The Red or the Blue Pill, reflections on a post human city.

In the science fiction film The Matrix ( Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999) the red pill would enable Neo (Keanu Reeves) to escape from a computer generated reality, the blue pill would enable him to stay, but have no knowledge that anything was awry. Of course, Neo swallows the red pill and abruptly finds himself in a liquid-filled pod, his body connected by tubes and cables to a vast mechanical tower containing identical pods. He discovers that his reality has been constructed by machines. A little bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole and entering a fantasy realm and drinking the contents of a bottle which made her smaller. Substances almost always change the way you feel about yourself and the world and here in the Matrix as in Wonderland the environment plays a part in the way embodiment is considered. I want to talk about the contrasting environments in The Matrix and the Alice in Wonderland story for they present a vast contrast. One being the highly technological world of computer technologies, the other a changing, but familiar natural landscape filled with various animals. However, both these worlds are populated by shifting boundaries between the human and animal, order and chaos. The rabbit that Alice encounters is humanized to the extent that it is dressed in human clothing and sports a large mechanical pocket watch. The rabbit speaks and as such makes problematic the boundary between humans and animals. When Alice pulls back a curtain to reveal a small door that she cannot enter, we understand that architecture is designed for the body, in other words, buildings are to be traversed by bodies and as such must be accessible to individuals.
So what has this got to do with the post-human and the city?
Well, in order to answer this I want to talk briefly about the flaneur. The nineteenth century French poet, Charles Baudelaire characterized the flaneur as someone who strolls through the city in order to experience it. The flaneur was both observer and participant. Baudelaire imagined in the first instance that the flaneur was a dandy; if you need to picture a dandy, think of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, dressed in suit and vest, carrying an umbrella under his arm and a pocket watch in his hand. Notice the references here to the possibility of changing weather and an emphasis on time. This is like being self-aware whilst being fully immersed in ones surroundings, like Neo and Alice in their perspective surroundings. The flaneur had a particular fascination with street life; they also took of the role of critic in regards to the affect of the city on the individual. As urban observer the street photographer may be perceived as an extension the flaneur, who appeared to have detached aesthetic and attuned observation necessary to be critical of the environment around him(her). Of course it was in this way that the city itself became a spectacle.
So what is this spectacle that the city presents to us? Is it just the buildings, cafes, restaurants, retail shops, juxtaposition of the older and new buildings, the street lights and signs, the rubbish bins, tram lines, trams, overhead wires; the old statues and new paths and steps. Is it the people who move through these permanent structures or a combination of the two? Or is it nothing of what I’ve just stated; is it really just our imagining of the city as we traverse its spaces? And how are we moving through the city and the people who inhabit the city? Is it, as Guy Debord has said: The Commodity is spectacle.

I want to focus now on my latest photographic project - The Body and the City, which addressed absence and presence, the familiar and the unfamiliar, comfort and unease, special disorientation and spontaneous arrangement. It was about the everyday, the commonplace activity of interacting with the general public in an urban environment.  It grew out of my persistent vertigo whilst attempting to negotiate public spaces – the alienating crowds, the sense that I was an outsider to the general throng, which moved along seamlessly, or rather, as I perceived it as a machine. The people who inhabited Bourke Street in the city during the lunch time rush, were in my mind, mere automatons who walked to some internal beat I could not hear, who were inhabiting a world akin to a Matrix otherzone, attached to the umbilical cord that enabled them to breath and eat and which apparently satisfied their every need?

Although I had been an avid photographer for much of my life, purchasing a pocket sized digital camera enabled me to take photographs whilst I was in the city. I still felt a sense of non-integration into the masses, but being able to capture images was a way of engaging with certain energy. I found that I was returning to previous concerns ~ individuality, difference and facial expressions. But there was also an underlying concern about how some things appear ordered, whilst they are in fact quite disorderly. Somehow the framing arranged things I viewed to an extent that I, although not entirely devoid of anxiety, am able to traverse the city spaces in what I call the mode of the flaneur – I allow buildings to determine my meandering to follow the city and its people.

My photography is not surveillance, not dispassionate. Something IS identified, noticed, explained in the taking of the photo. It is about using the image of the other outside oneself to say something about human life, it is about a reflection of self; it is about coming to terms with the other, who is almost always distant, even though they might be inherently within us. We are both interior and exterior as self. An intimacy and connection is formed, briefly, fleetingly. My photographs reveal a concern with people as ornamentation ~ decorous to the landscape, as order and disorder, an arrangement within a fixed urban environment, part of the textural interplay between building surface and body as fluid architecture. More often than not my photographs are about people watching or waiting for the other.

Often I concentrate on the person I identify as the outsider, someone sitting alone or special in their particular orientation. I did this primarily because I wanted to reveal that the ambiguous city people were not just a homogeneous and almost unidentifiable mass, but they were individuals who formed part of this mass. Almost always I look for the juxtaposition of textures between building and body architecture - the interplay between image and text – the meanings that may be created.

Francesco Vitalli said of my installation: 

it evokes community and belonging, the relation between public and private spheres, inequality, justice and entitlements and reminds us of an anxiety felt before the masses, before the city as a field of signification and symbol of might and grandeur. Its colonial legacy, reminiscent of the empire of racial segregation on which it was built, the anxiety of the alienated individual, regimented, classified and catalogued, which is now exsanguinated. We are reminded of Giorgio Agamben’s (2007) work on exclusions, of the permanent state of exception under which subjectivities and identities are formed and in which the city as locus of capital, produces aggression and a state of insecurity. (2011)

So, I want to return here to the post-human. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first appearance of the term in Maurice Parmelee’s 1916 Poverty and Social Progress. In a section entitled 'Eugenic Measures and the Prevention of Poverty' he wrote:

But even though it is not possible, at present at any rate, to do much to improve the quality of the human stock by eugenic means, it is interesting and profitable to consider what would be the result if socially undesirable types could be eliminated entirely or in large part . . . . [But] it is evident, in the first place, that it is inconceivable that human nature could be changed to the extent that is contemplated by [the] theory of perfectibility. Such changes would bring into being an animal no longer human, or for that matter mammalian, in its character, for it would involve the elimination of such fundamental human and mammalian instincts and emotions as anger, jealousy, fear, etc. But even if such a post-human animal did come into existence, it is difficult to believe that it could carry on the necessary economic activities without using a certain amount of formal organization, compulsion, etc.

Although there are various ways to approach the concept of the post-human, I understand it to be a liminal being marked by its transformation by advanced technologies.  Indeed, positioned as it is in relation to technological development, the post-human is framed by ideas of mutation, evolution and the development of a species that transcends the human. Even so, it is useful to consider Parmelee’s notion, for we may ask: are we already no longer human? And, I ask this because the human that we thought we knew prior to certain technological advances is essentially different to the human we know today and what  I mean by this is that when ‘we’ traverse city spaces we no doubt encounter individuals who are almost cyborgian in their obvious connection to electronic interfaces. Ipods, Iphones, laptop computers, headphones, and mobile phones appear permanently fixed to people’s ears as they walk through the city streets fully immersed in virtual worlds of music and text. So what, if anything happens to the actual city in these interactions? Sure, it remains there fixed, immovable, as structures to be negotiated, but is it really there to these people who appear always to be somewhere else? Are buildings just remnants of past history, past events, past human activity that have little to do with the contemporary psyche? Are buildings just a backdrop to the real experience of the individual?  Is it in fact a simulated reality, like that presented in The Matrix?

Just an aside here ~ I always thought it interesting that people had difficulty understanding the concept of the Tardis in the science fiction television series Dr. Who. The Tardis – basically a phone box, looks smaller on the outside, but is much larger on the inside. I like to think of it like the human brain – looks small, but contains billions of neuronal connections, or like buildings, because from the outside we can never see the totality of the building, we generally see the entrance and very rarely look upwards to attempt to take in the whole structure, so when we actually get inside the building its many rooms and corridors appear much larger than we had expected.

How can a city respond to the people who inhabit it – who live, work and shop in the city?

Imagined in this way, that is, buildings as facade, which affronts or covers another space (either solid or empty), the cityscape is rendered like a stage, the curtains drawn and then, when opened reveal the spectacle of the play. Without the play and its actors and the action, the theatre and the stage are nothing more than potential space. Although one could argue that with the scenery in place, it might be considered a spectacle in itself, if the scenery was spectacular or magnificent! But again, imagination must play a part here in regards to whether or nothing something has potential to excite or engage, since spectacle must arrest us from our usual ways of seeing, transport us into the visual aesthetics as well as the unfolding action or event.

How does technology change us. Well, on a very simple level, wearing head phones and listening to music whilst we are walking along, enables the individual to block out the usual sounds of the city, the persistent gabble of people talking, the sounds of passing traffic, road and building works, in favor of music we have chosen, rendering life (that which we see and experience) more akin to a film soundtrack where the visuals are accompanied by sweet classic strains or heavy metal. Thus making actual life more virtual, more cinematic! It’s a matter of, if you don’t like the current soundtrack -  then change it. We are psychologically modified by our use of technologies and by the manner in which technology enters our spaces. Think of the large screen at Federation Square, which has changed our view of inner city spaces. That ‘being there’ experience has been taken up by people who dress up to go to the Melbourne Cup, but actually watch the race on the big screen, rather than actually going to Flemington Racecourse. This behavior also occurs in regards to watching the AFL Grand Final, summer time tennis and cricket and the Anzac Parade. However, the screen is more than that, it is also a back-drop for actual performers, it enables them to augment their performance. Last summer the screen was used to display images and poetic texts – more than a cinema and more than a television, it has become an avenue for displaying our culture and creativity. Screens have crept into our cities. In some cities in the world posters are dynamic, not static.

Those already alienated by the metropolis as a space that caters only for those who desire commodities are further alienated by those who block themselves off from city people. These people cannot and do not interact on public transport and walk through the streets as ‘untouchables’ since they are wearing technological signifier that say in no uncertain terms: Don’t speak to me unless you are speaking through a technological interface – text me or mobile phone call me, if you are not a piece of music, a film or video clip then I have no interest in you. They prefer the non-human, because it enables them to remain distant from other human beings. Am I being too harsh?

These individuals already inhabit the matrix, but unlike the construct in the film of the same name, this matrix is one of their choosing, or is it? Is the technological space, as constructed reality any better or worse than actual reality and its constructs? Are we moving towards a time in which all city screens will be tailored to the individual, presented in such films as The Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002). Interactive screens and billboards herald a post human future in which 3D screens will interact with us by utilizing retinal scanners, iris recognition and databases of consumers' preferences to target our desires.

In the film, when the panicked John Anderton (Tom Cruise) races through a shopping mall, he is besieged by a flurry of interactive advertising. Screens, apparently sensing his predicament, make their pitches: Promoting the American Express blue card, a woman in a bathing suit beckons to Anderton and asks: 'Need to escape? Blue can take you.'Another says, 'John Anderton: you could use a Guinness right now'.

A spectacle requires spectators, but those who do not participate (in the sense that their intent all along was to be an observer, rather than player),do become overall, part of the spectacle, in fact, like actors in a play, the spectacle cannot be so unless it is witnessed as such.