“Imagine you are
falling. But there is no ground.” (Hito Steyerl)
This is a weird idea that Hito Steyerl proposes. If there is no ground
to fall toward, there is no sense of falling, and as such, as Steyerl proposes “it could initiate a sensation of stasis.
Or, the void. Black holes. Vertigo. This thought took me instantly to the
Existential Void and the “malaise of existence.” It reminds me of dreams of
free fall that are supposedly the mind’s symbolic way of alerting to a life
situation that has grown out of control or things going downhill quickly. Furthermore,
she suggests, that while one is falling, there is this feeling of “floating, or
not moving at all,” brief moment of disorientation before on catches sight of
what one is falling toward.
Steyerl claims that
“disorientation” happens “partly due to the loss of a stable horizon,”
that is an idea I find very intruiging. In particular, the creation of an
“artifical stable horizon.” A thought provoking claim is made here by Steyerl
who relates the emergence of tools like …the sextant that allowed sailors to
calculate the exact position to “colonialism and the spread of a capitalist global
market”. I was first reminded of Nietzsche, who writes in his essay Who killed God?, “Who gave us the sponge
to wipe away the entire horizon? …… Whither are we moving now? Away from all
suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all
directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an
infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become
colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time?”
The problem with linear perspective is, according to Steyerl, typically
disregarded. The horizon is conceived as an abstract flat line upon which the
points on any horizontal plane converge.
The
vertical perspective, or the lack of lines coalescing into a horizontal line
reminded me of photographs by Benny Lam, which are labeled with a QR code which
opens up to a petition to the Hong Kong government for better living conditions
for the lower and middle-lower income residents of Hong Kong.
According to
Steyerl, ‘the perspective from above establishes an imaginary floating observer
and an imaginary stable ground, which for her creates a visual “normality – a
new subjectivity that is folded into surveillance technology and screen-based
distraction”
This brings to
mind images that one has seen by drones, like the Gorgon Stare, that has spherical array of nine cameras
attached to it, which allow the viewer to observe 12 different perspectives at
any time.
For Steyerl “montage becomes a perfect device for
destabilizing the observers’ perspective and breaking down linear time.”
She points to the
film “Enter the Void” by Gaspar Noé: A gaze that penetrates space from the perspective of
a disembodied point of view as it travels rapidly from past to present in continuous
blur and rapid velocity. The sense of verticality is amplified by aerial shots
from bird’s eye view and sense of gravity is lost by the camera’s frequent
rotation. Most perspectives are shot from bird’s eye view as the camera travels
through buildings, walls, and corridors.
Steyerl
poses interesting questions here, such as “do these tropes, allegorized in a
single (and frankly, god-awful) movie be
expanded into a more general analysis of disembodies hovering point of views?
Moreover, “ do the aerial views, drone perspectives, and 3-D dives into abysses
stand in for the gazes of “dead white males,” a worldview that lost its
vitality, yet persist as an undead but powerful tool to police the world and control
its own reproductions?
No comments:
Post a Comment