Provocative Watching

"We're in the boredom-killing business."

Television has left the wall unit to go all the way down. It's been 
equipped with little wheels to maximize domestic mobility. The 
late-medial receiver sprawls across the couch, bed, chaise longue, or 
floor, cuddled up with a pillow and stuffed animal. Video ergonomics 
leaves the chair (where once the modern monarchs took stock of their 
media-glacis) untouched and researches horizontal reception. The royal 
scepter has become a remote control used to admit or dismiss channels. 
The inner experience of half-sleep in front of the screen is periodically 
interrupted by visits to the refrigerator, lavatory, or telephone. 
"Where's the ashtray?" Is this the post-human condition so often 
discussed, or is that something reserved exclusively for the "other"? The 
slumped video condition never directly admits the images to perception. 
Once, TV watching was mediated by radio and television guides and 
domestic affairs. Slouching in front of the tube, viewing critically, the 
pace of the serials, the couch potato's total addiction, staring in 
fascination at the fluctuations of light intensity: All are legends of a 
distant television era. Today, we speak of filtered watching: a 
psycho-chemical magnifying glass has been inserted between the naked eye 
and the radiant tube. Viewers are no longer vulnerable, naked and 
innocent, but themselves manipulate the images, including them in 
personal leisure activities at will. The image regime of yore, ruling 
over the docile, homogeneous masses, has itself become an inert jumble of 
icons, ready for unrestrained revision. The trajectory of internalization 
has been reversed; the images are now assigned the theoretical grid of 
the relaxed subject. Video artists who wish to breach this order are 
going to need a lot of violence-and-panic aesthetics.

Audiovisual media have not resulted in the anticipated "inundation by 
stimulation," but in a supreme state of mind. A space has been created 
between the classical transmitter and receiver, in which awareness can 
temporarily expand towards total control over every input. The best 
quality indicator for video clips and related genres is hashish and its 
designer variants. Herbal tea, café au lait, a microbrew, a Coke, a glass 
of wine, LSD, or XTC may as well produce unsuspected dimensions and 
one-shot viewing pleasure links. Everyone can be a fifteen-minute 
brilliant media theoretician. The unbearable state of current affairs has 
been reduced to archetypal proportions. There is comfort in the poetic 
experience of historical constants (for want of something better to do). 
Watching someone else's mental images is a form of temporary 
entertainment which can be extracted from the wealth of historical 
ideologies. But this is more than mere noncommitment; it is to glance at 
the final fateful hour. Drugs in hand, we descend into the very blueprint 
of the collective unconscious. Once beyond interpretation, we are 
surrounded by the thousand plateaus, here, on this simple weeknight, and 
all thanks to video. We should not underestimate the dialectics of quite 
ancient and new media. The technological images mentioned by Flusser draw 
on an immense, but limited universe: there is nothing new to be found. 
The attraction of media art is that it allows us to observe the entry 
systems themselves: Drugged perception consists of exercises in the 
perception of metastructures. Just as Hillary's account of the first 
climb of Mount Everest will always make for fascinating reading, even 
though nowadays we can simply rent a Sherpa helicopter to take us to the 
top from Base Camp I, so too are video art and computer animation of 
lasting value. Sooner or later, every experiment is fit into an all-night 
epic that mustn't necessarily be zapped to bits.

The habit of replacing the old test patterns with all-night aquarium 
broadcasts (with viewers making furious phone calls about silverfish 
floating upside down on the surface) - or a video loop of a ride on the 
back of a garbage truck, a boat through the waters of Berlin or 
Amsterdam, or a one-way German express train - is an appeal to the 
normality-inducive characteristics of the zero medium. The attraction of 
home viewing through security cameras that would otherwise register only 
audiences appears to be self-sufficient. The question of why this should 
not be interesting can no longer be answered. In criticism, normality 
appears under two headings: one pacifying (stupefying television), the 
other incendiary (mass killers copying TV patterns). The influence of 
television is thought to have two mutually exclusive extremes, 
resignation and blind rage, which at the same time represent two aspects 
of one and the same popular awareness. But normality is always outside of 
the subject, who gains access to it through intoxication. To the user, 
the world is everything as it happens to be - all else is superfluous. 
The material at hand is taken for granted, and enhanced judgment 
(-through-joy) is not concerned with the critical note that starts off 
the debate, but with a medial-input analysis that will culminate in a 
maximum matter-of-factness and outshine all controversies. Ecstatic 
resignation has a biological basis, and does not result from any 
cognitive-rational understanding of commonplace affairs: Watching is not 
a mathematical formula, but a chemical process. Whether it's brutal 
violence or a corny game show that's being served up, the home front, 
with its superior outlook, is chiefly interested in its own perceptive 
reactions, not in the battle of signs that takes place on screen. All 
images are abstract; they become actual through the suspense created 
between the content of ideas that remains absolutely clear within the 
viewer's hypertransparent frame of mind, and the production of bodily 
juices which occurs now and then, despite everything. Only within the 
glands can normality be produced; all else is artificial exaggeration.

Today, virtual reality presents itself as the media junkie's methadone. 
After kicking the habit, the clean synapses need to be offered an 
attractive alternative. Here, the advantage of video becomes obvious, in 
that it offered a distance to the image through which viewers could let 
their creativity flow. VR tries to beat the narcotic three-dimensional 
interpretation of the two-dimensional screen with the promise of a 
multifaceted, expanding, iconographic empire to keep you high. Yet VR, 
with its pseudo-menus, offers hardly a choice. It presents not a trip to 
the heart of the machine, but a program treasure hunt, an interactive 
holiday for the eco-minded citizen who prefers this artificial trek to 
disturbing the remnants of nature. Off the road through cyberspace is not 
included in the package; you cannot impose your own programs on the 
entertainment presented. In VR, no matter how far you travel, you never 
leave the library. The transcendence of the pictorial mountain achieved 
by the videonomous end user has been taken out of the cybernaut's 
datagloves. Now smart drugs are being developed that will allow the 
production of the most astonishing syntheses, even in VR.

Since it is becoming clear that VR will never surpass the game-room 
level, the attempt is now to hasten the promised absorption by images 
through existing telecom accessories. In order to renew connected 
humanity's interest in the television screen's constitution, the industry 
is now developing interactive TV, the main motor of which is home 
shopping. The solitary human being's natural tendency to talk to objects 
is addressed by those firms who manage to buy access to one network or 
another. Hair conditioners may be sampled on screen, ordered by phone, 
and delivered at your doorstep by messenger services. The object's answer 
is to deliver truckloads full of flashy gowns, electronic gadgets and 
porn movies to the interactivist's home. Teleshopping's educational 
objective is to make the viewers realize that to switch on the television 
is to leave the home. Telephonic consciousness must be transported to the 
TV medium. An impulse buy in a shop is still an act of relative 
individuality. The home-shopping industry hopes to transform the 
pre-pay-TV era's receptive rapture into the consumerist ecstasy of 
"buying-power watching" on two-way channels. We do not yet know exactly 
what is ruining interactivist thinking; the danger that the expanded 
viewers will never get down to the decision-making process, will skip the 
stages of multimedia initiation and elaboration altogether, or will leave 
the choice of channels to knowbots programmed to their personal 
preferences, or watch standard channels only, or do something completely 
different ... Flick-it-yourself TV is a test of the old premise that the 
subject in front of the screen is willing to want, think, judge, act. 
It's comforting to dwell among the temporary autonomous flocks every now 
and again; a moment of relaxation from the everyday demand for unique 
creativity.

Narcotics enhance our understanding of the nature of media power. They do 
not produce new inner images, but offer control over the complete old 
external image package. Drugs do not reduce, distort, or prevent 
reception; rather, they give the viewer the power of direction. A fact 
that is hard to accept for the media persons who thought of themselves as 
situated at the heart of the power disposition centered around 
technogical images, but which considerably increases the silent 
majorities' joy of living. What remains for the intellectuals, having 
only just conquered their own alcoholism, is deconstruction sports. This 
mental fitness training is the current approach to the video medium: to 
scan all channels for possible fasc/rac/sexism and the according level of 
political correctness. The media designers are well aware of this, laying 
their traps for every conceivable cultural-critical viewpoint. Many 
representatives of the theoretical classes have already defected to the 
other side of images, taking great satisfaction in the maelstrom of 
interpretations they evoke and manipulate. Contemporary illustrated 
stories already offer so much deconstruction by themselves as to 
dismantle the critical view by its own methods. Reichean movements, 
Eco-style mass culture, classical Freudianism, new age healing through 
blending in with the natural picture, fundamentalist selection methods: 
All these outlooks appear to add to the synergism of the entire media 
package as edu- and infotainment. Video is no longer watched as a means 
to get carried away, but is an interpretable and temporary cultural 
product from beginning to end. What has Hollywood come up with this 
summer? What lasting values does European cinema have in store for us 
this time? What's interesting in video is its production process and 
financial boards, not the final visual experience. All that counts is the 
aesthetics of production conditions. The awareness that everything is an 
expression of the Zeitgeist is the most rewarding form of historicism. "A 
responsible video from the Clinton era; a fine example of '90s 
engagement."

So far, reality TV defines itself in relation to classical media-user 
numbness: the rough image is expected to kick the spoiled viewers where 
they had it coming, a strategy aimed at charging the weakened image 
package with raw energy. The inevitable consumer's answer is: "Bring me 
another Coors!" Reality is just another marketing stunt. What's more 
exciting is the cold turkey of drug-free watching. To sit through the 
edit, shaking and in a cold sweat - to look the medium straight in the 
eyes, without the dope, in defiance of any productive relations. Those 
who place their bets on the return of traditional boredom will note that 
the image has already adjusted to the masses' level of intoxication to 
the point where it is impossible to follow without physical 
intensification. Detox is an attempt to witness the second demise of the 
Occident - by watching without either being manipulated or manipulating 
the images yourself. The existential moment of video arises when the 
viewers and their videos are linked up beyond all power structures. Any 
iconographic metaphysics, every superstructure or supreme violence 
disappears; all that the viewer without qualities observes are the 
picture lines passing by. In the material manifestation of the image, we 
are welcomed by pixels. Téchnis a friend for life.
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