P e r c e p t u a l  F i e l d s

In 1895, the Lumiére brothers presented the first moving picture to an audience in Paris. Cinema emerged amongst an array of optical inventions from the camera to the panopticon, the stereoscope to the x-ray, which together effected a spectacular fragmentation of the field of vision. At the same time, urban centers such as Berlin, Paris and New York swelled and shifted gear with the quickening pace of capitalist industrialization. The first nickelodeon movie theater opened in Pittsburg in 1905; the first skyscraper was built in Manhattan in 1913. Both inaugurated new kinds of urban spaces and new kinds of psychological and sensory experiences of space—fragmented and ordered on an unprecedented scale and density, characterized by plurality and contradiction, proximity and isolation, real and imagined spaces. Through devices like the mise-en-scéne or jump-cut, film developed a language commensurate with the increasing spatial complexity, temporal indeterminacy, and social dynamism of the modern city, while in the movie theater and on the street, individual and collective psychological spaces merged to create new forms of social relations and subjectivities. The immediacy of images and movements in time and space facilitated by the cinematic apparatus created a virtual experience that paralleled the "proximity without presence" of that quintessential modern urban figure, the flaneur. As the flaneur roamed through the arcades of nineteenth century Paris, he described a new form of urban experience that conflated public and private, distance and intimacy in fleeting, touristic impressions of ambient spaces. In 1903, Georg Simmel wrote about "the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli" that characterized modern urban life.¹ He, alongside others that included Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, intuited the impact of modernity in terms of a perceptual shift—as a culture of distraction, whose locus was the rapidly expanding metropolis.

In an essay on the new movie theaters of Berlin, "The Cult of Distraction" (1926), Kracauer described the theaters as "[a] total artwork [Gesamtkunstwerk] of effects… that assaults all the senses using every possible means."² Linking two of cinema's defining features—raising distraction to the level of culture, and targeting a new mass audience drawn together by the emerging urban centers—Kracauer's analysis of cinema's social and cognitive functions predicated distraction as a social and aesthetic strategy within spectacular society.

Both Julie Becker and Sarah Morris incorporate an investigation of distraction into their engagement with the contemporary urban experience. Surfacing as a perceptual framework for Morris' analysis of contemporary cities, distraction also underpins the production and reception of Julie Becker's work, an intimate exploration of the ways we engage and process today's super-saturated visual and cultural environment. In Midtown (1998), Sarah Morris' camera recalls the absent-minded attention of flanerie as it moves through the compressed spaces and flattened perspectives of midtown Manhattan, a voyeuristic relation to the space and its inhabitants that is both remote and intimate. Images of facades and flashing billboards run together before they can be separated and processed, creating a mesmerizing cumulative effect. Similarly, Becker's engagement with distraction is rooted in the processes of accumulation central to her epic projects. Also exploited as a mode of reception, distraction further problematizes the relations of looking, allowing subjectivity to surface in Becker's work as decentered and fragmented, embedded in the perceptual conditions of the work.

Since the tumult of its arrival, a cinematic way of seeing has become ingrained in the urban psyche. From depth of field to the narrative structuring of spaces, as architect Bernard Tschumi writes, cinematic devices play an integral role in the processes of describing and experiencing architectural space today.³   Mark Lewis' films Children's Games, Heygate Estate and Tenement Yard, Heygate Estate (both 2002) bring together an analysis of cinema, its techniques of vision and presentation, with an exploration of the extraordinary architectural spaces in a sprawling high-rise modernist housing project. Both Lewis and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster isolate single visual techniques (the steadycam and the fixed frame respectively in Lewis' Children's Games and Tenement Yard; the panning shot in Gonzalez-Foerster's Riyo (1999) to examine the role of the camera apparatus in mediating the experiences of specific architectural environments and relations of subjectification set up by each work. Sarah Dobai invokes the viewing and narrative structures of cinema in her 16mm film, Yard (2000), which raises then confounds the expectation of resolution built up around a scene that might be the opening shot of a feature film. In his photographs of high-rise apartment buildings, Knut Åsdam also plays on the visual language of cinema; picturing them at night, he captures the dramatic chiaroscuro effects of street lighting on the buildings and the noir romance of the dark spaces in a way that exposes tensions between the different ways we relate to modernist architecture—from the lived, social reality of the buildings to their formal beauty, enhanced by a cinematic imaginary.

1. [Simmel, Georg, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in Donald N. Levine, ed. On Individuality and Social Forms (University of Chicago Press, IL, 1971): 324-39.
2. Siegfried Kracauer, "The Cult of Distraction," The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995): 323-328.
3. [Bernard Tschumi, "Spaces and Events," in Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall & Iain Borden, eds. The City Cultures Reader (London: Routledge, 2000): 154-157

Urban Subject

Real Fictions

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