Thomas Zummer
What is your vision of a yet unknown art?
Méconnaissance d'utopie: trois extraits d'un future simple
What is your vision of a yet unknown art?
Méconnaissance d'utopie: trois extraits d'un future simple
It is a curious condition of our modernity that documents are constantly rendered into monuments, and monuments into documents. -- Michel Foucault, in conversation Even as he himself passed away, the differences that Michel Foucault alluded to were about to disappear: documents and monuments, in their persistence and referential traces, were subsumed as a new species of event. No longer capable of support as discrete artifacts, they became an armature for constant and innumerable supplements, first, as an instance of technical reproducibility (that is, no longer as an index indicating an originary absence, but inscribed as an infinitely repeatable, and positive, trace of itself as a simultaneous referent and reference; and second, as mediation (that is, as embodying an indeterminate range of possible inscriptions as evidences, with multiple registers of interstitial attachments, transmissions, or conduits between heterogeneous loci, or, in other words, as an interface). That is, as media, the implications of which are still only beginning to be drawn out. I. ...the whispered suspicions of our times... With every new technology, space and time have appeared to collapse. The interval is attenuated, and, paradoxically, extended ad infinitum. Yet it is the very appearance of collapse, one might suspect, that gives away the foundational slip, the elision, or phenomenological sleight of hand, wherein at the moment of its greatest weakness - the recuperation of these categories as forms of life - the loss is most profound. Consider for a moment a most common and familiar form of paratext, one that is to be found, now, almost everywhere: the term "LIVE" inscribed on the surface of a screen, indexed to a transmission, literally written into an event, a textual marker that something is taking place now (and, tacitly, here), at this very moment. Event and transmission are co-extensive, and the question of origin has been apparently been recuperated - snatched at the last moment - from an inaccessible real. Despite its deictic distance (its remoteness from a terminal spectator), this now phantom event has become, in its mediality, both document and event, sense and memory, at the same time. Perhaps it was this sort of spatio-temporal aporia that Heidegger refers to, asking himself: What is nearness if, along with its failure to appear, remoteness also remains absent? The remote as a mediated suspicion: "LIVE" as a deictic marker which is no longer bound by the constraints of sense, marking and indicating time, to be sure, but of what sort? Not the present as such, which passes away, but a present-perfect, which persists. Sense returns, arrested. Once having been, the presence of what has transpired before the camera is always accessible. We encounter the play of shifting luminous intensities with an archaic brain: we perceive changes in brightness and movement as changes in form and substance, and grant - before we know it - a phenomenal presence to flickering sensibilia. We are immediately involved in a repression of the mediate where we may become aroused, or terrified, where our hearts may race, our breath catch, or we convulse in laughter or disgust, where our private intimate subvocalizations, telling ourselves that "it's only a movie" deconstruct nothing, and in fact only heighten our illusory pleasures. The camera, which does not see, is without recourse to that reflex which is hardwired within us, to seek recognition in/for/as response to the other. Facial recognition is one of our earliest (unconscious) accomplishments, something that we do as infants: the camera intervenes in that, and presents a technically reproducible shadow, an apparition of presence, which is at the same time an index of loss. The camera, Benjamin notes, substitutes an "unconsciously penetrated space ... for a space consciously explored by man ... " introducing us to "unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses." Among the implications of this unconscious are a certain repression of difference, between referent and reference, or between event and record, such that the presumption of the evidentiary trace of the photo-chemical operates as guarantor of photographic verisimilitude, thereby upholding the notion that events do not pass away, but remain recoverable. There are certain indicators to the presumed possibility of the recuperability of loss. "LIVE" circumscribes an event, regardless of the extent of its repetitions; once having been so, as the camera witnesses, an event is always the case, and we ourselves reproduce the sense of things. The term "LIVE" arose as the dominion of uncontested naturalness of the presence - life - diminished, entering into fields of mediation. In early 20th century radio broadcasting, the term "live" was pronounced and invoked in an effort to decisively sever the connection between death and distance, between the past and present of events, people, and things. "Live" is the prosthetic form of life, something that announces its authenticity against potentially deceptive substitutes. The fundamental sense of live is therefore contrastive and oppositional: "live" means "not dead" (the "death" of the recorded event). The notion of "dead air" is interesting in this respect, almost like a kind of Turing test for transmissive verisimilitude. Dead is the interval. By the end of the 1920s, live had come to mean "simultaneous broadcasting," where "live" performances or events were exactly co-extensive with their technical transmission. The radio does not transmit "dead" material as does the phonograph, but present and "living" events. --E. W. Burgess Between radio and phonographic recording, the explicit equation of simultaneity with life, and recording with death is propounded and exemplified, over and over again. Television is figured as an explicitly "live" medium; the signal is "live" whether what is transmitted is currently unfolding or has been previously recorded. On television, within its carefully wrought artifice of intimate familiarity, there is an irruption of the uncanny which occurs with the displacement and repetition of live images. As familiar as furniture, the television screen is still a dangerous membrane with the possibility of overturning it's domesticity at any moment. Why else would so much energy be expended in circumscribing its use as an appliance, containing it as a live medium? The capacity to discern whether or not an image is a live image, or even whether that might matter, is evacuated in an architecture of evidentiary invisibility, to be re-located - in fact domesticated and repressed - only in the most conventional manner, and via the most minimally intrusive paratextual elements: captions, titles, notes, attributions: "LIVE". The image passes before us, in its real time, just as it does, we suppose, as we see it. There are only flashes, Augenblicke, arrested and fixed to the continuity of their endless passage: a persistence of vision. It is not that they have ended as fast as one sees them, but rather that their continuity has been parsed so that they no longer (re)attach to any subsequence (history), but only to other consequences (representations). This may be what Benjamin implies by considering History as photographic. The place of the image has been changed, and there are certain governances to such modifications. Point a camera to the sky, for example, and an anxiety suffuses the live image, especially now, when the sky has recently transported so many terrors, such that there is a gravity in the image of an empty sky that more readily maps itself to a reference - whether it is in Kosovo or Manhattan, Israel or Iraq - which subsumes it as a reference to a certain, precise event, almost by default - more readily than to any other. One might consider that the form of interest - in every sense of the term, conscious or not - in the allocation of images has become a tacit and governing hermeneutic, one which transfixes and transforms the evidentiary into the lived, in a vast phenomenological mix of specularity and consumption. What has happened is the inverse of what we have been induced to fear: time and space have not collapsed at all, but appear everywhere, at every moment, pluralizing and infusing everything, a surplus of presence, entirely too much of it, all around. Perhaps what we are seeing is an attenuation of the future. II. the future (is) simple... Upon first sight, novelty is ontological nonsense. Something is, although and because it is not what it was before. --Niklas Luhmann One might have asked, after Benjamin, how far a technically reproduced copy of something might exceed its originary instance before all that one might attribute to that original can no longer be attributed to a copy. The question has already disappeared with the conceit of an originary artifact: all media and medial artifacts, images, and transmissions are originary. Things change, and the register of attachments and investitures are constantly transformed; stability is achieved within a permeable field, by announcing itself as such: "true" or "good" or "valuable" or "despicable" or "live". Pure novelty, and its diminutive variants are, as Luhman suggests, unthinkable. But let's answer the question: In this vast profusion of images, is there an art yet unknown? Moreover, is it possible to infer, via the modifier "yet", that such an art might reside in our future? Or is it as likely that an unknown art is already dispersed and infused among us, in the depths and extent of what surrounds us? What might some of the implications of the future of such an art be? Can we continue to accept the deployment of familiar, speculative tropes of revelation or progress, or even more grounded figures of interest and the real, or does it fall upon us to attempt to think of that future in extenso? III. self-propelled sidewalks, growing lettuce on the moon ... the Corporate Renaissance and the performative archive of sales and motivational events So let us suppose a future for an as yet unknown art. Let us harbor the conceit that there are certain prolepses, foreshadowings of what that future might be, upon which we might ground our speculations. Here is one example: The Chrysler Building in New York City was, upon its most recent sale, copyrighted by the legal team of its new corporate owners. It was copyrighted as an image, casting into a legal framework a practice concerning the ownership of images which is in fact, already tacit and pervasive. One has to pay (sometimes a considerable amount) if one wants to depict a building in a movie, for example. These costs have soared in recent years, and there has been a migration on the part of directors and production companies to smaller, less expensive cities - such as Toronto or parts of Pittsburgh - which look enough like, which simulate on screen the ambience of, Manhattan. There is also a good deal of model-making, manual and digital, to evade these stiff fees. What is remarkable in the case of the copyrighted image of the Chrysler Building is that a convincing simulation of that structure - the image of the Chrysler Building - violates the copyright, the rights of the owners of the image, and there are, by law, some very real sanctions. This is not to say that this is not a contested terrain, a very problematic grey area which will, at some point in the future, have to be resolved. If, for example, one wants to depict the skyline of Manhattan, is there a certain proximity, a certain and specified distance from the site, where the laws of copyright fall away and notions or reportage, citation, or fair use reassert themselves? It is too early to tell. But one might imagine the art which would ensue in the aftermath of the determination of objects, sites and situations as already-virtual images, lawsuits in potentia. Here is a brief sketch of how it might work: In the future, everything will be owned; corporations will have the leverage to secure all images. Every lower middle manager will have acquired an archive of images and texts, and will engage in more or less free competition with every other owner (early progenitors of this model are Corbis (TM), SPADEM (TM) and early corporate collections such as those of the Paine-Webber Group, Chase Manhattan Bank, Fukuoko Jisha Company, The Equitable Center Art Complex and others). Because of this, there will be severe restrictions on the production of new images, and broad sanctions against a range of artistic practices. The production of new works would undercut the economy of images, and legislative controls similar to those which govern the trade in diamonds or precious metals will be strictly enforced. The precept "No new images" will become a tacitly ingrained ethic. There is a surfeit of already accomplished images, which can be repurposed ad eternam, and there is no need for new images. They are, in fact, dangerous. This will bring about a resurgence of interest in the real on one hand, and in a certain high order of phantasy on the other, and in their conjoinment. The only legal new artform will be the digital recording of corporate special events, with high aesthetic value placed upon product introduction and placement and sales-motivational spectacle. Edits, mixes and commentaries are outlawed. Here is a classic, early account of one such multi-media session staged by a pharmaceutical company: ... any number of educational sessions staged by companies transfixed between research and material seduction. At one of these, held in the Baltimore Aquarium, one was offered a choice between lectures on topics such as "Neurobiology and Treatment of Bipolar Disorder" and "Stingray Feeding and Presentation for Special Guests and Their Families." This was, in the context of the US launch of one of the major early antidepressants, and it was assumed that it would quickly capture a significant market share. While the launch was presided over and constrained by a tight regulatory body (like those common in the early 21st century), no expense was spared, and the atmosphere was one of a high order of spectacle, the epitome of Corporate America, high on its own commodities. It was a perfect model of how salesmen for any product are motivated to sell in an intensely competitive, promotional US marketplace. High glitz covered the relentless promotion of a product for people suffering from a terrible affliction. For the keynote addresses, salespeople assembled in a huge conference center. The size of the audience - in excess of 12,000 people - was overwhelming. When everyone was seated there arose out of the stage, like a scene in "Cats", an entire orchestra, playing "Forget Your Troubles, C'mon Get Happy", and Tears for Fears's "Everybody Wants To Rule The World". Against this backdrop, a booming Wizard-of-Oz-type voice welcomed everyone to the launch of a "fantastic new product". Gigantic photos of the Grand Canyon and a sylvan stream were projected onto twenty-foot screens, and the lights went up to reveal a set built to resemble a construction site. The orchestra began playing selections from Pink Floyd's "The Wall". A wall of gigantic bricks slowly rose at the back of the stage, and on it the names of competitive products appeared. While a chorus of kick dancers wearing mining helmets and carrying pickaxes performed athletic contortions on an electronically controlled scaffold, a rainbow of lasers in the form of the product logo shot from a stagecraft spaceship at the back of the room and knocked out the other antidepressants. The dancers kicked up their workboots and did an incongruous Irish jig as the bricks, made of stage plaster, crashed down in cascades of dust. The head of the sales force stepped out over the ruins to crow gleefully as numbers appeared on a screen, enthusing about the product's potential future profits as if he had just won on "Family Feud" ... Enjoy the future, it is all that we have left. Thomas Zummer New York City © 2002 |
