Art, the Sublime, and Movement

Spaced Out

Amanda du Preez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000540956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

This book is a critical interdisciplinary approach to the study of contemporary visual culture and image studies, exploring ideas about space and place and ultimately contributing to the debates about being human in the digital age.

The upward and downward pull seem in a constant contest for humanity's attention. Both forces are powerful in the effects and affects they invoke. When tracing this iconological history, Amanda du Preez starts in the early nineteenth century, moving into the twentieth century and then spanning the whole century up to contemporary twenty-first century screen culture and space travels. Du Preez parses the intersecting pathways between Heaven and Earth, up and down, flying and falling through the concept of being "spaced out". The idea of being "spaced out" is applied as a metaphor to trace the visual history of sublime encounters that displace Earth, gravity, locality, belonging, home, real life, and embodiment.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, media and cultural studies, phenomenology, digital culture, mobility studies, and urban studies.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780367501624-1

What would the visual history of climbing, balancing, ascending into the heavens, just to tumble again into the unknown, look like? As we gaze up at the sky, while gravity pulls at our legs, we often stumble, fall, and get up to rise once more – ours is a story of intersecting spatial forces. The powers of up and down, in and out, left and right, do not only direct us physically but fill our hearts and occupy our minds as well. How we perceive our place in space is through our bodies and specifically through the directionality of the body: “In a literal sense, the human body is the measure of direction, location, and distance”.¹ There is a solid experiential basis to metaphors such as “feeling down” and being “down to earth” or in the “seventh heaven”. As well as to the exclamation that “I am still standing” or walking on “cloud nine”.² These are powerful mental and psychological compasses and thus guiding “metaphors to live by”.³

When attempting to visually trace the history of these intersecting spatial force fields, I apply my attention selectively and synchronically, by sampling examples that stretch over the period from the nineteenth century, up to the contemporary twentieth-first-century screen spaces and outer space travels. A lot of ground is covered without aiming to provide a comprehensive or chronological visual history. The goal is more to highlight selected figures, agents, images, and moments that show a particular trajectory of human movement across time, space, and place. These image events or pathways through space are choreographed through the sublime and the concept of being “spaced out”. In other words, the hermeneutic lens that I use is one that explores these images and ideas by utilising the concept of spaced out as a significant geo-spatial and temporal principle that structures and directs aspects of human engagement with place, space, and time.

Let me begin by explaining what is meant by spaced out within this visual exploration. Perhaps a few vignettes may set the scene:

#1

You know that moment when you sit across someone, in the bus or waiting for your plane, when they talk and gesture animatedly. Your first response is to make eye contact and mime with your lips “are you talking to me?”, only to realise the person is oblivious to your existence. There is a blank look in their eyes as if they are staring at an invisible wall. They are hooked up to their phones talking to someone else who is not here, except perhaps per voice on the earphones. The person sitting across you is also not quite “here” or present. Although you can see and hear them, and maybe even touch, they are somewhere else whilst being here. They are, in what I would like to term a “spaced out” sphere. Neither completely here nor there entirely but occupying a new space that is in the public and private simultaneously. We live together whilst being separate. We even fill the same place but not necessarily the same space. For all practical purposes, the person opposite me has been transported, or tele-transported.

#2

The implosion of the communicative and phenomenological space between us can also be transposed in a sense to another person sitting next to the previous person chatting into space. This young man is similarly plugged-in to his phone and listening to his favourite tracks as he rhythmically sways his head. The connection between him and the music is intimate as it pours directly into his eardrums. The space between has imploded. No longer does he require a playback instrument like a turntable, or tape deck to listen to music. Neither does he require the space between himself and the turntable to carry the sound waves to him. He is intimately connected and the distance that the digitally produced sound waves must travel to his inner being is nanoseconds per millimetre. The space between has shrunk. There is no more in-between space, or stated differently, we are spaced out.

#3

Remember the lockdown blues, when you felt as if you have been atrophied? Your world shrunk to a few screens. Your body became the last screen, the last frontier, even the last interface. The screens opened your world to unknown new opportunities: to attend seminars and conferences online that would not have been possible previously. But soon screen fatigue sets in, it is all the same, talking heads. In the background you hear Grimes singing “Unrest is in the soul, we don’t move our bodies anymore”. And a melancholic sympathy for Howard Hughes enters – I am caught in a spaced out, non-functional inertia. Google asks that I verify myself. It is me, all right, but perhaps just logging-in from another account.

None of the situations sketched above should be unfamiliar and I am sure most readers will be able to associate with the scenarios. These snippets are teasers and do not exhaust the concept of spaced out entirely. More footwork is required for the idea of being spaced out is utilised here as both metaphor and phenomenological state. To be spaced out means to be literally out of space or in some sense to be in another (outer) space. If one is spaced out, you have no space or place left to go or even worse no place to be – after all planet Earth is overextended and exhausted.

Spaced Out

I realise that the concept of spaced out may immediately conjure images of a Timothy Leary-like trance induced by hallucinogenic substances and psychedelic drugs. Although this is perhaps not the exact meaning that I would like to evoke here, spaced out does mean to be blown away in awe, and not to be wholly aware or present, as is typical of sublime experiences. In a state of being spaced out, one is treading on thin air or may just as well be walking on the moon. The theme of suspension or a “mental freeze” is taken up in Masked Wolf’s track, titled Astronaut in the Ocean (2019), which confesses:

When these people talk too much

When your brain goes numb you call that mental freeze

Rolling down in the deep

I feel like an astronaut in the ocean.

For the Masked Wolf, spaced out feels like going down to the bottom of the ocean, which is experienced like another planet and hence the astronaut reference. This is a powerful metaphor for it encapsulates the estrangement, suspension, and numbness of being spaced out. The radical deferment also reminds of Andrei Ujica’s film, Out of the Present (1997), that chronicles the spaced out existence of the Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, banished on the MIR space station for ten months. Krikalev’s journey was launched from the Soviet Union in May 1991 and upon his return in March 1992, he landed in Russia. In other words, while he hovered in outer space, the world below changed drastically, but he did not participate in the events for he was outside, locked in a “out-of-the-present” hiatus. He became an external observer, an alien even, looking back on Earth.

We can accordingly link Krikalev’s “out-of-the-present” situation with another more recent trend namely what is referred to as “the extreme present”. This state transpires, according to Douglas Coupland, Shumon Basar, and Hans Ulrich Obrist in The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present (2015), because the human subject struggles to keep up with rapid technological changes and lags behind in creating appropriate language to understand the new experiences. According to the authors, who are channelling a twentieth-first-century McLuhanesque criticism, we are suffering acute “change vertigo”. Therefore, we need neologisms such as deselfing, accelerationism, posthastism, smupid, monophobia, and blank-collar workers to catch up to the world that is melting.⁴

The authors take their thesis a notch further in their latest publication The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021) that scrutinises the status of the self through extreme “self-portraits”. The agency of the self has imploded but not as a synthesis between self and other to create a new entity, but rather blended into unexpected and darker versions. Questions about the extreme self are posed through text art: “What is the opposite of you? … me? … a crowd? … a machine? … some as yet unnamed entity?” In our spaced out state, we no longer have fixed ideas about what the self is, let alone what its opposite may be. These concepts are “up for grabs”, so to speak. Although we may judge the volumes for their glibness and propagation of moral panic, they do reflect “the discombobulated stasis of our neurally networked selves”.⁵ Naturally this confused stasis corresponds with the state of spaced outness that I aim to uncover here.

My extension of the spaced out concept accordingly builds on several forerunners such as the so-called masters of implosion, namely Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio.⁶ McLuhan’s ideas of a discarnate existence that paradoxically sits at the interlock “between participation with the electronic media on the one hand, and the decline of an older, private identity on the other”.⁷ Although McLuhan died before the advent of the internet and the burgeoning of social media, he accurately predicted the “phantom electronic world” that is more than “a succession of objects, moments or arguments” but becomes a “simultaneous barrage of electronic simulations which requires an intense involvement on the part of the hearer, listener and viewer”.⁸ This new domain thus requires “high involvement” and yet ironic distancing at the same time. McLuhan describes the process as follows:

At the speed of light, minus his physical body, man is discarnate, and discarnate man is not related to the ‘Natural Law.’ His sudden emancipation from Natural law, in a sense, makes him ‘greater than the angels.’ He can be everywhere at once, whereas they are subject to limitations of space and can only be in one space at a time.⁹

Readers will hopefully allow for the obvious link that can be made between the cosmonaut Krikalev’s outsideness and McLuhan’s description of how “electronic media” or digital media for our purposes creates disconnection. Interesting that when Paul Virilio interviews the director of Out of the Present, Andrei Ujica, he similarly concludes that what Krikalev lived through “relate[s] to this idea of the human’s becoming-angel, of a cosmic ‘angelicness’ [angelologie] taking the place of human nature, displacing the material, raw, animalistic human being in favor of an omnipotent eye”.¹⁰

What we are thus dealing with is a state akin to omnipotence where the subject is extended beyond human horizons into galaxies real and virtual, while simultaneously retracted to docility and even immobility. Spaced out is at once an enormous extension and contraction of space. Here Virilio’s employment of the phenomenon of polar inertia moves into focus, since “the polar moment of inertia in physics […] is, the force required to change the axis of movement of a spinning object” and can be used as a beguiling metaphor to unpack spaced outness in some of its manifestations. For Virilio, the concept is packed with conflating and sometimes even ambiguous meaning, but in short it refers to

the way in which technology driven by speed is increasingly diminishing physical movement – just like with a spinning disk […] the higher the speed of technology the more difficult movement becomes in con...