World Trade

Mark Robbins

It's 4 am inside a darkened 40's dance hall in New York. Strobe lights, fog machines, and deafening sound heighten the disorientation of the dancers in the kinesthetic drive of music and ecstasy. Thousands of bodies in sync get lost with other dancers on the floor, reflected on walls of full-length mirror. The crowd is in constant flux, a huge amoebic mass, containing visible strands, clusters, and single cells. Like a school of fish it is diffuse in formation, figural at one moment, dispersed at another. Groups hang together watching, a spectacle for others. Like a religious experience, the evening offers the warm seduction of a glimpse beyond one's own body, the possibility of fusing with a group, a virtual experience.

Restructuring boundaries is part of the kick and promise of the virtual technology spatially and politically, that offers universal and unconditional access. It opens a range of possibilities for the presentation of gender, physique, and even voice. There is an ease in simulating that "you are there". The telephone first allowed this bodiless transportation; the dream of interactive TV is now played out by the web and c-u c-me technologies. VR with strap-on prosthetic viewing devices give a physical sense of presence. In very short order the net has evolved in our lives, from e-mail to direct time-based interaction. Chat lines with delayed text, were amplified with the addition of audio and video. Like spectators under glass, the net offers perfect hygienic engagement, projected wholly and passionately on the fragmentary evidence on a screen. Giddy at the first simple contact, the users of technology now get a greater sense of reality that approaches the proximate senses, the last set of senses left out. In the increased capacity to sever ties with the actual, elaborate invention is employed to make a virtual connection complete.

While already separated as individuals through mechanical advances into self-sustaining units, (the car, the air-conditioned home), Americans cluster in discrete suburbs. Event shopping and theme parks prosper, allowing for highly ritualized ways of being together through commerce. The mall and Cineplex act as a convincing stage double for the commune. At the same time, the culture has been thoroughly connected through radio and TV waves, and increasingly wired with cables. A common source for information and goods establishes community in spatial exile through the web. Home shopping with call-ins help resurrect a sense of community with the pervasive structure of evangelism. ("12,000 sold, 50 people on line", redemption and inclusion through a "sale" or "love donation"). In testimonials for food dryers or healing waters, an onstage chorus echoes the enthusiasm of the pitch : they've tried it and it's changed their lives.

The net promises an antidote to our own geographic limits, offering access to a multinational bazaar. With a credit card, access code and a PC, all the things once associated with the metropolis are available from home: entertainment, companionship, contact without disclosure. The world at our port. Like other myths of progress, the changes will not be total or provide universal access. The net is neither inherently liberating nor demonic and truly global access remains problematic in the delivery. There is an analogy between the hopes for modernism, the expectations for a global culture and the flow of information on the web. The totality of masterplanning gives way to the infil, the particular. It's always a hybrid condition, closer to "Bladerunner" than Utopia.

The corollary to our current fascination with the possibilities of the virtual is the preoccupation with the "real". Advertising breathlessly asserts its desirability, building a youthful market. At the supermarket, seemingly handwritten labels on a product line note, "real food for people". (One assumes the elided "real" as a qualifier for people). Beyond Coke's "real thing", "in the back of your mind, what your hoping to find", it's probably not a soda. Vogueing, the intense simulation of identity, takes the consumer imperatives of fashion and beauty and represents them with a vengeance. Coded in hyperbolic performances, voguers assume desired identities from pop diva to Brooks Brothers' executive drag. The prized "realness" marks the degree of success in passing. The apotheosis of the consumer's dream of stardom is played back with cutting irony.

Architecture like the physical body in fact is limited, fixed in place. Attempts by designers at achieving a mutable space, though movable or transparent walls, a fascination of early modernists, continue. The explorations present catalogues of possible configurations or a graphic fluidity of form. The insertion of video, or choreographed lighting, offers a sense of speed and movement in a building, but it's basically a leaden proposition, fixed in space. The building can simulate MTV with rapidly alternating sound and light, but more powerfully orchestrate the congregation of bodies in space. It offers the tactile possibilities of direct interaction.

If the building however is no longer the dominant purveyor of meaning, its attempts to capture a broader narrative within culture is significant. Buildings continue to hold a place in our consciousness, though often finding purchase through style and décor, in the theatricality and simulation of Williamsburg, or Graceland, (The "Old South" under a high tech roof, the trees bound with metal mesh to assure their lollypop shape). Disney's Celebration serves up a past we desire as it did the World of Tomorrow. That architecture supports a set of fixed notions of what a community looks like, and about who inhabits it. In less saturated versions across the country the vocabulary finds imitations in home, and product design, a national style

American developers have recognized the popularity for gathering and being seen, and labor to set the stage in appealing ways. Configured at the periphery as new "town centers" or with a less bucolic images for urban settings, malls are offered as safe but engaging public space. Marketed with saturated colors and programmed with activities, like a Ritalin-deprived kid, they are always running. Using the techniques of film — Eisenstein translated through music videos — they are bright, full of stimuli. The space competes with newer faster technologies, with analogues of the graphic spin of .coms.

Umberto Eco and others have plumbed the hypperreal turf of Disneyworld and adventure parks for a sense of our national culture. This is not news. In the recent blossoming of themed events and entertainment shopping, however, there is an aggressive blurring between authentic, public experience and its simulation : Universal Walk in L.A., and the representations of New York, Venice and now Paris as Las Vegas casinos. They offer distance without the trouble of travel, the exoticism without the risk.

Metreon recently opened in San Francisco at Yerba Buena as part of a public private partnership on a long vacant urban renewal site downtown. It is a good example of an agora for commerce, with its great fragmented interior vaults, a palace to give the net a run for its money, offering tactile participation in this "retail baroque". As physical engagement and cultural narrative, it compares well with the formal and propagandistic effects of eighteenth century pilgrimage churches and residences. Here too the edges are blurred, the viewer swept into the atmospheric event, the perspectival experience of heaven and hell, paradise in mirrored, paneled interiors. Typical of this new generation, the interior is spatially complex, themed with futuristic references reminiscent of Flash Gordon and an industrial deco. Distinct zones between the retail are erased with vistas that cut through shopping areas, from computer stores, to coffee shops, to a video game parlor in some intergalactic style. (Sony did the interiors). The movement of people plays against the hyper-animated surfaces. At the top level of the escalator ascent is the multiplex. This is the final darkened repose in stadium seating, with instructions on how to behave in a public theater, before the rumbling show in Dolby sound.

In the mall we enter the realm of the spectator in an audience with objects and each other. It is a space in-between, as in the apprehension of art described by critic Rosalind Krauss as "virtual". Grappling famously with Clement Greenberg she wrote in the late eighties about abstract art "rendering substance entirely optical, …incorporeal , weightless" rooted she continues, in the "pulverization of the edge, the setting up of the illusion that one cannot secure the experience of distinct objects because one cannot locate the contours. The viewer floating in front of the work as pure optical ray… a dematerialization into the virtual."She proposes this as a pure desiring subject "constructed by pop" and the "world of media and the solicitation of advertising". It's a description and a technique that applies to virtual media and to the tactile field. It is evident in the blurring of the baroque and high modern space — one through hyperbolic pattern, the other through transparency — a layering of glassy and reflective surfaces, oscillating between inside and out.

The use of visual simulation as a marketing device is not particularly new, traced by Douglas Rushkoff in his book Coercion to Frank Baum, who in the 1890's began testing blends of color, light, glass and mirrors, to stimulate positive responses to certain products. In 1902 Theodore Dreiser identified the use of mannequins as having the ability to create "an atmosphere of reality that aroused enthusiasm". Rushkoff describes the creation of controlled spaces, using props, light, sound and smell. The casino , the mall, the stadium spectacle are all environments carefully orchestrated to disorient or reorient the viewer to make a specific pitch effective. "The exclusion of all real world sensory stimuli meant that patrons were dependent on manufactured cues for their behavior. Eliminating all external stimuli prevented any random… reactions". While virtual modes become more sophisticated in providing an approximation of tactile environments into which we can lose ourselves, so does environmental or atmospheric design. We are disoriented but the use of familiar visual and aural cues, even for example, the scent of baking cinnamon rolls exhausted to the interior, help us feel comfortable, at home.

Rushkoff introduces the term "techno-real" used by a group of authors to restrategize the commercial control of the net, "to reclaim the Internet as public space rather than one dominated by market forces", fusing tech and real. Tech becomes a means to an authentic, real end, rather than a substitute. In reverse, Intel offers, "can't do it in life do it on the web".

The theatrics of the newer commercial architecture makes most of the decisions for the audience, selecting theme, sequence, activity and behavior, as if going to a movie that you can be in. In describing this increasingly sophisticated genre, journalist Susan Doublilet writes of the complex production in the terms of a movie, with a narrative, and a script. A host designers, from industrial to graphic design, interior, lighting, architecture, assemble a believable storyline for the retail experience .

Artist and writer Amy Rankin wrote in 1987 about the ways that the "unruly real" is banished from our public life through what she terms the symbolic "mapped over the imaginary". The pointed use of simulation has become a popular, subversive strategy in art practices, one that challenges the passive digestion of our own image. The critical distance toward representation used famously by artists like Warhol, or later Hans Haacke or Fred Wilson destabilizes assumptions and stereotypes. The image, Rankin continues, "produces pleasure precisely where it fixes meaning least", the complexity and ambiguity that "bear a faint stain of the real". Artists leave questions in place, with quotations repositioned, leaving things open for interpretation by active viewers. Complexity though, is generally not what the consumer wants and commerce instead trades on easy black and white equations between product and effect. Ads smooth out difference offer a seamless depiction of how we live what we desire. The pitch is direct and offers happiness and membership in an imagined community, however remote.

The bulk of media is generated for profit and the realities offered are those that most readily sell. Like most forms of advertising or narrative representations, they exclude non-conforming types . As in post Hays Code movies and later, TV, the representations of us is controlled, the way we speak, dress, decorate. The movies not only trained us in an easy reception of conventions for the medium, the way film images generate meaning, but also of a dominant set of social ones. Chorus girls from Lima, Ohio, trained by diction coaches spoke an odd Anglo patois, prostitutes became "hostesses", closed doors signified sex, women were pale, men rugged. Archetypes of wealth and poverty were reinforced.

Corporations have always understood that multiple buyers exist, the trick was to appeal to them without losing the mass market. Advertisers precisely identify different groups in the search of new markets that offer significant enough niches. Target stores open up the idealization of the American family to Latino and African Americans, showing sunny outings worthy of Martha Stewart. IKEA courts the gay market, showing a mix of couples that could be partners or friends. In an odd way the ads offer the promise of democratic access that legislation and good intentions often fail deliver.

Personal and the particular responses are a hedge against the homogenizing force of the market. They are generated by larger ideas, and riskier, richer propositions, about program, use and form, which must be allowed to exist. Not all will succeed, or even appeal, but the aspiration of designers and artists is necessary for a public realm in which the difficult exchange of ideas can occur.

In "Transfiguration of the Commonplace", philosopher Arthur Danto presents a case for the relation between art and mere real things, which goes back to the earliest discussions of art, imitation and reality. He loosely quotes Plato asking "who would choose the appearance of a thing over the thing itself ; who would settle for a picture of someone he could have ,as it were in the flesh". The virtual and the tactile do jockey for our attention. Who could not be impressed with the continued force of the imagination in the face of the void : a power to reproduce and invent. Both have the potential for freedom and co-option, making other possibilities or only an international market share.