Abstract
This paper is an investigation into the kinds of spectatorial relationships that could be generated when a moving image (video, in this case) presents a city within a political framing. To this end I will analyse three different case studies in which the city—its architecture, and its population—is the polemical common ground of the artwork: Guilty Landscape episode I—Hangzhou by Dries Verhoeven (2016), Sign on a Truck by Jenny Holzer (1984), and Història Urbanística by Video-Nou (1978). In my argumentation, I will adhere generally to Jean Baudrillard’s conceptualisations in terms of media “responsibility”, and those of Jacques Rancière when focused on the term “dissensus”, understood as the essence of politics. Importantly, and worth emphasising, all moving image works are able to mirror the spectator who, through different devices and spatial settings, becomes an active part of the representation itself: and a representation that does not require a form of response is a curtailment that does nothing but amplify the decision-making power of the powerful. Instead, Dries Verhoeven, Jenny Holzer, and Video-Nou confront us with their representations and bid us towards an active personal participation in its construction. Moreover, this could be considered as a reflection upon what might feasibly be achieved today in architecture and urban representation through various new media and their intersections with the moving image and performative arts.
Highlights
The act of expanding architectural practice compared with the mechanisms of social agency, urban action, and participatory practices requires some deliberation upon which systems of representation are able to accommodate, encode and convey those new subjects, as revealed whenever such comparisons are made
The risk is, as Bernard Tschumi articulated in The Manhattan Transcripts, that models of representation would be “caught in a sort of prison-house of architectural language, where the limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Tschumi 1994, 9)
In discussing this exigency for responsibility (“not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange”) (Baudrillard 1986, 128) in architectural representation, I will endeavour to expand the horizon of its language, using three examples that go beyond the discipline–referring in particular to the world of moving images–but whose subject is still the city and its political common space
Summary
The act of expanding architectural practice compared with the mechanisms of social agency, urban action, and participatory practices requires some deliberation upon which systems of representation are able to accommodate, encode and convey those new subjects, as revealed whenever such comparisons are made. The risk is, as Bernard Tschumi articulated in The Manhattan Transcripts, that models of representation would be “caught in a sort of prison-house of architectural language, where the limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Tschumi 1994, 9) In discussing this exigency for responsibility (“not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange”) (Baudrillard 1986, 128) in architectural representation, I will endeavour to expand the horizon of its language, using three examples that go beyond the discipline–referring in particular to the world of moving images–but whose subject is still the city and its political common space. These are images that put contents into form but that in themselves make the construction of that same form visible
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