2017 - The Unseen Workshop

/ TONI SERRA *) ABU ALI

Toni Serra *) Abu Ali

An activity in the framework of OVNI programme for 2017 at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona that proposes -with the help of videos and texts- to go in depth into the notion of the invisible. Given by Toni Serra (Abu Ali), the workshop goes from the political to the poetic, or from poetry to mysticism.

From forced invisibility to permanent exhibition in the panopticon. The image as a veil. Tunnels of reality. The reality of the dream. Crossing the other side. On contemplation. The one and the multiple.

You are asleep and your vision is a dream; all you are seeing is a mirage. (1)

Capitalism’s gigantic audio-visual machine, like all its machines, is driven by an extractivist impulse: life as an infinite reservoir to be exploited. It makes sense to counter this instrumentalist drive with a method based on collaboration, immersion, and commitment that weaves together the creators of images and their environment, and does not turn them into mere agents at the service of that machine. However, there is a danger that this measure alone will be insufficient and reversible, unless it is accompanied by a radical critique of the notion of vision that has prevailed in the dominant global culture: if we do not consider vision’s capacity to extract but also to involve and project, if we do not deconstruct the visual language that implements the colonisation of time and of perception....

We normally associate images with vision, but in the society of global capitalism the use of images as spectacle (2) has turned vision into a kind of blindness, creating an imaginary woven from a huge number of images that are renewed and also replicated unceasingly. A tissue that solidifies until it forms a dense veil of images that not only hinders vision and obstructs direct experience, but also tends to colonise our realities and dreams, while plundering deposits of fantasy (3) and personal or shared imaginaries. A dominant reality that threatens the fabric of other realities, that threatens to wipe out forms of knowledge, landscapes, people, ways of life, affects... As if a thousand libraries of Alexandria, still embedded in people’s daily lives, in their chores, their places, were already burning once again.

Much has been said about the manipulative nature of media images, their capacity to deflect, distort, and distract the senses, creating a vision of reality that is completely biased on favour of the big economic powers. A huge, seemingly diverse, audio-visual production machine, in the hands of a few private, government, or hybrid corporations. But the real power of these images does not lie in denying, coercing, or manipulating (which always generate resistance and thus opposition), but in claiming to build, to constitute, to give space and make meaning. In other words, to create an imaginary and offer a place, an individual or creative role in that master film that will then be projected under the heading of “reality”. Of course it is no more real than a theme park or a shopping mall that simulates town squares, street musicians, and even action scenes...

This spectacle-reality is forged in the constant, high centrifugation of labels: news, fiction, advertising, education, entertainment, training, and so on. Themes and concepts are mixed together, and so is the syntax of consumption, permutating them in time and space until they become indistinguishable or their differences become irrelevant, once they are consumed and absorbed as part of the same segment of experience.

Audio-visual media have undergone radical change and hybridisation under the impetus of the new consumer, entertainment, and socialisation technologies. They have partly yielded the oligopoly of the means of audio-visual production, and are now complemented (and challenged) by the massive spread of devices for recording, editing, and disseminating images. They have hybridised with other media based on micro-segments of information and opinion..., creating a dense media ambience in which TV news, advertising, video games, film, advertorials, and social media are constantly in self-referential mode. Inspired by marketing strategies and informed by the personal information that is “voluntarily” provided on so-called social networks, critical voices also take on a spectacle-role. An implementation of a new version of the panopticon, given that any “social” element of these networks dissolves with the ownership, management, and use of the data they amass.

Models are no longer simply projected onto passive viewers, like in the old Hollywood dream factory. Instead, what were formerly audiences are offered an “opportunity to participate”, a chance for interaction that gives them an active leading role in a pre-written script. Stories, feelings, private and shared dramas, aspirations, desires, dreams, fears, likes and dislikes, emotions and ideas, are the raw material that fuels the great accumulation machine, always geared towards obtaining and maintaining maximum profit in the form of financial or cognitive capital. In this context, as Pasolini saw, free participation and interaction paradoxically coexists with looting and plunder, with the exploitation of the enormous experiential and cultural reservoirs, the personal and collective realities of those who participate, whose reality either becomes productive or is cancelled. The “raw material” is used according to the financial logic of marketing and the politics of control. It is extracted, inserted into the timeline (4), filtered, and put back on screen in the form of the global imaginary.

The dominant power presents itself in an outward-oriented imaginary, but this does not mean that it is only used on forms and surfaces. Rather, it provokes and forces the interior – anonymous, hidden, insignificant – to flow towards the surface, to be reduced to it, to show and advertise itself and ultimately become only that outwardness. Only thus can it be mapped in its entirety, its identities grouped and produced, experts assigned, and goods targeted to it.

The sleep of our era is not a good sleep that provides rest. It’s an anxious sleep that leaves you feeling even more worn out (...) There is a narcosis that begs for an even deeper narcosis . (5)

This is the sleep that gives rise to “capitalist realism” (6), which mainly affects people living in the central parts of the global system, where capitalism tends to seem unfair but unavoidable, with no conceivable alternative. Mark Fisher, who coined the term, describes it as the impossibility of there being space for an alternate possibility within a capitalist framework.

Capitalist realism cannot be confined to art or the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action. (7)

Capitalist realism, implemented as a hegemonic ideology, consists of the conviction that there is no alternative to the paradigm of capitalist social organisation, and also of its own means of reproduction and dissemination to most of the population.

As we have seen, the image industry and the media are essential for projecting this capitalist realism onto the social screen. Two of its media strategies are notable for their capacity to go viral.

The first, presented as “information” and “objectivity”, consists of what we could call the creation and export of the visual concept of poverty. Through images (preferably taken from countries on the global periphery), news and mainstream documentaries present decontextualised, re-situated visual segments that illustrate the dominant idea of poverty for “central” audiences and export it as a global imaginary. At the same time