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‘How Video Shapes Urban Experience’,
paper presented at the Humanities
and Technology Association Conference, ReConfigurations:
Arts, Humanities, and Technology
in the Urban Environment,
Borough of Manhattan Community
College, The City University
of New York, 7 October 2006.
This informal presentation
was accompanied by a series
of photographs and was introduced as follows.
 What
I would like to do (as far as
I can in a short talk) is to
unfold the implications of the
phrase I have chosen as my headline,
or at least suggest how such
and unfolding might proceed.
Reflecting on how video shapes
urban experience, my thoughts
tend to spread, to flow into
all the places and gaps in daily
life which video has infiltrated
and inhabits. From the mainstream
of public culture to the backwaters
of private life, from mass-consumption
at home to closed circuits in
the street, from fantastic desires
to reality-TV, video binds our
experience, twisting and braiding
the strands normally separated
as ‘public’ and ‘private’.
The images you are seeing are an accidental
inventory of the urban phenomena of video familiar
to everyone. I call it an accidental inventory
because it is not a systematic survey. I did
not go out of my way to take any of these photographs,
although I have to admit I have become something
of a video spotter, not to say voyeur. Maybe
it’s because I don’t have a TV at
home.
The photographs demonstrate how a small set
of technologies supports a large set of applications
at different scales: from the infrastructure
of terrestrial, satellite, cable and mobile
networks, through the equipment of the home,
the workplace, commercial and public spaces,
to systems of surveillance and control. Each
photograph offers a document which would repay
analysis, tracing the web of interactions between
of media and architecture, subject and commodity,
identity and desire, the city and its phantasmagoria.
Describing a few of them might serve to underline
the complexity of the topic and how difficult
it would be to come to a stable generalised
conclusion. As Anna McCarthy points out, video
is always site specific, but often in unexpected
ways.
Shooting an Indian pop video in central London .
(Not) watching a Brazilian soap opera in Bratislava.
Playing real pingpong in virtual Shibuya in
a London arcade.
The President in person, screened for/from
the public.
Reverent close-up of the Pope and subversion
of the architecture of St Peter’s
Square.
Sex and the City at the subway entrance.
The question is, what does this have to say
to a meeting of the humanities and technology
association, or rather, what does it say about
the association between humanities and technology?
My heading, how video shapes urban experience,
ought to have the stress first
on ‘How’.
That is, the ways and means:
how the technologies and codes
of video appear and operate in
urban environments. Video is not only or principally
an object: a TV set, billboard screen or DVD.
Neither is video only or principally a text,
a TV show, art work or advertisement. Video
is a set of mediating devices and must be counted
among what are called ‘pervasive technologies’.
Secondly, I would emphasise that ‘Experience’ implies
a subject, a situation and the relationship
between them. We would have to take account
of the role of video in forming subjectivities,
the impact of video on the material and social
environments of the city and the potential of
video as an artistic medium to give form to
experience. Experience is both formed and informed
by video, and the subject both identified and
conditioned by it. We could pertinently ask
whether a given use of video assumes or constructs
the subject as a citizen, a consumer or a suspect;
a participant or a voyeur; an individual or
a member of a collective. We should also ask
under what conditions the urban subject conforms
with such assumptions. We should examine how
we become the subjects of video’s seeing:
in front of the TV set, with camcorder or cell
phone in hand, and under the watchful eye of
video surveillance.
It’s pointless to claim that video is ‘essentially’ about
distance, for example, or ‘essentially’ about presence,
as one still finds — in my opinion, almost
as implausibly — in
discussions of cinema and theatre
and, for that mattter, karaoke,
as if these effects were caused
by the technology. Video gives
the lie to the claim that can
still be heard in discussions
of art and literature that reflexivity
is the mark of the avant-garde.
It is almost the norm on TV.
It is the aesthetic lure of surveillance.
It is at home in home video.
The meaning of these relations is dependent
on subjectivity. That is, it depends who you
are ...
 ...
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...
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