Impact is more than technique and effect, especially so when done with media. Media turn impact into a force field, in which models and modeling of world-making are tested out physically and virtually, staged as well as performed. Here, impact also serves as an operating parameter to evaluate which qualities are being achieved by it.
The Warum 2.0 media arena made the public visible as a phenomenized object. ‘I am seen and I see that I am seen.’ ‘I see myself seeing myself.’ This doubled sensation of seeing and being seen, makes visible the invisible public. For them, besides being controlling and repressive, panopticism is empowering. Being in public, what one already is in private, in front of the tv set and the computer, makes panopticism seem like part of everyday life. It can be managed.
We gaze at our screens, and at the same time, at our doubles on the screens, even at the streamed data of ourselves displayed live on the screens. ‘The media-environment’ of war and its cognates in everyday life is the operating arena for this new visual subjectivity.’ Nicholas Mirzoeff calls the ‘simultaneous display and interaction of a variety of modes of visibility, intervisuality.’ The switching between logos, stations and connected media ‘reveal that the images are not purily visibility but highly mediated representation, itself an expression of a chain of images, discourses and material reality.’
We can paraphraze Mirzoeff further suggesting that in Warum 2.0 the public artfully mixed the Nike ‘Just Do It’ mantra with Arjun Appadurai’s observation that in globalization, the imagination is a social fact. If this scenario made any sense to the visitors, it must have been precisely so, because they had it all seen and experienced before: seeing battlescenes from the point of view of the weapons themselves; experiencing terrorism as if cinematically directed; complementing executions with personal chats on the mobile; staging sexual, thug and adventurous tourism, digitizing one’s desire by means of self-surveillance and self-display.
In the meantime, ‘the audience had learnt to see like computers, taking the digital gaze for granted, with vast eyes perched on insignificant bodies.’ ‘In this naturalized panoptic space of media, ‘the body is a vehicle for visual surveillance unhindered by a self or an identity.’ ‘Mind and body, they simply do not belong together.’ The gaze itself becomes indifferent to what it sees. Derrida writes, there becomes visible ‘there where they were already there without being there.’
‘What seems to be critical at the present moment is precisely the means by which cultures and peoples are connected – the medium of cables and electricity, the linking computer code, and the attention economy.’ Warum 2.0 in Leuven was a demonstration of endless return that is nonetheless different on each occasion. ‘Think of the ghost in Hamlet, who is visible to all in Act One but only to Hamlet in Act Three.’
(Quotes from Nicholas Mirzoeff, in ‘The haunted house: Visuality in global culture’, published in ‘architecturanimation’, CDAC, Barcelona, 2002).
