Observation forms the basis of scientific methodology and creative practice…but the way we observe is culturally informed by the immediate circumstances of our experience, and by the way that the world is presented to us. Also, we change what we are observing by looking at it…
Remember that systems of observation always become systems of representation…have a look at the Stuart Hall text we shared earlier. Hall is writing about language; but his comments apply equally to visual culture.
John Berger’s book, and television series, was the first attempt to describe the cultural construct of observation to a wider audience
Berger J (1972) Ways of Seeing (+TV series)
Jonathan Crary has described the technological developments of the 19C that informed this change way of seeing in relation to the visual culture of the modern world.
Crary J (1990) Techniques of the Observer
Crary J (2000) Suspension of Perception
Rebecca Solnit has described how these ideas came together in California and has identified this moment as a decisive marker in the acceleration of the modern machine-ensemble in the US. In practical terms, the speed associated with the transcontinental railway reduced the size of the US and contributed to the annihilation of time and space, described by Marx as a defining characteristic of industrialised capital.
The golden spike provides a slightly unlikely starting-point, through the personality of Leland Stanford, for her description of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic experiments in relation to animal locomotion.
Solnit expertly combines the work of Jonathan Crary (1990) and Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1977) to account for the acceleration of image culture associated with the speed of the machine-ensemble in late 19C America. She describes how the traditional themes and subjects of the western image-culture, comprising Yosemite, native Americans and sequoia, became incorporated into something bigger and more comprehensive.
In this context, Solnit describes the railway as providing the basis for a specific optic derived from accelerated speed, and informed by the culture of California, understood as a form of utopia. She also acknowledges the brutality of the machine-ensemble and the destruction associated with its extension, and its connection to the politics of manifest destiny and to the mythology of the American sublime…
It’s no accident that California has also supported the machine-ensemble accelerations associated with flight (20C optic) and the digital realm (21C optic). Nor that the film-industry chose to locate itself at the point of maximum acceleration…
The image-culture of the Californian west, especially the photographs of Muybridge, provide a tangible glimpse of the future.
Solnit R (2004) River of Shadows
Paul Virilio (1986) has described how the acceleration associated with modernity alters the qualities of all sorts of relations…
Virilio P (1989) War and Cinema
Here are links to a couple of blog posts about observation