Rachel's Response

Rachel’s Response
Thanks Sarah, for your kind and thoughtful comments. Yes, yes, and yes to:
• commenting on the content of the billboard. Why is it we need MORE FREE HD?
• spending the majority of time in front of a TV screen, or computer screen, or cell phone screen
• personal interactions becoming less and less
• a distraction from real communication
• Our society is nearly completely controlled by the media- we are psychologically controlled by this
• people don’t even realize when they are looking at billboards any more, as if their prevalence is just part of the landscape. Yet we absorb the content without even realizing it

I am exploring a theory that through a virtual escape from the monotony of daily mechanization and routine, the consumer of mediated imagery has become more standardized than ever.

What I find most ironic in this billboard is the promotion of Planet Green and The Outdoor Channel in HD. The channels themselves may have information on sustainable living and wild explorations of the outdoors, however, these messages are ironically displayed on a larger-than-life sign of steel girders, obstructing an actual view of the outdoors, which is sadly nothing more than an industrial site crossed by railroad tracks at the end of a parking lot. It is ironic that the Outdoor Channel could create a version of nature in a higher resolution than nature itself while simultaneously barring access to it. Walter Benjamin states, “The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.” It seems to be an obvious statement on technology’s improvement upon nature and the creation of a simulacrum that is more “real” than reality. Umberto Eco in his essay "City of Robots" states, “Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can” and “We enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it”. If Disneyland and The Outdoor Channel can create for us a representation far better than nature itself, this suggests that nature itself can be disregarded, due to its inferiority.

We are no less fascinated by nature itself, but moreso our ability to represent it. This is certainly a long-standing fascination with images standing in for reality as well as an escapist antidote to the manufactured industrial landscape. Baudrillard writes, ”What society seeks through production and overproduction is the restoration of the real which escapes it.” The Time Warner billboard exemplifies this desire to recreate an escaped reality of high definition visions of nature in order to compensate for what is lost in reality. As Guy Debord describes, “The spectacle divides the world into two parts, one of which is held up as a self-representation to the world, and is superior to the world.” If it were simply this, however, it would be a large image of an idealized natural scene and nothing else. The cable company billboard takes this a step further as it not only imitates and represents reality, but also promotes the commodification of a manufactured version of it, to be considered and consumed rapidly from a distance. The billboard as well as the channels advertised seemingly have the capacity to expand as well as extend an illusion of time and space in the midst of its high-speed annihilation. It is selling us the normalcy of a routinized life as well as an escape from it through the spectacle.

My reaction to these images is to repurpose them through a very early form of duplication and representation, intaglio printmaking, and the effects of slowing down the creation of rapid-paced media meant for immediate rather than ponderous perception, in hopes of uncovering what lies beneath the veil of mediated imagery. This certainly gets me into a snag of all sorts of contradictions, but so far, that’s the fun of it.