Real
Sally McLaughlin and Aaron Fry
In this paper we describe issues explored in Real, a digital
installation developed by the authors. The project grew out of
an interest in two bodies of work The first, the work of the Situationist
International with their focus on the social and cultural mediation
that occurs in urban environments. The second, the work of writers
such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Wittgenstein and Foucault. We were
interested in developing a visual and physical response to the
insight that we are always already located within constellations
of practice, that all experience is interpretation. The paper
explores the development of the project in terms of three processes
– framing, articulating and automating.
Digital installation, exploration of contemporary environments,
response to our being always already situated within frames of
reference, discourse on the authenticity of objects, environments
and experiences – Real is the distillation of diverse
processes of investigation, an artefact that has become a locus
for reflecting on products and processes that shape our reading
of contemporary environments.
Real – the installation – consists of a database
of images. Images were chosen that had the potential to raise
issues of mediation and authenticity – details from postcards,
signage and survey forms, street scenes, museum displays and advertising.
The images are categorised according to terms such as nature,
prosthesis and body – terms that reveal something
of the practices, often implicit, that are at play in the interpretation
of contemporary environments. The digital medium allowed us to
construct and explore a matrix of associations between images
and categories in the database. Sequences of images relevant to
a category are displayed over multiple monitors. Through the juxtaposition
of images with images, and images with categories, shifts in understanding
occur. Assumptions about the real are brought into play.
The project grew out of an interest in two bodies of work The
first, the work of the Situationist International with their focus
on the social and cultural mediation that occurs in urban environments.
We were particularly interested in the Situationist strategy of
the dérive (drift) as a means of renegotiating and
reconceptualising encounters with lived environments. The second
body of work was that of writers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Wittgenstein
and Foucault. We were interested in the metaphors that they explored
in articulating alternatives to metaphysical concepts of interpretation,
truth, language and representation. In particular we were interested
in developing a visual and physical response to the insight that
we are always already located within constellations of practice.
All perception is mediated by prior understanding. All experience
is interpretation.
We were also interested in developing modes of expression that
draw on specific qualities of digital media. Processes of classification
and random combination lie at the heart of the work. These are
supported through the use of a database and random generation
algorithms. Combinations of images and categories that might not
otherwise come to light are constructed.
The images themselves are marked by digital technologies. Video
footage was captured on small hand held cameras. This allowed
relatively unobtrusive access to environments. The variations
in depth of field resulting from the use of this technology played
into the construction and selection of images. The final images
are stills extracted from video footage. They read as fragments
in time and space and thus refer to a context from which they
were ‘extracted.’ In contrast to the desire for self-contained
simulation that lies behind many virtual reality projects we were
interested in activating references to external phenomena. Finally
the consistency in the format and presentation of images achieved
through digital processing facilitates the construction of relationships
between the images. The viewer is encouraged to read coincident
fragments as a whole.
In the course of developing this project we found ourselves focusing
on three key processes – framing, articulating and automating.
All three processes were prevalent in our practice. Perhaps more
importantly, all three processes are prevalent in our day to day
experience. The framing of experience is the central preoccupation
of entire professions – public relations, advertising, the
various design professions. We negotiate the outcomes of these
activities on a regular basis. The articulation of values
is similarly entrenched in our day to day negotiations. The articulation
of these values may be explicit – as in expressed opinion
– or implicit – expressed through our actions. Finally
the automation of activities from travel to preparing a document
is something that is so familiar that it typically resides in
the background of our conscious experience. The database, in particular,
has far reaching implications in terms of the nature of activities
that we engage in and will engage in the future. In the following
sections we describe the ways in which the processes of framing,
articulating and automating informed the development of this project.
Framing
Information economies are in large part economies engaged in defining
orientations – in framing. Branding and identity systems
are perhaps the most explicit outcomes of this enterprise but
the framing of experience permeates all aspects of our lives –
it is manifest in the technologies and the specialist paradigms
that we employ, in our self perception, and in our perception
of objects and environments.
A case in point is the ‘branding’ mentality associated
with many urban developments: the development of Times Square,
New York as a ‘family friendly’ urban space [Delany
1999]; Baron Hausmann’s nineteenth century development of
Paris as a city of boulevards; the mid century preoccupation with
zoning [Jacobs 1962]; and more recent experiments in the construction
of ‘ideal environments’ such Celebration, Florida [Ross
2000]. Each of these projects may be considered to be an implementation
of a particular view of urban environments. Each of the projects
has been open to charges of ignoring the diversity of existing
urban environments.
The framing of urban environments was a theme taken up by the
Situationist International in the 1960s. In The Society of
the Spectacle Guy Debord [1994] laments the reorganisation
of Les Halles, a part of Paris that had been a marketplace since
medieval times. As in the case of Times Square, the bars, drug
dealers and sex shops of Les Halles were ‘redeveloped.’
The site became home to a large shopping arcade and cultural center.
A single interpretation of Les Halles, it's economic function
as a marketplace, was retained. Its street culture was resurrected
as museum culture.
Debord saw this transformation as undesirable not because he opposed
destruction of tradition but because it paved the way for greater
regulation of the urban environment. He believed that western
cities were possessed of an inexorable will toward regulation
of the most important aspects of individual human experience.
Urban time and space were to be organized with a view to ever
increasing efficiency. This regulation streamlined the operation
of a capitalist economic and cultural system.
In distinguishing authentic from inauthentic experience, the Situationists
advanced the idea that the images and objects that surround us
have the capacity to shape our behavior because they are touchstones
that inscribe habitual associations and trigger particular memories.
Combinations of images and objects coalesce forming networks,
sequences or clusters of meaning that accrue the capacity to elicit
particular and often predictable responses and modes of behavior.
The distinction between authentic and inauthentic experience has
important parallels in the work of Heidegger [1962], particularly
his discussion of ‘idle gossip’ and ‘the they.’
Congealed, conventional modes of understanding are characterised
as inauthentic. Authentic understanding requires a more engaged,
reflective, primordial encounter with the phenomena being investigated.
Our current project – Real – is an exploration
of contemporary environments. We were interested in the ways in
which contemporary environments are conventionally framed and
in possible alternatives. In some senses the work is a response
to the work of the Situationists – we were interested in
exploring the legitimacy of their distinction between authentic
and inauthentic experience. We were also interested in the strategies
that they developed in an attempt to encounter urban environments
in ways that subverted conventional perceptions of those environments.
The Situationists bring a process orientation to framing the city.
In the strategy of the dérive the city is used as both
raw material and performative site. Environments are observed
without particular ideas of function and utility in mind and then
information is reflected on and processed in ways that reorient
possible interpretations. The dérive lets go of the first
premise of urban travel, to arrive at a destination, encouraging
the imaginative reorientation of intended functional modes of
the object and image world. The absence of separation between
city, participant and observer acknowledges the shaping power
of experience.
The strategy of détournement involves the reworking of
existing materials. The original form is imbedded in, and integral
to, the meaning of the reoriented form. Both these strategies
can be described as interventions into existing systems. Both
strategies highlight the tension between the stability of the
object within the total system of congealed function and
the interpretive transformation it may be subjected to.
The strategies employed in Real are loosely related to
those of the Situationists. We maintained the process orientation
of the dérive, bracketing functional concerns, recording
video footage at random, reflecting later on the possibilities
of that footage. We were interested in inserting technology into
the process. The formal qualities of the images produced using
a hand-held video camera play into readings of the environments
documented. In a move that has parallels with the strategy of
détournement, the materials of the environment are
reworked. In the digital installation the images are constantly
being recontextualised through juxtaposition with other images
and with database categories. Again there is interplay between
the original form and a revised reading of that form.
One final point should be made with regard to framing relates
to concepts of power manifest in the framing and reframing of
environments. Whereas the Situationists considered the congealing
of particular points of view to be driven by the interests of
a capitalist economic and cultural system we would like to admit
the possibility of a more implicit tendency towards order. Here
we draw on the insights of writers such as Heidegger [1962], Gadamer[1989],
Wittgenstein [1958] and Foucault[1983], insights which point to
the fact that the orientations that we bring to our understanding
of situations are largely implicit. We develop these orientations
through the taking over of practices. We are often unaware of
the orientations that we are bringing to particular situations.
The task of bringing a partial understanding of these orientations
to the fore involves considerable reflection and encounters with
alternative points of view. The promotion and incorporation of
particular points of view, then, is not necessarily driven by
conscious intention. Furthermore, where conscious intentions are
at play we will inevitably encounter a background of practices
that exceed those exercised with intention.
Articulating
Real and virtual; authentic and inauthentic; fact and conjecture
– oppositional terms that permeate our language and structure
our understanding. These terms make sense to us. We are continually
making distinctions between representation and ‘reality,’
between statements that seem more or less believable, between
the authenticity of product, people, experiences and environments.
As cultural producers we know we must bracket our use of these
terms – we understand that understanding is perspectival,
that representations are for us and that to claim any truth
value for our statements outside an appeal existing practices
of interpretation makes no sense. We know that the potential exists
for redescribing the world in a way that many of our judgments
about the authentic, the real and the true may change. In fact,
when we stand back and try to justify conventional distinctions
between reality and representation, fact and conjecture, authentic
and inauthentic products, persons or experiences, we find that
possibilities for subverting conventional assumptions are rife.
We see that representations are integral to our perception of
‘reality.’ We see that fact can only ever be conjecture.
We see that distinctions between authentic and inauthentic are
malleable.
Much has been made of the contingency of our ‘take on reality.’
What tends to be overlooked is the remarkable resilience of our
interpretative practices. It requires conscious effort to remind
ourselves of the potential contingency or our perspectives. We
can construct arguments that subvert conventional assumptions
only because these assumptions are relatively stable.
Real is a response to both the stability and the instability
of our practices. Part documentation of contemporary environments,
part catalogue of concepts, part machine for provoking shifts
in understanding – Real occupies ambiguous territory
between artifact, archive and argument.
As an artifact it acts as a locus for reflection on the interplay
between constellations of interpretive practices. Images and terms
are juxtaposed in varying combinations. Interpretations are invoked
and superceded. The temporal aspect of the medium is employed
with a view to directing attention to the practices of interpretation
that are brought into play.
As archive Real is a repository for visual documentation
of diverse aspects of contemporary environments: the rapidly constructed
infrastructure for commercial use in Shenzen, China; the leveling
of time and place that occurs in the British Airway’s Go
campaign; Christmas displays in store fronts in Hawaii, the practices
of museum display in Te Papa, New Zealand. The images are indexed
according to terms that convey assertions about ways in which
the phenomena documented play into our orientations. The term
prosthetic, for example, is used as an index to images
that reveal something of practices that extend the possibilities
of our bodies, relationships, and even time. The term nature,
is used to draw attention to practices that posit distinctions
between the natural and the artificial, the natural and the mediated,
or nature and man.
As argument Real is an assertion about both the resilience
and the contingency of our interpretive practices. The fact that
associations can be made between images and between categories
and images brings to the fore the significant stability of our
interpretative practices – practices that allow us to make
sense of the material presented. On the other hand the juxtaposition
of images with images and images with terms provokes reflection
on the material presented. An image initially viewed in one way
may be interpreted in a different way when considered in the light
of a subsequent image. The potential for change in our interpretative
practices is highlighted.
Automating
As already noted, one of our interests in this project has been
the exploration and acknowledgement of the perspectival nature
of our understanding. Our interest in working with digital technologies
lies in part in the opportunity to engage with those technologies
that are used to order information in the digital realm. In particular
we were interested in working with the form of the database.
Database technologies are now ubiquitous. They may be seen as
the product of a desire to stabilise perception by congealing
information – the phenomenon that the Situationists observed
in the development of modern cities. Computerised databases take
practices of organisation and order further than city planning
ever could. Database templates are designed with a view to avoiding
interpretive ambiguity. Databases encourage normative orientations
toward information. Databases serve up information in predefined
and largely predictable ways.
Our use of digital technologies embraces an important, and perhaps
contradictory, aspect of the medium – the potential for executing
random combinatorial operations. Because digital media are malleable
it is possible to conceive of digital data as endlessly fluid.
While this is true at a technical level it should be remembered
that in database projects digital data tends to be subsumed by
a structure that emerges from the assumptions and projections
about the purpose of the data at a given time. If archived digital
data isn’t as malleable as we would sometimes like to believe
it is also not as fixed or stable as we tend to believe in other
circumstances. Obviously possibilities exist to interrogate an
identical body of data in a number of different ways. Even if
we restrict ourselves to pragmatic, utilitarian motivations for
organizing data different pressures arise, different points of
view develop, that lead to data being either configured, viewed
or interpreted differently. If we view the desire for order that
underlies database design as a desire to know the world (the encyclopedic
impulse) then we see that data archives are always contingent
– they are representations of the world from points of view
that are prevalent at the time of their creation – but the
potential is there for subsequent reinterpretation and possibly
reconfiguration.
Our use of the database brings to the fore a rich set of interpretative
possibilities against a background of order established through
the database structure. We sought to enhance the potential for
reinterpretation through the random recombination of images within
the confines of that structure. The encyclopedic impulse is frustrated
by the fluidity of responses to images and responses to categories.
One final point should be made with regard to the issue of automation.
In many ways Real is a mechanism designed to illuminate
an argument. Mechanism is central to the work. The medium
is mechanism, image and language. Technologies can be every bit
as influential in constructing our perceptions of the world as
images or language. The computer for example has given us metaphors
of communication, community and mind. It is very easy, however,
to engage in the habit of conceiving of the computer as a passive
medium for the display or distribution of the content.
In this project we wanted to foreground the technology, to provoke
reflection on its operation as both mechanism and metaphor, to
highlight the potential of mechanism as a mode of expression analogous
to painting, sculpture, and literature, to reflect on the medium
through the medium itself.
Acknowledgements
This project was supported by research grants from The Waikato
Polytecnic, New Zealand and Massey University, New Zealand. Further
support in the form of accommodation, equipment and technical
advice was made available by the Massachusetts College of Art,
Massachusetts.
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