Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media

The Prosaic Image

Helen Grace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415830638
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134665020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book argues that ubiquitous media and user-created content establish a new perception of the world that can be called 'particulate vision', involving a different relation to reality that better represents the atomization of contemporary experience especially apparent in social media. Drawing on extensive original research including detailed ethnographic investigation of camera phone practices in Hong Kong, as well as visual analysis identifying the patterns, regularities and genres of such work, it shows how new distributed forms of creativity and subjectivity now work to shift our perceptions of the everyday. The book analyses the specific features of these new developments – the components of what can be called a 'general aesthesia' – and it focuses on the originality and innovation of amateur practices, developing a model for making sense of the huge proliferation of images in contemporary culture, discovering rhythms and tempo in this work and showing why it matters.

1 Spectral monumentality and the face of time

Virtuality, distortions of scale and asynchrony in post-colonial Hong Kong

… visuality itself has become such a totally open and yet totally mediated field of negotiations. Precisely because anything can instantly be transformed into an electronic virtuality and because so many of our experiences now come to us first in the form of technologically mediated images, the status of the visual as such is likely to become increasingly problematic – polysemic, unpredictable, yet unavoidable…. How to deal with the seemingly obvious or literal appeal of the visual while being mindful of the complexity of engaging with vision?

Chow, 2004, 679

It is difficult to find a better metaphor of remembrance than a vanished sound recalled.

Wu, 2005, 140

For some days and nights before the final Star Ferry service to the old Central terminal on Hong Kong Island in November 2006, crowds gathered to take photographs¹ and, in particular, to bear witness to the final clock toll at midnight on 11 November. Estimates put the number on the final day at 150,000 – the scale of a large demonstration (Lai, SCMP, 2007, A12). On the surface, it was hard to know whether the unprecedented numbers of photographers, both amateur and professional, were like a pack of paparazzi, chasing a celebrity to her death, since there was a sense of waiting for a significant event to occur or the imminent arrival of someone important. In this case, perhaps the ‘important’ people (‘temporary celebrities’?) were simply those ordinary passengers taking the ferry, continuing to move backwards and forwards across the harbour, as testimony to an everyday practice, resisting change, but equally adapting to it and surviving.

At the same time, there was a sense that the photographers were engaged in another kind of deathwatch, like the members of a large family, keeping vigil by the deathbed of an elderly and esteemed relative. And a third option exists: that this phenomenon of the frenzied proliferation of images might also be giving witness to a fresh idea of ‘Hong Kong-ness’, embodied in the Star Ferry symbol as a register of a particular form of renewed consciousness directed towards the possibilities of active citizenship. For these proponents, this was not a ‘deathwatch’ at all, but the opposite: a battleground for the preservation of a site. Within such a consciousness, a future of ‘universal suffrage’ is imagined along with the projection of a past that is worth remembering and preserving rather than ignoring – or treating it as something from which it is necessary to escape.

In this chapter, I will consider the phenomenal proliferation of images at this moment of intense local mobilization and try to figure out what it might signal, as a means of introducing the image space of Hong Kong, beyond the spectacularity of the image of the global city. The highly visible and public production of images at a moment of particular local intensity draws attention to the ways in which new forms of the technical image are so readily embodied in everyday practice, visualizing public as well as private memories, and most notably blurring the distinction between public and private.

To some extent, the Star Ferry mobilization marks the arrival of a new generational awareness of politics in Hong Kong, and a renewed activism amongst young people – the so-called ‘Post-Eighties Generation’ – challenging planning decisions, embarrassing the government and raising new questions of democracy in Hong Kong, in confrontational engagements and actual street battles. Protests of renewed intensity occurred in late 2009/early 2010 in opposition to development plans for a High Speed Rail line between Guangzhou and Hong Kong, which saw heated battles, the siege of the Legislative Council building by protesters during debate on the proposal, and the forced dispersal of the protesters, using pepper spray. The constitution of the so-called ‘Post-Eighties Generation’ as a specific social problem, threatening the stability of Hong Kong resulted in the hasty commissioning of official reports (Wu, 2010; Cheung G., 2010; Hui, 2010).

As researchers have widely observed, social networking and user-created content (UCC) are key forms/sites of expression in a dynamic use of the image in its most mundane aspects. We have access to many of these images via online image-sharing sites, such as YouTube,² flickr and social networking sites,³ though there are still thousands of images that may never surface. Although this book is primarily concerned with more mundane camera phone pictures, in this chapter I focus on social activist videos on YouTube, and I also refer to work made by activist groups such as Inmedia.⁴ I am especially interested in the act of photography under these circumstances and what it might mean for a consideration of participatory democracy in a post-colonial context. I am deliberately not making a clear distinction between the products of this action – still photography and video – because technological convergence has largely eliminated this distinction and most ubiquitous ‘capture’ devices, especially mobile phones and digital cameras, have capacity to record stills, still sequence and video recordings, and in image display technologies, still images are frequently ‘animated’ in automated slide show loops. The still image thus no longer records a ‘frozen’ moment in time but is rather situated in a generalized dynamic animation of visual space.

More generally, there is the question of what role the image plays in constituting historical memory in an embodied sense – especially in a city that is characterized in many ways as image. Here I am interested in the generation of images and their circulation as a process of self-writing within new circuits of technological exchange and the local particularities of these practices.

The chapter examines the extent to which historical memory of colonial experience is still, in part, materially constitutive of Hong Kong's post-colonial consciousness – and this is registered in community activism around the preservation of sites marked for demolition. What this activism produces is what I will call a spectral monumentality, a bringing into existence of invisible monuments – in this case, the memories of demolished structures which survive in an embodied form, supported by miniature images in the digital photographs uploaded and shared on internet sites, and small, publicly available documentary movies posted on YouTube.

The timing of the actions which followed the closure of the Star Ferry pier and the silencing of the clock tower condenses a whole series of significant dates in Hong Kong history – the Star Ferry riots of 1966; the 1967 ‘Cultural Revolution’ riots; the year 1997 and its tenth anniversary in 2007; the year 1989 which intervenes in the linear series, 1966–1967–1997 and is actively remembered in 4 June candlelight vigils each year; the huge pro-democracy march of 1 July 2003 as the city was recovering from SARS (see Chiu and Lui, 2000; Loh, 2010; Lee and Chan, 2012).

Each of these moments in time is remembered and ‘revisualized’ perhaps more in the affective engagement with an emblematic sound as opposed to an image – the chimes of the Star Ferry clock. The focus on this site seems anachronistic because it is a mechanical clock in a city that has been a global centre of electronic watchmaking, and because its Westminster chimes provide an uncanny echo of the city's colonial legacy which, ironically, activists are at this moment engaged in fighting to preserve.

In thinking about the excessive repetition of image-production at this moment, I want to extend the discussion of time and the formation of political space which Wu Hung (2005) masterfully elaborates in his book on the remaking of Beijing, as well as considering the function of the monument more generally, via reference to the nature of iconoclasm in the post-imperial context. If time is a very general and cosmological concept, an historical construct and a phenomenon embedded in artifacts, it also has a very practical and mundane dimension in watchmaking which, until the last decade, has been one of Hong Kong's key manufacturing industries and exports. In 1988, the export value of watch production exceeded that of the toy industry and was the third most important export behind clothing and textiles and electronics (Glasmeier, 1994, 233). Between 1994 and 2006, the size of the industry in Hong Kong declined by 90 per cent, as manufacture moved to the mainland (see Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 2007). Hong Kong is now the second largest importer of Swiss watches in the world.

Horizontal monumentality and official iconoclasm

Hong Kong is not a city filled with monuments in the sense that Alois Riegl discusses them in his influential essay, The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and its Origin. This essay was written when Riegl was editor of a government commission journal on the research and preservation of monuments in the late Habsburg period, as the monarchy began its fade into oblivion (Riegl, 1903; English translation, 1982; see also Gubser, 2006). The shadow of this essay is still to be seen even in the 1976 Hong Kong Antiquities and Monuments Ordinance, which defines monuments principally in terms of Riegl's concept of ‘age value’ and its distinction from ‘historical value’. So it is of historical significance (in terms of the nature of history and memory) that a local activism has recently arisen to declare certain relatively contemporary structures as monuments, in order to preserve them as local sites of collective memory.

Mikhail Yampolsky suggests that monuments are partially magical instruments in their impact on the structure of time – to the extent that their erection has the magical aim or desire of changing time's course or avoiding its influence. This is evidenced in the generally static structure of the monument and an imposed distance surrounding it in official urban planning, separating it from the people, creating a kind of ‘sacral zone’ which requires meditation on the nature of time (Yampolsky, 1995). There is no place for such sites in a city whose architecture already overwhelms the essential verticality of monumental space – a space, which is above all designed to diminish the spectator in the colossal form of the monument. This means that there is a very different sense in which the monumental might be understood in such a place. For example, it seems entirely appropriate that ‘Statue Square’ in Central is a key site for domestic workers to occupy on Sundays, but no-one can remember whether there actually are statues in the square or who is being monumentalized. (Statues of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, King George V and King Edward VII and Sir Thomas Jackson [HSBC chief in the late nineteenth century] occupied the space until their removal during Japanese occupation. The only statue that remai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘Dynamic sequencing of cultural genomes’?
• 1 Spectral monumentality and the face of time: virtuality, distortions of scale and asynchrony in post-coloni Hong Kong
• 2 The surrogate image and blog life: mobility in the everyday blogosphere
• 3 Sounding the image: between visuality and orality
• 4 Particulate vision and the evasion of capture
• 5 iPhone girl: assembly, assemblages and affect in the life of an image
• Appendix: on methods
• Bibliography
• Index