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Part 1: the Ecology of the Image PART 1: THE ECOLOGY OF THE IMAGE Figure 1: Figure-ground reversal: the face-vase illusion (original design by Edgar Rubin). Ian E. Gordon, Theories of Visual Perception (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1989) 53. 2 PART 1: THE ECOLOGY OF THE IMAGE …no denser or more tacit form of communication, no shaping or organising force more comprehensive or more insidiously embedded in our lifeworld than images. They make up the true lingua franca of commerce, politics, and psyche; they are the ‘cloaking devices’ par excellence of the human social world. (Sanford Kwinter)1 One must see, at first sight, what does not let itself be seen. And this is invisibility itself. For what first sight misses is the invisible. The flaw, the error of first sight is to see, and to not notice the invisible. (Jacques Derrida)2 …nothing seems more important than to debate the ecological role and character of images. (Andrew Ross)3 Don’t worry sweetheart — it’s just a movie. (Anon) INTRODUCTION 4 SNAP SHOT: AN ACCIDENT IN SLOW MOTION I am sitting in a Holden car designed in 1966, travelling down a highway on an extremely hot day at fifty miles per hour. The luxurious design of the interior (beautifully preserved by the car’s owner) speaks of a familiar car culture even though the detailing has changed. Something is, nonetheless, 1 Sanford Kwinter in his introduction to Bruce Mau, Life Style (London: Phaidon, 2000) 36. 2 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994) 149-50. 3 Andrew Ross, “The Ecology of Images”, The South Atlantic Quarterly 91:1 (Duke University Press, 1992): 219. 4 Hajer after Roqueplo describes ecological damage as ‘an accident in slow motion’, a gradual process of incremental change rather than a clearly identifiable event. I am here borrowing this idea to make a point about the ecology of design, which is, as shall be seen, not other to biophysical ecology. Maarten Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernisation and the Policy Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) 21. 3 out of place, and it has to do with what I can sense but can’t see: the air. The windows are open and air is circling around the car in a gentle and starkly unfamiliar way. Then I realise what is affording me this experience: the quarter-vent or ‘butterfly’ windows. These small, metal rimmed, triangular windows form part of a dual window design that has almost completely disappeared from cars, due partly to developments in manufacturing and to rising car theft. Yet the opened windows simultaneously circumvent the need for air-conditioning by gently directing the flow of air into and out of the car and allow me to keep in touch the environment I am speeding through, an experience that has also almost completely disappeared from driving today. The butterfly windows reveal the design of the modern car — with its ozone depleting air- conditioning, toxic upholstery, air-fresheners, growing range of safety, security, entertainment and orientation features, and of course tinted, all-in- one windows (which, opened at speed, produce a fierce, deafening wall of air) — as a form of designed environmental ignorance. The role of the image in shaping a product like the car is paramount. The car is a designed assemblage that forces together materials, industry, human being, culture and environment. Yet through the collusion of image and design, the car is extricated from these conditioning relations and has come to embody instead the Western dream of emancipatory thought. It is as though with an engineered-for- satisfaction whoomph of the car door, Descartes’ mind body split is made material. And in spite of the insistence of the material world in its visceral collisions with this dream, the car is increasingly designed to behave as though it were operating in an artificially resilient, consequence-free televisual domain, disarticulated from material constraints — endlessly tracing open trajectories over the world as res extensa. 4 The car is an extremely significant object in the technologically ‘liberated’ democracy of our culture.5 It sits in an anxious place between ideas and their material effects: it is an object of desire and fear, trust and betrayal, success and failure. When people feel good, they buy cars and the economists project a secure world. Likewise historically, nations have employed a car industry to proclaim themselves to the world as modernised. The confrontation between the industries producing and promoting cars and those whose job it is to manage the material impacts left in its wake, can be reconceived as a debate about this erroneous idealism of the car. The influence of promotional images on real driving habits, particularly speeding, has been a particularly ‘hot’ topic. While for many it feels as though there just is an obvious connection between the promotional image and the actual conduct of car users, this connection cannot be made with the available mechanisms of proof, much to the delight no doubt, of every Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries. If there is a connection, it is clearly a transfigurative event, but it is one that cannot be presented. The terms of the debate change, however, if a consideration of the agency of design takes precedence over the individual culpability of car users.6 The car is a designed thing that, as it “worlds” — and here we use the Heideggerean understanding of a world as a coherent and distinct context opened by the designed machine — is both sign and world.7 In the world of the car, a space radically disarticulated from the outside environment is delivered, and desire is shaped. 5 For Albert Borgmann, technology’s cultural power resides in its actualisation of ‘liberal democracy’. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984) 92. We take up Borgmann’s work in Part 4. 6 Ulrich Beck points out that the horror of mass deaths on the road has been normalised socially because it is ostensibly a matter of people’s free choice to drive or not, and traffic accidents are therefore perceived as events of individual culpability. Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, trans. Amos Weisz (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995) 165. 7 Martin Heidegger turns ‘world’ into a verb: the “world worlds”. This names the ongoingness of world making in relation to being. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) 44. Hubert Dreyfus 5 The car has become the ultimate icon of the linear force of consumerism as well as of its systemic blindness. In its endless negotiation of parameters of safety, speed, security, comfort and style, the car continues to arrive as the latest perfection of a utopian, streamlined future. This scenario is ever ironic: in the recent promotion of a vehicle that is environmentally benign, for example, industry in fact is merely creating and meeting the demands of a niche market for a machine that in the context of the world it has helped create, will never be benign. It is not surprising that the centrepiece of the permanent design exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney entitled Ecologic: Creating a Sustainable Future is a ‘parallel-hybrid’ vehicle called the ECOmmodore — the result of a collaborative effort between Holden and CSIRO that boasts a conventional and electric engine.8 The car is attended by a video that demonstrates, in luxurious images, the ‘beautiful’ transparency of technology’s sustainability crusade. Not only does the car look like a conventional Commodore, one might also say the will of the car remains intact.9 The technology makes sure that performance is not sacrificed and you can continue to drive as usual. Your driving dictates the imperceptible switch between, or utilises the combined power of, the conventional engine and electric motor. Where once the exhaust belched modernity — and Charles Spinosa aptly explain the process of world making: “According to Heidegger our nature is to be world disclosers. That is, by means of our equipment and coordinated practices we human beings open coherent, distinct contexts or worlds in which we perceive, act, and think. Each such world makes possible a distinct and pervasive way in which things, people, and selves can appear and in which certain ways of acting make sense.” In Dreyfus and Spinosa, “Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on How to Affirm Technology”, After Postmodernism conference, 1997. Last Accessed August 30, 2004. <http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_highway.html>. 8 The ‘parallel-hybrid’ is an electrically assisted mechanical power train that has an electric motor generator and an internal combustion power source. It is conceived as an interim design on the way toward a mechanically assisted electric power-train called a series hybrid, which in turn will be followed by a fully electric power train: the fuel cell. There are other parallel hybrid cars available; Toyota’s Prius (Latin for ‘to go before’) and Honda’s ‘Insight’ have both been heavily marketed. 9 “Technology is without a directing human subject. It now exists and functions independently of any subject’s overall direction. This is to say that technology has taken on a ‘life’ of its own. It has become something to react to, rather than direct…technologies have been designed with an embodied ‘will’ of their own that designs the users’ and the technicians’ relation to them.” Tony Fry, A New Design Philosophy: an introduction to defuturing (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999) 33. 6 modernity’s dark side — it will now produce, it seems, modernity’s fume-free salvation.10 ‘We’ live in a world where it appears that everything hinges on productive capacity.11 This cannot be shut down, even where material abundance of goods far exceeds our ability to consume them.
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