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U r b a n S u b j e c t Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film North by Northwest opens with a panning shot of the glass-grid façade of a New York skyscraper. It is typically Hitchcockian cinema: the narrative shot, a visual metaphor for the elaborate scheme that ensnares Cary Grant. The splintered and repeated reflections of taxis, bodies and sidewalk in the emblematic grid emphasize the mechanisms of fragmentation inherent in both the modern city and the cinematic apparatus, and the implicit threat they pose to individual identity. Hitchcock's image captures the ricocheting relations between the contemporary subject, the urban environment, and image culture, where space and subjecthood, image and identity entwine. The artists in Sodium Dreams approach the position of the urban subject from widely different perspectives. While Sarah Morris outlines a sense of subjecthood reduced to visual experience, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster explores the role of looking and voyeurism in the relationship between the self and others in the city. Their films echo what Siegfried Kracauer described as "the pure externality" experienced by audiences in the new movie theaters of Berlin. In the cinema, he observed, "the audience encounters itself; its own reality...revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid sensory impressions."1 For Kracauer, the spectacle of cinema provided a model for the externalization of subjectivity performed in the act of looking, commensurate with the processes of subjectivation taking place within the modern city. Embodying the contradictions of modernity, cinema was part of the processes of mechanization, standardization, and the dis-embedding of social relations, while as an institution it expressed the utopian possibility of an alternative public space, the democratization of culture with the establishment of a new, heterogeneous mass audience. At the same time, cinema's assault on the viewer at the level of sense perception, engaging the conditions of experience and subjectivity through distraction, an essentially decentering mode of reception, represented for Kracauer a practical critique of traditional subject-object distinctions that shattered the boundaries of individual identity. Training his camera on the anonymous spaces of contemporary cities, Knut Åsdam presents the urban environment as a highly charged psychological space. His images and installations explore the experience of the subject through the visible and invisible relations of control and resistance, aesthetic, social and ideological dynamics between people and urban spaces. French theorist Roger Caillois' discussion of psychasthenia, or the disturbance in the relations between personality and space, offers a radical interpretation of subjectivity that Åsdam reinvests in the contemporary urban environment. Tracing the psychasthenic experience through strategies of mimicry and assimilation to devices of reflection, disappearance and camouflage, decentering and abstraction within urban spaces and cultural practices, Åsdam presents a complex, multivalent experience of contemporary urban subjecthood. In the essay "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," which was originally published in the Surrealist journal Minotaur in 1935, Caillois described psychasthenia in terms of a schizophrenic's relation to space, an almost pathological blurring of the boundaries of personality. His notes resonate strongly with Sarah Dobai's photographs, in which an unsettling equivalence between subjects and their environment manifests itself both psychologically and formally within the structure of each image. Figures stand, sit, crouch or lie still in unspecific urban environments, in an indeterminate but contemporary time, their emotional state leaching into their surroundings. The ineffable quality that characterizes each of Dobai's scenarios seems to link every location, from a staircase to a supermarket, to an urban vernacular that derives from what Gilles Deleuze, in his major study of the temporal and spatial characteristics of cinema, described as l'espace quelconque, or the "any-space-whatever" created by film both on and off the screen.2 An instrument of the deterritorializing processes of global capitalism, film, and especially the mainstream film industry, has played a key role in the fragmentation and homogenization of the urban landscape, and the generic cultural context against which the contemporary subject is aligned. This space, whether tawdry or idealized, is equally real and imaginary. And as Hannah Starkey demonstrates with her intricate manipulation of cultural and social signifiers, the notion of the urban subject is inevitably a stereotype, whether a resident of Åsdam's tower blocks or the character of Anna Sanders.
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