A key might be found in the ubiquity and enormous power of new imaging
technologies and the need for their results to appear unmediated
(disappearance of the interface and its apparatus), and the need to
foster the illusion that we still have some 'place' within these vast
mediated landscapes--that our eyes are still situated in our bodies.
Right now the US is going nuts over that cute little microwave
oven-sized rover, as it transmits incredible panoramic views of the
surface of Mars. (It also has its own website, with '100 million hits'
as journalists breathlessly tell us, as if these were ticket sales. A
solution for a thus far commercially disappointing medium?) As the
wheels of the rover first hit Martian soil, the media was already
equating it with Neil Armstrong's first steps, and the atmosphere was
nearly as euphoric. Someone remarked that 'Mars doesn't seem so far
away anymore.' Considered optically, and in terms of robotic agency,
this feat is incredibly complex and exciting. But what do we want to
view? What is shown to the pubic? Not the vast streams of analytic
information, which is what the robot really 'sees', but a situated,
binocular, 3d-rendered space, as if the viewer were standing right
there, in the robot's place. And of course we would much rather watch
this than streams of soil analysis data scrolling down the television
set.
At a time when vision is no longer located primarily in the body, it
seems that perspective is maintained as a useful tool for manufacturing
a viewpoint and placing a situated subject at the origin of this
viewpoint. This would place a 'here' against a 'there' along potential,
embodied trajectories, and so include potential modes of movement and
desire for mobilization (and here perspective's analogue, narrative,
becomes useful, pulling one outward along a socio-temporal axis, as well
as the viewpoint's politicization as 'standpoint.') And so if we are
society that is mobilized--driven--by this perspectival representation,
then the agenda for critical work is to give a continued focus on the
apparatuses of this representation (including how representations are
socially determined, since they are not handed down from on high). It
also must provide alternative, situational ways of interfacing the data,
in line with the contemporary realities of multiple, alternately-located
agencies (e.g. the Mars rover). But is this hypertextuality or
interactivity as such, as well as the escalating depthlessness that
traffics in the form of MTV-ish programming? What is the relationship
between the perspective and its dispersal (multiple agencies and
interactive formats) or 'flattening' (surfaceness)? What techniques of
positioning do these register?
But in some ways these trains of thought are off-track. Not only is it
possible, through imaging technologies, to establish extended agencies
linked to the body, but we also have a kind of 'image-agency' that
emerges within the very structure of the image. What does the image,
which now becomes so deep that it incorporates perspectives within its
very body, 'see', and what are its modes of visualization, if they can
be called that? The very notion of representation as such fails to
capture these 'deep images', which 'look back' and harbor social
networks.