> The anonymous nature of concrete and steel is generally corporate, a giant
> mysterious facade, with modern sculpture dodahs angular and reaching for
> the skies, and restricted access, security guards and cameras, you are
> observed and monitored in these spaces. It is a restricted area unless you
> belong and are selling to the image, equiped with pass you witness inside
> the corporate wall, inside the domain of image control.
This is interesting in an extended sense too. Because unless you
'belong to the image' you can't enter into its domains, and so you have
to endeavor to make yourself adequate to enter. (And 'enter' is the
right word because the image becomes a space.) You have to make
yourself fit for the image. You have to open yourself to the kinds of
mobilizations and entrances it demands. What are these?
Think about the commercially-fueled print or television image. This
image produces a viewer and a viewing capacity adequate to its
desire-producing demands; it mobilizes that viewer down the road to the
store to 'achieve the image'; it provides a shopping environment that is
in many ways an extension of the magazine or television environment; it
records the patterns in this circuit and employs them to optimize its
continuance and effectiveness. And the reverse can occur: the viewer
is held stationary, while the image runs toward it. The body sits parked
in front of a television set or computer screen, nearly immobile, as
vast worlds of images rush across the surface, overlaying upon one
another in distance-construction. The body seems nearly zombified,
dislodged from its condition only by momentary distractions or
intrusions, as accelerating images channel directly into the captive
mind. But this is a preparatory stage toward the institution of new
mobilities. The viewer's responses are couched in metaphors of travel,
tiniest flicks of the finger institute vast changes that are often
registered as movements across enormous distances, and powerful desires
to move across real or constructed geographies are produced, either to
get to a particular 'place' or nowhere in particular (as in surfing).
Travel metaphors are channeled into the viewer's language: one does not
'say' so much as one 'goes'; speech and action are collapsed into the 'I
went.' Does it lead to an all-out immersion, when the distance between
symbol and referent seemingly collapse and the receptive body is
'swallowed up'? No. A rigid viewer must to be constituted in order to
channel mobilizing circuits into and through it, erupting, as if through
wormholes, interior mobilizations that 'open out' elsewhere. The
immobile body is a body being made fit for re-mobilization.
The space between the viewer and the image is a social space. The
social actors are corporeal and representational, near and far, real and
fictitious, as is the space in which they are situated. One moves
through a stack of windowings on the computer screen or through the
layered environments on the television, in complex, overlapping social
formations. Newscasters make eye contact with the viewer in order to
generate a bubble of intimacy and trust while both are transported
through dynamic landscapes of crisis (a 'transport' that is as hybrid
and contradictory as the space and social relationship that it marks); a
subject is hailed in a networked environment and compelled to click, to
'go there,' moving through overlapping formations in which its own
status shifts. Both visual and linguistic techniques are employed as
mobilizing devices, driven like wedges into speech and space in order to
catapult positions into motion, all the while smoothing over the
disparities with a seemingly unified plane, a plane that houses flows
and uniformly-formatted stacks shuffled in hierarchies of intimacy and
distance, a plane that houses colonies of actors, for whom (and in place
of whom) logos and icons stand as imploded frames, worlds, and
personae. From one window or frame to the next, or between series of
levels within frames, or through the wormholes provided by logos and
icons, a language of travel is constituted, a language whose demands
technology and reality hastily endeavor to meet.
It would seem this language emerges in terms of deep overlappings and
varying degrees of 'closeness' to the viewer: a pushing-pulling visual
and semiotic mechanism that is parlayed along the z-axis, generating
various intimate or distant social relationships, between which a
subject is compelled to travel, sliding into and out of various embodied
forms in repertoires of segmentation, movement, and unification. Is
this how you get an entrance pass? The 'here' is fragmented; the desire
for 'there' is created; the means of travel to get 'there' is provided;
and the achievement of that goal is made temporary and incomplete. At
work are procedures of unification and coherency, shuttled back and
forth in conceptions of destination and arrival, or better yet, a
movement between simply for the sake of mobility, a mobility equated
with freedom.
What, exactly, is transported? The viewer adjusts within itself in
order to respond to and incorporate the senses of movement and location
portrayed on the screen and its accompanying communication forms. And
so, too, does the screen representation adjust 'within itself' according
to the changing norms of the viewer. The viewer-agency (as well as the
representation) is 'held' together in temporarily stable condition
inside a 'coherency device' as it is moved along a trajectory registered
as travel, oriented through a complex of interlocking mechanisms that
participate in producing bodily faculties and awarenesses. What is this
device, this embodying force?