Modes of Spectating

Alison Oddey, Christine White

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781841502397
• eBook ISBN: 9781841502960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personal Success
• Index: Psychology

The notion of spectatorship has become of increasing interest as artists develop experimental works and manufacturers seek to produce the means for viewing such works. Modes of Spectating explores the visual landscapes which spectators encounter, and how they perceive what they view.The volume questions the effect of different mediums on the spectator and asks not only how we view, but also how what we view determines what artists create. Chapters discuss how gaming and televisual media and entertainment are used by young people, and the resulting psychological challenges of human beings in their new 'spectated' surroundings of virtual worlds and media. Themes explored include aesthetics, the body and mind and digital entertainment environments, looked at through the lenses of gaming art, photography, sculpture and performance, making it a useful text for scholars of all disciplines of media and art.

PART ONE: INTERACTIVE MEDIA AND YOUTH CULTURE

1

ALTERED STATES

Christine White

A beautifully designed videogame invokes wonder as the fine arts do, only in a uniquely kinetic way. Because the videogame must move, it cannot offer the lapidary balance of composition that we value in painting; on the other hand, because it can move, it is a way to experience architecture, and more than that to create it, in a way which photographs or drawings can never compete. If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture.¹

Steve Poole with these words attempts to raise in the viewer/user’s consciousness the prowess of the art forms that develop/create and enable the process of developing videogames. He invokes the sacred geometry that lies behind the presentation of the visual, as architectures of maths and music but it is commercial and global concerns that have given videogames prowess and their artistic merit is seldom celebrated. Success rated by popularity and usually accruing commercial value too, has often achieved little critical repute.

In The Location of Culture Homi K. Bhabha proposes that globalization must begin at home as this enables us to recognize the ‘predatory effects of global governance’;² he argues for the rights of cosmopolitanism to be recognized, rights of diversity and the richness of the history of human civilization. In all this, the individual’s claim for identity is a difficult path between the global and local, where ancestry and travel have changed our experiences, heritage and parentage beyond that of any other generation. In the last two decades more people have lived between or across national borders than ever before with one estimation from UNESCO as high as 40 million migrant workers, 20 million refugees and 20–25 million people displaced due to famine and civil war. The borders of culture are breaking down, and much of this breakdown is being determined by technologies of communication, be they computer, via e-mail or VOIP technologies, design images, which are part of a global culture transmitted via cable, wireless, terrestrial or extra-terrestrial technologies; the Internet and the interactive, downloads, pod casts, webpages and blogs, which contemplate and document human action and interaction in a way that could not have been thought possible 50 years ago.

A democratization is occurring which by offering the ability to speak in a global context, makes it far harder for oppressive regimes to maintain control, when the population of a country can get a perspective of their local world from a global context, from news media and local webblog comment.

The communications of people to people across the world have enabled many changes from local cultures and economies to global cultures and economies and these cross-border forays of cultural practice have altered ways of reading and perceiving. Professor Sue Thomas worked on a project called ‘Transliteracy – Reading in the Digital Age’. In 2005, she ran a conference looking at the use of the Internet and its possible causes for anxiety or opportunity. The research was particularly concerned with reading in the digital age. The claim and concern for scholars was that the web is primarily a textual medium, which, therefore, requires reading – often of more than two languages, one being predominately English. This emphasis on reading gives an enormous boost to text, however, it caused some concern and anxiety by the fluidity of reading possible on shifting platforms. The platforms could be blogs, e-mail, hypertext and mobile media. The concerns were that text was being superseded by image, audio or even ideogram as the communication language of choice, and of course, in the context of the conference’s research, that would change the nature of literacy.

The development of the global technology of communication has enabled an anarchic liberalism, where the evolving knowledge presented is not academically peer-reviewed but, as in the case of Wikipedia, is globally viewed, reviewed, and multi-edited by collaborators who are collaborating in providing edited definitions of knowledge. However, Wikipedia when launched in 2001, was originally inspired by the door-to-door selling of encyclopedia in the 1970s and a wish to use the computer to liberalize knowledge. Initially, the inventor asked academics to write definitions for the online-free-content-encyclopedia, but he decided that the entries were too dry and dull and so he opened the editorial role to everyone. Wikipedia encourages not only debate but in recent years has also been open to abuse, particularly with regard to, the number of times the entry on George Bush has had to be re-written or cleaned up.

The ways of reading the web are predominately visual, and it is rare for a viewer to simply read the pages one after another in a linear fashion; what is more usual is to edit as part of reading. We read a part, line or paragraph, skip irrelevant content and move through the information to find what we want. Often this is navigation done through visual structures, and by and through a sense of associative ideas. If this is the case, are we losing narrative structure and are the readers enabled by this seeming lack of coherence? This lack of coherence may in fact be what is attractive. This random kind of thinking/viewing is a very liberal response to creativity without a defining knowledge of narrative coherence. What impact does this liberalism and use of associative connections have on the brain if it is now so prominent a style of communication? Is there a problem with the lack of coherence? In his famous book, Homo Ludens: a study of play-element in culture, Huizinga writes, ‘any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own’.³ This suggests that although, as he details in his book, play can be found in all human activity it is also able to be a thing/experience in itself. A feature of the new tools of communication has been their immediate integration into activities which constitute play.

In the global transliteration of information and the dissemination of thought and image, we may be able to chart the activity of human history changed or potentially changed by an endless communication, but what happens in the local sense to our use and absorption of images and information? What happens in the most local point of consciousness to this information and how do we process our reactions and behaviours accordingly? In this global arena, what happens in the local, locality of the brain? This chapter looks at questions for the local brought about by the global digitalization and visualization communications systems, which we take for granted and do not analyze with regard to the effect on our brains and brain function.

The separation of distinct reactions to image technology and image product has brought about a significant response to such technologies. In the late twentieth century we have invariably argued about the dangers of too much television watching for children and generally there is a perceived wisdom in limiting the time with which children have contact with computers, also based on a similar presumption. This sense of what is good for children is contrary to what is endured by most adults in both work-place and home situations – namely to sit for long periods of time, often several hours, working at the computer work-station. This rather hypocritical interaction between machines and humans of differing ages and experiences further confounds our responses to how we ‘should’ be responding to time in the company of technologies.⁴ For what exactly are we protecting children from whilst not protecting ourselves as adults? We might be concerned for our children, thinking that prolonged activity on the Internet might lead them to unsuitable chat rooms or pornography sites where they could be groomed by paedophiles. A need to protect from this threat is therefore rational, sensible and some would say imperative. However, our response to the televisual world is negotiated by ideas of too much exposure. Certainly in the 1980s some sociological studies were made into the reactions of societies in non-televisual contexts and how their society communicated in the now lost ways of pre-TV communities.⁵ However, what was the danger here? Indoctrination? The diminished conversational skills of these populations? The lack of work achieved due to this new technological distraction? It was more to do with the potential soporific nature of this technology on human behaviour and a perceived problem of visual imagery taking over and taking precedence from a literary or verbal culture, a culture of great art in terms of literatures, of poetry and prose.

In the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century, with many countries of the world investing in design and design research, we can see that the visual culture, which surrounds us, in many mediums and technological forms, is affecting our reception of and responses to communication. In the adage that ‘a picture tells a thousand words’, we as a global culture can quickly respond to televisual reports and fast moving images, and are able to determine messages in complex forms from the array of sequenced images put to us. Contemporary insights about the interconnections between modern imaging systems and their historical and perceptual impact on our human imagination can be both surprising and unforeseen. However, it is harder to promote new technologies as ‘new’, as they are not developing a unique category of perception. However, what these imaging systems do is privilege the cybernetic richness and sensory density fusing patterns of information that are mediated by technologies.

In the last twenty years, scientists have begun to take the phenomenon of synaesthesia more seriously as neuroscience has developed as a field of medical practice. However, the testing for synaesthesia as a mechanism must be countered by the notion of differences and similarities of perception that have arisen in the arts.⁶ The implication of synaesthesia for theories of consciousness for painting, literature, music and performing arts are legion. Scenography embodies the arts of music, design, sculpture, paint, light and dimensional design and as such the notion of perceptions of spaces and responses to such design spaces is always based on an understanding, perhaps non-scientific, of the potential synaesthetics of such performance spaces.⁷

Harrison and Baron-Cohen produced their book on synaesthesia because they felt there was enough scientific evidence to warrant the discussion of different modes of perception.⁸ Their definition of synaesthesia is where one sensory modality automatically triggers a perceptual experience when no direct stimulation to this second modality has occurred. This definition would be a natural explanation of what might be occurring in digitalized visualizations. In fact, one might from this premise suggest that performance and scenography have purposely set out to develop an audience’s ability to respond synaesthetically to what is presented. Whilst states of synaesthesia can be reproduced through hallucinogenic drugs, performers desire such altered states for their audiences, and many audiences indulge in spectating to lose themselves by the nature of skipping through associative states, whilst being provoked by sound, light and form in space. This might indeed be one explanation for the popularity of contemporary and modern dance, which offers abstractions and visual stimuli for the spectator to enjoy. These altered states demonstrate the skills of design, the development of associative thought and the nature of artistic perception, which becomes a part of a less conscious art. This associative process may be a productive way of interrogating the design process, but what of the visualizations and their resultant effect on the audience?

The context of performance now encompasses the media of TV, film, theatre, DVD, Internet, web-blogs and people of all ages are interested in and intrigued by the possibilities that fast moving...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Visions Now: Life is a Screen
• Part One: Interactive Media and Youth Culture
• Part Two: Imaginative Escape
• Part Three: Identity and the Self-conscious Spectator
• Part Four: The Site of Spectating
• Selected Bibliography
• Authors Biographies
• Index