“Screen Democracy” or Fascism of the Image? New Audiovisual Regimes in an Era of Indiscriminate Information Dissemination

By F. Javier Panera

Some time ago, while accompanying a group of students who were visiting an exhibition at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Salamanca (Spain), characterized by large multi-screen video installations by the German artist Julian Rosefeldt, I was able to confirm with utter bewilderment that a significant number of the young people did not look at the video projections directly with their eyes; instead, they preferred to do it through the small screens on their cell phones or digital cameras. That experience immediately reminded me of other very similar situations, such as Barack Obama and his wife Michelle’s dance at the Washington Convention Center on Jan. 20, 2009, the day of his inauguration as President of the United States. On that occasion, practically everyone in the select group of guests preferred to look at the couple dance in real time through the screen of their cell phones. The reaction of the audience was similar at the beginning of a spectacular rock concert by U2 in Sevilla in September 2010¹.

These three events can in no way be considered anecdotal; they are living proof that “something is happening.” Firstly, of note is the important role that the cell phone-a device not only for information and communication, but also for the production and consumption of multimedia content-played at these events. These days, any smartphone includes a camera, video recorder, audio recorder, video game console, SMS telegram office, videoconferencing monitor, digital TV, messenger support, portable computer and web navigator. In fact, I am certain that some of the students, who were visiting the Rosefeldt exhibition, were “tweeting” it in real time for their friends.

Some may think that this situation has a certain abnormal or dystopian element and that nothing can substitute for the physical experience of being in front of a work of art or in front of people. Nevertheless, if we put ourselves in the skin (or rather the retina) of those students we cannot deny that their “visual reality” is no longer ours. The capacity for visual perception of today’s young people-trained by 100 years of retinal masturbation produced by media such as cinema, television, videogames and the Internet, and audiovisual formats like video clips or social networks-is far superior to that of young people and adults who, for example, were surprised more than 60 years ago with movies like “Citizen Kane.” Even so, it is inferior to that of the future young people of 2020 when immersive audiovisual spectacles will be a daily reality. Non-contemporary cinema, just like a simple painting in a museum, bores many of these young people, because it lacks sufficient information to keep their eyes and minds occupied or entertained.

Woman records a Police concert at Verizon Center, Washington DC, November 5, 2007. Photo: Scott Ableman. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ableman/1884813924/)

Therefore, my hypothesis can only be that we find ourselves at the beginning of a “new visual regime,” which is affecting social, cultural, psychological and cognitive processes in which-as noted by investigators such as Tíscar Lara and Roberto Balaguer²-we have a life “at the other side of the screen,” where it is becoming increasingly difficult “to exist” without generating a visual history of it. Anything that is not digitized and recorded (externally) has no place in this world. “Nothing exists if it is not recorded digitally.” Just ask the many artists who, like Lady Gaga, have built their careers based on their omnipresence in virtual territories like Google or YouTube.

The retina, like memory-since “without (external) recording there is no longer any memory“-is no longer sufficient. We are witnessing the progressive sacrifice of vision, of that corporal, phenomenological relationship of the human being with the world, in favor of the “visualization” of that which has already been framed in a screen that tends to be mobile and indiscriminate. In summary, let us speak of visual information, which is transmittable, editable, repeatable, reusable, and with the advent of the huge collective file repositories of Web 2.0, also extremely easy to share. It is as though merely relating an experience were no longer sufficient. Human memory is too fragile and precarious for the complex world in which we live, and we have to help it along with these intermediary devices. Faced with a mnemonic memory of the image/static, a “heuristic” memory arises that “is no longer of the object, but of connectivity, and it is no longer localized inscription but rather relational and disseminated.”

As noted by J.L. Brea and Martín Prada, the immateriality of this image/time transforms the sense and the symbolic charge of the scopic regime of today in which the image acts as memory, archive, protector of the patrimony and of the past, altering its formats of production, circulation and consumption and its very political economy. To the extent that in some cases it would not be far-fetched to speak of the advent of a “pantallocracia” (”screen democracy”)-to incorporate into my discourse the term used by Lipovetsky³-in certain contexts it can contribute to the development of a new more active and more emancipated observer in line with what Rancière proposes because of the immense range of possibilities offered by new technologies to audiovisually intervene in history. The role that cell phones and social networks have played in the success of movements with a high rate of citizen participation like the 15-M Movement or the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt would be good examples of this “performative visuality.”⁴ At times, however, it could become a regime of “fascism of the image” in which that same observer is not aware of the extent to which he is being totally controlled by the very technological devices he handles.

As everyone is aware, for some time now our personal data has circulated through the files of major corporations, and thousands of video cameras film and record the public and private spaces of major cities nonstop. Our entire lives, all of our relationships with the world and with others, increasingly pass through a multitude of interfaces where screens converge, communicate and connect with each other, not to mention really incredible cases in a modern democratic state, such as Italy, where the prime minister has business interests in the country’s major newspapers and television channels⁵. In effect, knowing that we are being watched by that panoptic camera that Foucault spoke of⁶, we cannot escape being actors/creators/spectators of a movie that as Gómez Tarín notes⁷ does not suffer the rigors of editing because it is viewed in real time, offering us a fragmentary and fragmented world, which responds less and less to a referent that we shall call “reality.”

Under these circumstances, those of us who devote ourselves to education and cultural pursuits, and even more so those of us who work in museums, cannot avoid the new models of production, circulation, reception and filing (the word collection, even in a museum context, will soon be obsolete) of images that this new visual regime proposes; likewise, it is becoming more and more urgent to define a new legal framework to facilitate the administration of the rights of use and distribution of images, conceived of as simple information cut into thousands of bits. In summary, we speak of going beyond the physical limits of the museum, (from the white cube to the black box) even surpassing the “imaginary museum” proposed by Malraux based on advances in photographic reproduction, making way for a new model situated between the physical and the ubiquitous, the public and the private, the global and the multilocal.

Notes

1. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1xxEJtE9rw&feature=related>

2. <http://tiscar.com/2009/06/09/intimamente-movil/  / <http://tesisantitesis.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/¿un-nuevo-regimen-de-cultura-visual/>

3. See, Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy. La pantalla global. Cultura mediática y cine en la era hipermoderna. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009. [L´écran global. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2007]

4. The role of social networks and mobile screens has been essential to organize demonstrations, as well as coordinate, denounce and provide information to reporters in countries lacking in freedom of the press where channels do not reach and correspondents cannot work “at street level.” The first information to reach many reporters during the Arab Spring in countries such as Egypt or Tunisia or upon the death of Gadafi was from witnesses who sent information via the Internet or cell phones.

5. In recent years, Berlusconi has indirectly controlled three channels of the RAI and directly the three channels of Mediaset (that is to say, 100 percent of terrestrial television and 90 percent of the total). He owns the largest Italian advertising company and has recently bought ENDEMOL a company that sells programming “formats,” which are later adapted to the taste of each country. His empire also extends to the territory of the written press. In 1976, he bought shares in Il Giornale. In 1990, he secured the presidency of the Mondadori group, publisher of the newspaper La Repubblica and of the weeklies L’ Espresso, Epoca and Panorama. Mondadori in addition currently controls a third of the publishing sector in Italy. In order to merge the various communication sectors that he owned (television, newspapers, publishing, the Internet, advertising), he created the conglomerate Fininvest, which is now called Mediaset.

6. See, Michel Foucault. Vigilar y castigar. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1998.

7. See, Francisco Javier Gómez Tarín: Discursos híbridos: cine, fronteras y culturas en un mundo glocal. 2011 Departamento de Ciencias de la Comunicación <http://apolo.uji.es/fjgt/malaga2011.pdf>

Javier Panera Cuevas is a professor of art criticism at the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain. Former director and chief curator at Domus Artium 2002 (2003-2011), he has curated retrospectives of Kendell Geers, Franz Ackermann and Chris Cunningham, among other artists. He is the author of Música para tus ojos: Artes visuales y estética del videoclip (Festival de Cine de Astorga, Leуn, 2009).