The First Vehicle of War M3 F19
El lugar de la calle como un no-lugar (descripción en espanol aquí). The place of the street as a non-place (different description in English below).
En su crítica del no-lugar, Peter Merriman argumenta que Augè pasa por alto las complejidades sociales involucradas y desarrolladas en el emplazamiento y uso de la infraestructura de la autopista (Merriman, 2004). Merriman sugiere que este espacio no es único en la historia de la comunicación y el transporte en masa, y que es similar a esos lugares y experiencias creadas por el ferrocarril y, anterior a eso, las diligencias de tracción animal. Para Merriman, la elaboración de un lugar incluye la planificación, diseño y construcción, y el uso diario que establece asociaciones y relaciones constantes. Sin embargo, Augè matiza su análisis al enfatizar que el lugar nunca se borra por completo, y el no-lugar nunca se completa totalmente. A través de esta brecha permanece la posibilidad de apropiación por uso. La F19 es inherentemente percibida a través del automóvil que, simultáneamente, ordena “el cuerpo, espacio y tiempo” por medio de la creación de dos zonas (Conley & MacLaren, 2009). La primera zona es el interior del vehículo como refugio y, a la vez, un aumento de lo corpóreo a alta velocidad. La segunda zona, creada por el automóvil, es el mundo exterior más allá de la cubierta del motor, mediado por las ventanas del vehículo, transmitido a través de la velocidad y recibido como una imagen consistentemente telescópica. Paul Virilo explora esta imagen a través de las dos aspectos de la velocidad involucrados en la realidad cinemática -el pequeño vehículo dinámico que es el automóvil y el grande y estático vehículo que es la carretera misma (Virilio, 2006). La imagen telescópica vista a través del parabrisas del pequeño vehículo dinámico es “el campo y paisaje desplegándose como en una cinta transportadora” hacia un horizonte negativo como constante punto de partida (ibid).
First Vehicle of War (El primer vehículo de la guerra) consistía de una serie de cinco proyecciones públicas a lo largo de toda la autopista F19. Estas proyecciones ocurrían secuencialmente durante las tardes de los días hábiles por una semana. La obra consistía de una proyección fija de una imagen compuesta de tres fotogramas de los estudios fotográficos del siglo XIX sobre la locomoción humana de Eadweard Muybridge. Los tres fotogramas secuenciales retratan a una mujer recogiendo un velo del suelo. La duración de las proyecciones es de 11 minutos, que es el tiempo que toma viajar por los 18 km de la autopista F19 a 100 km/h. La imagen compuesta era proyectada en los costados de la autopista F19 desde el lado del copiloto de un automóvil. A medida que la imagen proyectada pasaba por el paisaje fijo y la ingeniería del corredor de la autopista, ésta se iba animando, componiendo, escalando y editando. Los conductores de los otros vehículos eran los espectadores de este trabajo mientras nos acercábamos al límite máximo de velocidad.
La F19 es parte de una infraestructura para “el rápido movimiento de bienes y personas”, sin embargo, esta sección no mantiene “la solitaria contractualidad” de las transacciones mediadas no humanas – es de uso libre y no se encuentra controlada. First Vehicle of War es una transacción humanamente mediada que manifiesta identidad a través del gran vehículo estático que es el paisaje suburbano “desplegándose como en una cinta transportadora”. Los conductores del pequeño vehículo dinámico se encuentran unidos en su sedentario confinamiento por una imagen de tres mujeres que flotan en relativa proximidad a la velocidad colectiva de un grupo de individuos. 
En este sentido, el trabajo hace de la F19 por medio de su discontinuidad: una suspensión del espacio público como tiempo de viaje en vehículos privados. No obstante, la F19 es un lugar en su propio uso y forma por medio de sus asociaciones con esta condición suburbana. First Vehicle of War insiste y se conecta a la experiencia colectiva del espacio y tiempo de viaje en este espacio público suburbano.
The First Vehicle of War. A cinematic inversion of freeway travel.
F19 Freeway, Melbourne, Australia 2013
Anthony McInneny
Paul Virilio proposes that car travel
produces a cinematic landscape of automotive projection (Virilio & Degener, 2006). Freeway travel is a particular space of departure where we leave
behind the concept of place and, in this uninterrupted movement, “the interval glimmers, distorting
ceaselessly thanks to the displacement of the subject(s)” (Virilio & Degener, 2006, p. 151). The imposed velocity in the freeway’s seamless form visually prioritises
the mobile illusion of space as time in which “the country and landscape unwind like a drive belt” (ibid). In the
repeated daily use of the freeway, the landscape is remembered as a
displacement of space over the driver’s time through the temporality of travel.
This memory and representation is both futural and cyclic human time (Hoy, 2009), an interval of rapid movement towards a destination and, at the
same time, a daily retracing of steps through the infrastructure of
super-modernity (Augé 1995).
Super modernity, as described by
French Anthropologist Marc Augé, is characterised by excess – an
excess of time, space and the personalisation of references (an excess of ego).
Its infrastructure is designed for the rapid movement of goods and people. Augé categorises places like freeways as a
non-place.
“If a place can be described as relational,
historical and concerned with identity, then a space that cannot be defined as
relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (Augé, 1995, pp.77-78).
Despite
arguments about the place of the freeway as being similar to other spaces
created in the history of mass communication and transport, for example rail,
(Merriman 2004), the car produces an individual velocity of instantaneous
travel and coercive flexibility (Featherstone, Thrift, & Urry, 2005) that is optimised and manifest in
the freeway landscape. Augé emphasises that, in the infrastructure of
supermodernity, place is never fully erased and the non-place is never complete.
In this incompleteness resides the potential for appropriation.
Virilio’s analogy
of cinema and automobility is created through the relationship of the “small
dynamic vehicle” of the automobile and the “large static vehicle” of the road
infrastructure (Virilio & Degener, 2006). The cinematic experience of high-speed,
mobile anonymity is shared via the two spaces that the automobile itself creates
- the private space of the vehicle’s interior and the public space of
everywhere outside this prosthesis for movement (Conley & MacLaren 2009). However,
in the public space of the F19 freeway [1],
there is no public other than those inside the other vehicles within the
carriageway for a point and period of time in space.
In the artist project presented here,
the temporality of the freeway
landscape is cinematically inverted through an appropriation of its
communication and transport, use and relations.
Freeway
space is visually perceived as the displacement of the approaching landscape
coming into view, bending past the windscreens and receding in the framed past
of the rear-view mirror. We share this perception as a swarm of drivers,
looking forward, checking sideways, and glimpsing back.
Of a night, this freeway is an
autoscape of deceptive ease traversed in the mass behaviour of a requisite
speed that oscillates within an accepted variance of 100 kilometres per hour
(km/h). The freeway’s
uninterrupted travel permits a changed state of driving where a semi-sensory
self conducts each separate vehicle and sets the collective and fluctuating
proximity for the flocking cars. The
driver’s sight shifts between the measuring and entertainment instruments of
the darkened interior and the exterior landscape illuminated in vignettes.
Touch moves blindly through the driver’s extremities and between the implements
that maintain the rate of transmission of these two spaces as time. These
“small dynamic vehicles” hold the audience of sedentary bodies that simultaneously
register the smooth surface of the “large static vehicle” and it’s linear trajectory.
The vehicle and the freeway are not liminal spaces of change or disruption
towards an unknown, for the idea of freeway travel is given an intention, a
history, a time and the body acts instinctively, automatically, intuitively and
in a precognitive manner (Cresswell & Merriman, 2011) in a repetition of actions and pre-emptions towards a goal.
Across the length and for the duration
of the F19 Freeway, The First Vehicle of
War [2]
is a continuous projection of an image from a moving vehicle. This image is a
composite of three photographs from Eadweard Muybridge’s late 19thC series of
black and white studies of animal locomotion (Muybridge 1887). The photographic technology he developed and refined was later
applied to the study of the human animal and both were a major contributor to
the development of the motion camera and motion movies.
Travelling at 100 km/h, Muybridge’s projected
images illuminate and animate the freeway landscape that in turn edits and
recomposes the three static, sequential images of a woman dropping a veil.
The technology of the still analogue camera,
that enabled Muybridge’s original recording and analysis of metabolic movement,
is used in reverse through the analogue projection of a single transparency
that transmits an enlarged re-presentation of this analysis via the moving
landscape. Of a night, the pupils of the eye
dilate and receive light via the monochromatic photoreceptors that render most
of our vision in black and white. This nocturnal perception renders the static,
black and white image as visually located on a moving plane somewhere between
the windscreens of the vehicle and the actual screen created by the near-distant,
rapidly changing landscape. This moving landscape in turn and by
proxy punctuates the image’s resolution and register.
Paul Virilio proposes that there are
two means of mass communication – audio visual and automobile (Virilio & Degener, 2006, p.
155) where “speed is the common
denominator of direct and indirect information” (Ibid, p.157). The
projection of Muybridge’s image manifests this common denominator in a direct
transmission of the freeway’s landscape via the speed of the automobile’s
transmission that reverses the idea of freeway travel as a cinematographic
experience. The freeway’s “landscape
unwinds like a drive belt” but only via the hovering image and only for the
similarly suspended and swarming audience of sedentary bodies and the two
technologies that separately holds each of them in place, in flight.
For the audience of drivers in this flight, The First Vehicle of War is an
appropriation of their time and the freeway’s space that unifies the separate
but simultaneous experience of this landscape . This clustering of
vehicles establishes the viewing distance and duration of this appropriation for
the time it takes to travel the 18 km of the F19 Freeway at 100 km/h = 11 minutes (approximately).
The First Vehicle of War inverts Virilio’s cinematic analogy of
vehicular travel and appropriates the shared relation, history and identity
that exist in Augé’s non-place of freeway infrastructure.
[1] The F19 Freeway, constructed between 1972 and 1997, links the eastern suburbs
to the Melbourne CBD. It is the only un-tolled entry to the city centre and in
this sense remains public. It was part of the original freeway network put
forward as the transport solution to the second suburbanisation of Melbourne 1947
– 1971. The F19 is one of the few road spaces and few urban spaces within
metropolitan Melbourne without fixed advertising infrastructure. In addition,
the absence of public art within the F19 corridor offers a site from a period
of time when the choreographed experience of the freeway held an uncritical
promise through the idea of amenity.
[2] The selection of the Muybridge images and the title of this work
references Paul Virilio’s description of the ‘transportation revolution of
woman’. This revolution is in relation to the primitive hunt, mobile war and
the evolution of roads in warfare from the Romans onwards. Virilio argues that
as the ‘first logistical support” women carried supplies for the hunt and later
battle before and to be replaced by the beast of burden, the chariot and later
the automotive vehicle.
Comments
Post a Comment