>esidence, durational adherence, and velocity of the advertising image
>within the field of human recognition; cynically or optimistically
>(depending on the side of advertising production one is one), these should
>be wrapped entirely around the person, such that their parameters are
>exactly the same as those of the subject, that their most prominent
>characteristic is their adhesiveness. the advertising image is to remain >with
>us, last as long as we do, and travel at our speeds. we can't really out-pace
>them nor can they out-pace us; to avoid them we must increase our
> slipperiness and/or decrease their adhesiveness.
[…]
>what, for example, is the fundamental difference (in terms of the
>production of an urban image) among the staged incidents of Jeff Wall, >the
>real ones of Camilo Jose Vergara, and the constructed ones of "Cops?"
We have velocity of the advertising image within the field of human
recognition, and the velocity of the human and its recognition within
the field of the advertising image. About the difference between Jeff
Wall and "Cops": Wall's images are stills, seeming to be snatched out
of sequences that we never see, while the visuals in "Cops" are always
part of narrative flows; the people in the story are arrested, but there
are no arrested images. But then, in the conditions of its viewing, the
viewers are arrested - parked, nearly immobile before the television
set. In contrast, the viewer of Wall is arguably a more mobile one (in
a physical sense). In any case, there is always a complex dance between
fixity and mobility, in cognitive, physical, and imagistic senses.
Serge Daney: "Photography is an immobile image, whereas the cinematic
image has movement, different kinds of movements. In general,
photography is contrasted to cinema as immobility to movement. True
enough. But what's forgotten is that the movement of images in cinema
could only be perceived because the people--the public--were immobile
before those images. It's because people were put into theaters, locked
into place before the screen and held in a situation of 'blocked vision'
that they were able to *see* all kinds of movement: the
(technologically-fabricated) illusion of movement and a still more
complicated movement, which, if you insist, can be called the 'language'
of cinema, though it is much more a grammar: the movement consisting of
everything that filmmakers from Lumiere to our day have proposed in
order to make the jump from one element to the next. Cinema would never
have been an art had there not been many different possibilities of
montage, many different ways of forbidding oneself to pass from element
A to element B without some underlying theory of editing that 'ensured'
the transition."
Daney goes on to say that nothing of montage would have been perceived
had there not been a movie theater with immobile viewers in "seat
arrest" who had been slowly trained how to behave. The "history of
cinema" might be regarded as the history of the public's domestication
and immobilization: immobile people who became sensitive to the mobility
of the world, to all types of mobility including the mobility of
fictions (ahead to happier tomorrows and various other dreams), bodily
mobility (dance, action), material and mental movements (dialectical and
logical games).
Daney suggests that now a reverse has occurred: that we have become
very mobile in relation to images which have become more and more
immobile. We have learned to pass by images the way that people must
have learned to pass by lighted window displays in the nineteenth
century. Commodified images are illuminated for the benefit of a
passing public, and the mode of vision is conditioned by the shopping
stroll: the ambulatory movement through a field of images that offer
themselves up for consumption.
The "immobile image" is not a freeze-frame, but a prefabricated shot, a
ready-to-use cliché. It is concurrent with the triumph of advertising.
The movement is no longer in the image, but in the enigma of the force
that has programmed it. And of course television -- the triumph of
programming over product -- is the obvious example. A network of
clichés awash in programming mobilizations.
Is this the context in which to view the triumph of tourism?
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