BENJAMIN EDWARDS  WRITINGS   Reverse Perspective, 2005 
This lecture was delivered at the College Art Association Conference in Atlanta, in February of 2005.

A slide show of images presented with the text is now available.
REVERSE PERSPECTIVE
One of the values of painting is that it can visualize an experience. It can reveal to us things that we feel about the world, certain abstractions about our condition, rather than simply reproduce what we already know. Over the last decade or so there have been changes felt but not necessarily visualized, and a big change has been in how technology and media have altered our cultural landscape. Specifically, how has our internal, psychological landscape changed? The signs of a creeping virtualization of the world are all around us: from the mall to the movies to the military, we see it everywhere, but its deeper effects are not as apparent.
I came at this subject from the bottom-up, so to speak: that is, through my individual experiences as a consumer and as a traveler through cities and suburbs around this country, I observed a certain fakeness, which I now recognize as a kind of virtualization, that existed as the veneer to the architecture and environments that I encountered. Buildings and places seemed to be not of the landscape, but on it. At this time, in the mid 1990s, computer graphics technology was too expensive, and not developed enough, to be widespread, so I took traditional photographs in the form of slides, which I projected onto the canvas to build up my images as paintings. This process was very much one of finding instances of what I perceived as a trend in the landscape, and then compiling them like data into a painting, which formed my generalization, or conclusion.
In the late 1990s I began using a digital camera and Photoshop. This allowed me to plan the layering of the paintings, direct the image on a macro scale and to manipulate the two-dimensional shapes, which had the effect of simulating a three-dimensional space. But I soon felt constrained by my use of flat planes of color to construct a convincing immersive environment of the sort becoming common in popular visual imagery.
The methods I use now are very different, and more like the tabula rasa approach of my subject, more like the process of virtualization itself. I still take photographs but I use them as sources for virtual models that I construct using 3D modeling software. Much like the pure intellectual and geometric space of the Cartesian grid, the software’s default scene is an empty, gray, gridded space. The way that I conceptualize and organize how my paintings develop relates directly to this empty space, so that what I build (and eventually paint) is a virtual mirror of the things I experience as a traveler through other spaces, real as well as virtual.
Coming at this subject first from empirical observation and then from theoretical construction has given me two distinct angles to use as lines of approach, and this has led me to observe that the “virtualization of the world” and the “world of virtualization” seem to be converging.
Within the last few decades, we have gone from a universe where the world seems to impose itself on us to one where we seem, with a false sense of empowerment, to actively create it, due almost entirely to the computer and the internet, and the shifting ideas about the real and the virtual. The physical world now seems less and less like a universe which contains media, and more like just another medium in itself. In virtual space, such as video games, the environment is planned and controlled down to the level of minute detail in order to deliver to the consumer a satisfying experience with the illusion of control within the space. The newest planned physical spaces, particularly those influenced by New Urbanism, are designed with a sort of user-friendliness on the human-scale, which promotes a feeling of individual empowerment. In both cases, these spaces have the appearance of being designed for “you”, for your pleasure. Both begin on a computer. The first ends up there, and unfortunately the second often feels like it never really transcended the mathematics of the computer to become “real” in the physical world. We have a situation, then, where digital animation, like Pinocchio, is on a ceaseless quest for verisimilitude, while the physical spaces we inhabit are not what they appear to be, with a veneer like a graphic user interface which hides the code beneath. What drives this phenomenon of virtual worlds increasingly appearing more real while real spaces seem to get more and more like theme parks?
It’s too easy to say that virtual worlds and simulated environments have become prevalent solely because of the computer. The technology is there, but that's not the whole answer. What is it in our human nature that makes virtual worlds attractive? What are the forces in our society that drive us in this direction?
In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argues that the bonds of civil society have frayed, citing the example that communal institutions like the bowling league have been in steep decline over the last few decades while more private, individual activities, such as television, have been on the rise. Television, as most of us are aware, is now like the quaint, old grandmother in a vast field of more inwardly directed entertainment options. In The Medium is the Massage, written in 1967, Marshall McLuhan described television as fundamentally different from other forms of media:
“In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. This creates a sort of inwardness, a sort of reverse perspective which has much in common with Oriental art.”
As a painter, I’ve found this to be an apt metaphor for both the way that I like to think of painting, and more specifically how I make paintings, as well as the way I feel as a visual consumer in a culture where we seem to be constantly bombarded with advertising, images and information. McLuhan’s insight of “you are the screen” helped me to make the link between the screen of the blank canvas and the screen in my head, so that my paintings became like multi-channeled mirrors of the world of my visual experiences. “You are the vanishing point” led me to think about this generic “you” as the generic consumer, someone who has the appearance of being at the center of his own universe of information and entertainment, but in reality is plugged in and cut off at the same time.
Television had the effect of bringing people together into a shared culture while isolating them physically, a trend seen in the development of all media over the last half-century. Around the same time that television was changing our culture from a shared space to a more isolated, private zone, other technological forces were changing our physical landscape. The automobile reworked the spatial organization of cities, and practically dictated the form that suburbs, and eventually our houses, would take. Like television, the new interstate highway system connected the country geographically and gave rise to a mass standardization in roadside culture, but it also had the effect of killing off local culture. We still see this playing out when local communities try to stop Wal-Mart from opening a store because of fears that it will devastate small businesses. The rise of cable television has resulted in more programming, a more fragmented landscape of niche programs that appears on the surface to be diverse, but is still controlled by a small number of corporate parents. The internet exemplifies McLuhan’s notion of the Global Village, but it also marks new extremes in fragmentation. The Great Equalizer, the internet both spurs and undermines conventional news coverage: an obscure story can get traction on a political blog, but its race-to-the-bottom ethics can erode the journalistic standards of more respectable news operations. The internet is like an unraveling of television. It still isolates us physically but it can fragment us culturally by our own customizing of content.
I see McLuhan’s reverse perspective as an early insight into what is now a more generalized condition of contemporary life, a streak inherent in America’s history from the beginning, something that I call radical individualism. The metaphor for this condition is the iPod. The pod can be a sleek form which is minimal on the outside but complex and information-packed on the inside (much like the X-box or the big-box retail store). The pod can also take the form of a car, a house, a gated community, an office park, a mall, a cell phone, a PDA, or any number of things, including a frame of mind. It is marked by the sort of inwardness that McLuhan talked about, but it can also be a navigation tool that connects us to the various layers of information that make up the complexity of our daily lives. Like the paradox of the widening of a freeway bringing more traffic, the more control we have over all of this information, the more the information itself seems to grow, requiring still more navigation tools. What make these things attractive are the levels of individual control, convenience or safety involved. Often there is a fetish value, probably related to pure ego-boosting and a sense of empowerment. McLuhan referred to technology as the “extension of man”. Sometimes we are just infatuated with what our iPods, TiVo or cell phones can do, and we like to flex these muscles: we spend too much energy on doing things because we can, rather than because we should. This “gee-whiz” factor is in full force with the digitally animated blockbuster, where we get to see the latest installment of “realistic” special effects, often ends in themselves at the expense of more traditional criteria of a film’s quality.
Video games are the culmination of the pod phenomenon, and the most insidious. The ecstasy of control in a free zone of lawlessness seems to be the primary attraction and the more realistic the better. Teenagers can kill and mutilate as much as they want in video games. Watch a young male play and you’ll see a puerile joy, making a detached observer somewhat embarrassed of our species. Video games also represent the point where the converging of “real” and “virtual” is the least abstract and most immediately disturbing. The troops in Iraq play video games in their down-time. What’s scary is that on actual missions in Bradley fighting vehicles they plug in headphones and crank up the same speed-metal from the soundtrack of their games, so they can get more “in the zone”.
This eerie parallel exists here in this country, too. In some far-flung exurb outside Los Angeles, on a bland, mass-produced, perfectly curving street, in a non-descript house with fewer windows (as is the trend now), some kids are playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on a home-theater projection system with surround sound, while real crime and pressing social issues loom not far away.
We tend to romanticize pre-modern, more "organic" cities, cities with narrow, curving streets that present a variety of vistas. In the suburbs of the past this was given mere lip service, with curves so monotonous they could hardly be called organic. Now you see this romanticization taken to new heights in the New Urbanist developments that have spread across the country, especially in outdoor malls, such as The Grove in Los Angeles, that evoke an old, European street. What we tend to forget, probably deliberately, is that the inhabitants dumped their sewage directly out their windows and onto the streets, which were often not even paved. It was only after gas-lamps, and later electric lighting, that streets became safe after dark. Dwellings were havens from the uncertainties that lurked on the outside. They were less oriented to the street, with fewer windows, and more inwardly focused, for example around an inner courtyard. They were, in a sense, pods.
My feeling is that today in this country, despite all of our technological euphoria, there is a general anxiety about the world. I am not just referring to a fear about the physical spaces we inhabit, city, suburb or exurb, but a general distrust of other people, and a feeling that the public infrastructure of our daily lives, from local schools up to the federal government, cannot solve, much less address the ill-defined anxiety that plagues us. There has been a steady erosion of community, brought on by many of the technological advances already noted, and consequently a rise in people's distrust of their environment. This has contributed to a rise in more inward-focused forms of living, working, and entertainment. In the most extreme cases, where this alienation is most pressing economically or spiritually, individuals feel a need to connect with surrogate forms of community to make up for the void caused by this erosion of the public sphere. These surrogate communities could take the form of gangs, the church, online communities, terrorist organizations, or any other group that offers answers and solutions to a generalized and ill-defined societal malaise that is too complex for the individual to understand. Much like other moments in the history of Modernity, the individual feels a lack of control. The difference now is that we appear to be on the down slope of the Enlightenment: as a society we do not share the feelings of hope and optimism and a faith in scientific progress that marked earlier generations. There is anxiety about the complexity of the forces and systems that seem to work their will with us. We feel like numbers on a corporate balance sheet. We call a customer-care representative (unsure where) and we enter a vast maze of automation and various stages of holding. We don’t want to look under the hood of this society, not only because we’re afraid of what we’ll see, but because we know we won’t understand it.
The pod is like a protective bubble against the changing, uncertain world. From the compound of the isolated McMansion, the individual travels in his climate-controlled car to the office park, or to the mall, and moves fluidly through this zone of closed-off safety. But part of what makes life in the city so much more dynamic and stimulating than life in a suburb is a lessening of this supposed zone of safety. In a city you don't necessarily control what comes at you: in the course of a day, the individual is confronted with images, sounds, and ideas that are new, foreign, perhaps unwanted. But we don't always know what's good for us. A momentary inconvenience on the street, a half-glanced at image, a snippet of a conversation, all of the things that make up the barely-noticed buzz of the city, can shift one's thinking on a subject, give inspiration or insight...in short, the more “random” or unexpected stimuli we encounter in our lives, the more our minds can evolve and the more tolerant we become of new and different things. When we plug into the pod, we choose to give this up. We trade new and shifting inputs, live content, for something self-enclosed, predictable and controlled. Cass Sunstein in Republic.com has noted how the idea of the “daily me”, that is one’s daily diet of pre-selected news or entertainment using technology to filter various sources, has resulted in a weakening of democracy and public discourse. Disconnecting from an environment and retreating into a virtual one to have greater control over what you want, over the long term, will not only weaken what that environment has to offer, but will isolate you from new and unexpected inputs.
In simple terms, the pod is the result of an extremely efficient system of mass-production followed by an equally efficient system of mass-consumption. It often feels like people are all too willing to be numbers, as long as they get what they want. I can’t help thinking of soma, the drug that the people of Brave New World took whenever their spirits dragged.
What I find fascinating about the American character is not just this retreat into technology alone, but also its flip-side, its simultaneous retreat from it. While we may be radical individualists, we also suffer from regressive nostalgia. Notions of Main Street U.S.A. (a la Disney) have always held powerful sway in our national imagination, from Norman Rockwell to Thomas Kinkade (who claims to be America’s most collected artist). The neo-traditionalist movement in architecture, New Urbanism, has taken a lot of heat for being too fake, their projects too much like theme parks. It’s the lower-rung, second or third generation of such developments that are really the culprits, however, because they seem to have taken only the aesthetics, without internalizing the ideals. Mostly, it seems, neo-traditionalism at the mass level, from the outlet center to the new housing development with the preposterous-sounding name, appropriates this aesthetic language in large part to take advantage of people’s desire for the lost ideals of community, or to borrow a phrase from the promotional language of the “Village at Hiddenbrooke”, a new development of houses inspired by the paintings of Thomas Kinkade, a “vision of simpler times”.
Most people probably think that painting is more naturally suited to this latter form of escapism, and it is no doubt painting’s long history that makes it seems this way. After all, the Impressionists have had over 100 years to sink in. Painting shows us our past, those simpler times, not our future. I find it fascinating how these dueling escapist tendencies, two visions of utopia really, one into and one away from technology, rub up against each other and sometimes work in tandem in our culture. In a similar way, painting is oddly well-positioned to cover both ends of this spectrum. As a medium it carries with it an automatic historical context, a frame in which to place contemporary spectacular phenomena, and in this way, painting can help show us where we’ve been as well as where we’re going.