegate and to control.
____________________________________________________________________
David Cox is a film maker and writer based in Brisbane, Australia.
He currently lectures in digital screen production at Griffith
University
____________________________________________________________________
* CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology
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