I’ve recently been reading about civil engineer Amu Ramaswami and her desire to improve urban environments. Anyone ensconced in a particular corner of the photography world might assume I was about to embark on a psychogeography project. If you’re not up to speed with that term, it was coined by Guy Debord (2012) author and director of the 1967 book and film Society of the Spectacle and means “the study of geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals” (Tate) and is popular among urban landscape photographers. I’ll be accused of reductionism, but throughout my first reading of that book, when I don’t think I’d even heard of psychogeography, I couldn’t help replacing the word ‘spectacle’ with ‘Internet’, and it nearly always made perfect sense. Debord died by suicide just before the dotcom bubble burst. Nevertheless, he managed to write with incredible insight and perspicaciousness about a landscape that feels familiar to this blogging human in 2021. It’s hard to deny he saw all ‘this’ coming. That and much else besides has made me cautious about any narrative which blames all our ills on the Internet, even though social media can accurately be, and is often, described as a cesspit of bile and a grotesque marketing horror show. The speed with which information travels, along with the complete absence of any of the evolutionary social brakes which space and time once provided, poses enormous challenges. Despite seeing much that is positive about the technology revolution, I do not underestimate the harms. However, its most visible and noisy form, social media, is a manifestation of processes and trends that have been emerging for much longer than the previous two or three decades – the objectified, commodification of all relations, which is what I found so riveting in Debord’s book. But yes, the recent exponential blooming of hate, misinformation and extremism does indeed make the landscape seem desperate.
Back to Ramaswami, who works across disciplines, sectors and countries to implement sustainable solutions in cities around the world. I absolutely love that she wrote, “Planners tend to focus on these [shelter, water, food, energy, connectivity, sanitation and green spaces] in isolation; our goal is to study them holistically, including their interactions” (2021). That’s the sort of sentence that makes me want to jump up and down with excitement, and then drag photography writers to the article.
“Look!” I’d say imploringly. Because, throughout my recently ended Open College of the Art’s photography studies, I have felt an increasing unease with photographic theory, which can seem, at times, a little (or a lot) parochial and somehow detached from the reality it purports to represent. For instance, it mostly appears wedded to a long-held narrow interpretation of the gaze, ignoring contemporary knowledge emerging from a range of disciplines (unpicked by James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini (2021) in Visual Worlds, which I will blog about soon). Theorists writing about photography often sound like they’re privileging the photographic image above all else, dismissing millennia’s worth of art forms which came before, even imbuing photography with super powers at times. Photography also seems intrinsically oblivious to goals like Ramaswami’s; which are to encourage holistic thinking and embrace what she refers to as transboundaried practices. All of this excites me because towards the end of my undergraduate studies, I was experimenting with situating the photographic image holistically in relation to other media, including text, illustration, and audio, so often underpinned nowadays by one single medium – code; and to explore the interactions between these objects (images, stories, people) rather than focusing on, objectifying and isolating subjects.
That desire of Ramaswami’s echoes a recently released paper, Stewardship of global collective behavior (sic) (Bak-Coleman et al. 2021)* who address the speed with which information is shared today, and asks how that can be managed with human well-being in mind, rather than constant sales and marketing. They write:
Because human collective behaviour is the result of processes that span temporal, geographical, and organizational scales, addressing the impact of emerging technology on global behaviour will require a transdisciplinary approach and unprecedented collaboration between scientists across a wide range of academic disciplines.
I have been contemplating this unboundaried trend while making my final degree work, why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ (2021), a collaboration with a proprietary AI and various other bits of matter including other people (living, dead, aware of their collaboration, not). I invited a range of signifiers that haven’t always been expected or encouraged to work together. Not because I am deliberately contrary, defying everything we photographers were taught about unity. Nor because I was purposely being obtuse. But because we have to start seeing the connections between seemingly disparate things. Sometimes I wonder if I’m on completely the wrong track but then I read articles like the one about Ramaswami and the paper about collective behaviour. And I put my head down and keep going. Because it seems to me that we have to stop seeing objects and imagining they’re unconnected to anything else, or that they’ve always existed that way and will be forever more. And I’m not sure photography is designed to foster that kind of updated view. At which point, it becomes partly responsible for our failure to see and exist in a more sustainable way. Of course, photography is everywhere and an integral part of the landscape today, so perhaps my ongoing inquiry is about examining that situation. In my project, I have positioned analogue and digital, text and image, colour and black and white, still and film, silent and noisy, all together, in various configurations across a range of platforms. The work is at heart a comparative study of media and I hope it asks viewers to consider the interactions between each of the elements, and how those alter depending on relationships, rather than the elements themselves. I did none of this just to poke traditional photography theory and teaching in the eye. Bak-Coleman et al. (ibid) go on to argue “that online and offline dynamics cannot be disentangled and careful consideration of both will be necessary for identifying successful intervention strategies”. Which provides very good justification for my insistence that the project exists in both printed and digital form, much to the alarm of some. And what interests me is the entanglement of all signification, not the fetishisation of one over any other.
None of this makes the project easy; to create, experience or share. Not only because photography and the photographic image defy connectivity, something Susan Sontag (2008) wrote about in her eponymous book On Photography as far back 1977. But also, because there are very few people in photography talking in a similar way to Ramaswami and the authors of the 2021 paper I’ve quoted; about the connections and interactions between objects rather than the objects themselves. Added to that, I have found it virtually impossible to ‘market’ the non-objectified interactions that my work hopes to explore. And since marketing intrinsically requires an object that can be packaged and sold, that should come as no surprise.
But unless we start to look at the interactions between objects, and I use the word objects to describe anything from a thing we can hold, to a country or even an idea, like Mother or Other (i.e. contained, boundaried and demarcated) rather than simply looking at the objects in isolation, we have no hope of addressing the many crises we face today.
I doubt I’ll ever do a psychogeography project in the expected sense. The landscape, urban or otherwise, is indeed integral, but in my mind, we cannot and must not separate the so-called virtual from the physical if we are to examine the present. So I’ll continue to explore this fragmented, half-formed, cyborg-like landscape we’ve created. And for now, that means finding ways to examine the stuff that we can’t see rather than the objects we can’t avoid. With that mind, perhaps, I have indeed made a kind of psychogeography project after all.
You can visit a web-based installation of why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ for a limited period at http://www.astronautflowers.online
*One of the authors, Carl T. Bergstrom (2021) has released an excellent thread on Twitter breaking down the arguments laid out in Stewardship of global collective behavior
References:
Bak-Coleman, J. B. et al. (2021) ‘Stewardship of global collective behavior’ In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (27) At: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/27/e2025764118 (Accessed 23/06/2021).
Bergstron, CT. (2021) Thread outlining Stewardship of global collective behavior [Twitter] Available at https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1407098810942164993?s=20 (Accessed 24/06/2021)
Debord, G. (2012) Society of the spectacle with introduction by Tom Vague. [Kindle edition] London: Bread and Roses
Elkins, J. and Fiorentini, E. (2021) Visual worlds: looking, images, visual disciplines. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
Sontag, S. (2008) On photography. (Reissued) London New York Toronto: Penguin Books.
Spinney, L. (s.d.) Anu Ramaswami interview: How to shape the cities of the future. At: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033380-800-anu-ramaswami-interview-how-to-shape-the-cities-of-the-future/ (Accessed 23/06/2021).
Tate (s.d.) Psychogeography – Art Term. At: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/psychogeography (Accessed 23/06/2021).