Urban and Post-Photographic Fragments — An Assemblage in the Digital City
Annabel Pretty, June 2023
‘Unreliable Landscapes’ is an interdisciplinary forum (web and print) for the presentation and discussion of art centred on the possibilities of imagining the digital poetics of city living. Congruently Unreliable Landscapes—Downtown Auckland1 is the title of David Cowlard’s aerial assemblage, a constellation of overlapping Google Earth ‘snapshots’ timestamped—viewing the progress of the construction of the City Rail Link, and the consequent demise of The Downtown Shopping Centre,2Hobson Street Auckland, paired with an evocative sound recording of squealing metal-on-metal rail recording. Are the audio recordings future focused (assemblage) or indeed those of the current state: readers slip seamlessly between both modes: unsure. Visual memories past and the audio future focused. One greets the works as an aerial flâneur-photographer3 moving through the landscape / city scape.
An Assemblage of Data
Google Earth and Google Street View (as used by Georgia Carr, Warisara Thomson, and Cowlard within Unreliable Landscapes) are two paradigms that contribute significantly to the artist creators’ toolbox but have a complex intertwining relationship with the spectator, the artist, and the originator. Roland Barthes writing in Camera Lucida4 introduces the hypothesis of the Operator, and the Spectator—the Spectator being the viewer and the Operator being the photographer, yet who is the operator in the authorship of this data-based, Google imagery. Is it the mechanical digital / logarithmic Google image-maker or the artists reinterpretation of Google’s imagery? Most post-photography artists would clearly side with the viewpoint that Google Earth is but a dataset,5 available for data mining, an endless resource of imagery, almost paralleling the analogue ‘found’ postcards of artist Tom Phillips in The Postcard Century: 2000 Cards and Their Messages 1900-2000.6 A further complication to Barthes notions of authorship and relationship—is the consideration of the positioning to the horizon within the usage of Google Earth. Hito Steyerl writes in the essay In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective, that the God’s-eye view or satellite view7 loses the relationship with the horizon. Nevertheless, Google Street View changes the relationship with the satellite-view—fragments of past images, an unstable disorientated horizon create a montage of interconnections. Montage,8 photomontage and assemblage9 become the optimal choice for unsettling the observer's viewpoint and dismantling linear time—fragmentary.
Fragments and Memory
Photographs are but fragments of memories past, of a time that cannot be re-made. Cowlards’s art-installation is photographically past-looking but nevertheless potentially future looking, in terms of the audio—the sound of future trains and yet the images of Google Earth’s past imagery—both fragments. An in-betweenness of the forward and past dichotomy. The notion of these image fragments (screen grabs) is a recurring theme within the current body of works within Unreliable Landscapes, as it relates to the concept of in-betweenness. Photographs are naturally, to an extensive part, fragments of the photographer’s visual experience, preserving what the operator was looking at, via the camera’s eye, at a given point in time—a version of reality made with thousands of fragments of possibilities—a possible cacophonic representation of reality for the spectator. Yet only represented with a singular sanctified viewpoint—the tangible confabulation of the studium and punctum as a spectrum.10
Photographic fragments are therefore enshrined, and thus consequentially deemed more essential and ‘real’ than any non-recorded moments. Cowlard, Carr and Thomson all engender the usage of fragmentary screen grabs, consequentially the evitable degradation, of image as they are re-presented—a complication of both authorship and viewability creates added complexity. Fragments of moments past. Jolanta Wawrzycka on interpreting Barthes would assert that “photography partakes in the economy of death and resurrection”.11 The metaphorical nature and role of both the urban and post-photography fragments,12 as well as the role of the analogical or metaphorical images, are examples of the continuity between Cubism and Surrealism, and the neo-avant-garde and post-photography. To paraphrase Sigfried Giedion, who writes extensively on how Cubism dissolved the three-dimensional space of the Euclidean geometry of the Renaissance as understood and reimagined—a process that has striking parallels with the way photomontage dissolves normative imagination.13 Returning to Steyerl who suggests that montage (consider both photomontage and Google Earth) has emerged as a valuable technique for disrupting the viewer’s perspective and deconstructing the notion of linear time. Through movements such as cubism, collage, and diverse forms of abstraction, painting (and photography) has largely forsaken representationalism and dismantled the principles of both linear perspectival time. Geoffrey Batchen’s writing in Forget Me Not —sets forth that
Memory, a ghost of the past, is continually conjured, brought back to life, as real component of the present. Shuttling us back and forth between the past and present, slowing down our perceptions and drawing them out, speeding us towards an ideal future, these photographic artefacts are like time machines14
Therefore alluding to the fact that memory is constantly summoned and resurrected as a fundamental component of the present. Photographic artefacts are like time travel, transporting us back and forth between the past and present, slowing down and drawing out our perceptions while speeding us towards an ideal speculative future. John Berger proposes that: “Memory serves as a sort of redemption, that which has been recorded is thus remembered and therefore not forgotten”.15
Seamlessness, Simulations, and Reality
These digital, filmic, video photomontages of Unreliable Landscapes’ draw attention to the seamlessness between images with the goal of creating more intangible and more conceptual impressions amongst their audiences and have extended the collage effect beyond ironic playfulness, whimsy and humour. Contemporaneously, of course, creators (operators) deal both with the playful surreality of their imagery and have exploited the boundless possibilities of digital technology to create transparent and seamless images out of multiple photographic images. Jesús Vassallo in Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture debates the notion of the new world order of seamless digital imagery and proposes that:
This democratization of forgery shatters the indexical link of photography with reality. We are now much more vigilant when we approach an image, aware that may be looking at something other than a registration of reality. In severing the umbilical cord between the photograph and its object, the introduction of the digital blurs the division between observation and action, between representing the world and proposing new worlds.16
The idea of Unreliable Landscapes implies a seamless slippage between potential fictions and a possible authentic building(s), imbuing both qualities of the real and the unreal: a veritable uncanny17 moment. It is the whimsical implausibility and the seamless photomontage that cause a collision of reading for the spectator— playing into the surreal. Photographer and visual artist Filip Dujardin on being interviewed by Architect Wilhelmus ‘Winy’ Mass—in response to Mass’s question of his images being ‘uncanny’, Dujardin answers:
The parts themselves are nothing special, but by putting them in a different order, it makes the whole special. It’s what I do all the time: rearranging reality. Because reality is quite banal, ordinary commonplace18
To draw the conceptual threads together of Urban and Post-Photographic Fragments—An Assemblage in the Digital City, one might be well placed to consider the words of the filmmaker and writer Wim Wenders who reveals and exquisitely describes the wish for creative output as:
You have a wish. You wish that something might exist, and then you work on it until it does. You want to give something to the world, something truer, more beautiful, more painstaking, more serviceable, or simply something other than what already exists.19
1 David Cowlard, Unreliable Landscapes—Downtown Auckland, 2017, Video, HD video: 3” with stereo sound, 2017, https://vimeo.com/user181776097.
2 The forty-one-year lifespan of The Downtown Shopping Mall, opening in 1975 and closing in 2016, was replaced by Commercial Bay on the exact location. Corazon Miller, “End of an Era for Downtown Mall,” NZ Herald, May 28, 2016, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/end-of-an-era-for-aucklands-downtown- mall/VOIF63SE6T3QQDSDM3P5YIVMFM/.
3 Anthony Vidler, “The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary,” Assemblage, no. 21 (February 4, 1993): 52, https://doi.org/10.2307/3171214.
4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1980], trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982), 09. “The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photograph […].”
5 Lev. Manovich, The Language of New Media, The Language of New Media, Leonardo (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000), 249.
6 Tom Phillips, The Postcard Century: 2000 Cards and Their Messages 1900-2000 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000). The Tom Phillip’s archive at the Bodleian has more than a million unused and unseen postcards.
7 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, E-Flux Journal (Sternberg Press, 2013), 14.
8 Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 22.
9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980], ed. Felix Guattari, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 23.
10 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1980], 28.
11 Jean-Michel Rabaté, Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 95.
12 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004), 319.
13 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition., 5th ed., rev.enl., Charles Eliot Norton Lectures?; 1938-1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 434–35.
14 Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance (Amsterdam?: New York: Amsterdam?: Van Gogh Museum, 2004), 97.
15 John Berger, Understanding a Photograph, ed. Geoff Dyer (London: London?: Penguin Classics, 2013), 54.
16 Jesús Vassallo and Juan Herreros, “Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture,” in Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture, ed. Jesús Vassallo, Architecture at Rice University (Zurich, Switzerland: Park Books, 2016), 171.
17 Masahiro Mori, Karl MacDorman, and Norri Kageki, “The Uncanny Valley [From the Field],” IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19, no. 2 (June 2012): 98–100, https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811.
18 Winy Maas et al., Copy Paste: The Badass Architectural Copy Guide (Rotterdam: The Why Factory: nai010 Publishers, 2017), 81.
19 Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Boston: Faber, 1997), 78.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1980]. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982.
Batchen, Geoffrey. Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance. Amsterdam?: New York: Amsterdam?: Van Gogh Museum, 2004.
Berger, John. Understanding a Photograph. Edited by Geoff Dyer. London: London?: Penguin Classics, 2013.
Cowlard, David. Unreliable Landscapes—Downtown Auckland. 2017. Video, HD video: 3” with stereo sound. https://vimeo.com/user181776097.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980]. Edited by Felix Guattari. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press, 1987.
Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. 5th ed., rev.enl. Charles Eliot Norton Lectures?; 1938-1939. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Maas, Winy, Felix Madrazo, Adrien Ravon, and Diana Ibáñez López. Copy Paste: The Badass Architectural Copy Guide. Rotterdam: The Why Factory: nai010 Publishers, 2017.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Leonardo. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000.
Miller, Corazon. “End of an Era for Downtown Mall.” NZ Herald, May 28, 2016. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/end-of-an-era-for-aucklands-downtown- mall/VOIF63SE6T3QQDSDM3P5YIVMFM/.
Mori, Masahiro, Karl MacDorman, and Norri Kageki. “The Uncanny Valley [From the Field].” IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19, no. 2 (June 2012): 98–100. https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811.
Phillips, Tom. The Postcard Century: 2000 Cards and Their Messages 1900-2000. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Writing the Image After Roland Barthes. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. E-Flux Journal. Sternberg Press, 2013.
Vassallo, Jesús, and Juan Herreros. “Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture.” In Seamless?: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture, edited by Jesús Vassallo, 165–90. Architecture at Rice University. Zurich, Switzerland: Park Books, 2016.
Vesely, Dalibor. Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.
Vidler, Anthony. “The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary.” Assemblage, no. 21 (February 4, 1993): 45–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/3171214. Wenders, Wim. The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations. Translated by Michael Hofmann. London: Boston: Faber, 1997.