The construction, design and preservation of highway panoramas puts a set of related issues on the agenda concerningmobility,perception,performativityand the
experienceof these within the visual regime of navigation. These key terms require a brief positioning.
The first, most general issue is the changing role of mobility in contemporary society. The technology concerned with mobility and the infrastructure it entails has developed spectacularly in the last century: from the first steam trains, sub-ways, streetcars and automobiles, to the high-speed rail and international airline networks–a development that has accelerated in the last decade. In part due to the exponential growth of communication technologies, from the cellular phone to the Internet, it is possible to travel distances in far less time, as well as to maintain contact all over the globe. The contemporary world is not only reliant on mobility and communication in a social, economic and cultural respect, but it is also spatially arranged, accommodating different modes of transport and mobi-lity.
In his study on mobility as a defining characteristic of modern societies, sociol-ogist John Urry develops a differentiated notion ofmobilities. From walking to fly-ing, to mobile communication and imaginative travel, as he calls it, he analyzes different historical and contemporary forms of mobility. His study argues for a new sociology based on these mobilities, rather than one based on territorially fixed societies. This historical comparative perspective on different forms of mobility and their impact is pertinent to my analysis. My perspective, however, is focused not on general sociological developments, but rather on a diachronic comparative analysis of the visual regime of navigation, that is, the conditions in which the visual experience of mobility is both possible and taken for granted.
This regime–the conditions of mobility as a way of life–is what I aim to offer an analysis of.
Visualityin today’s culture is tightly connected to mobility–corporeal by means of physical travel, and virtual through media and communication. Visual percep-tion refers here to the brain’s registration of the visible dimension of the world through the visual faculty. This sounds more unbiased than it is. What we see is in fact present, but in looking we select, taint and interpret the visual stimuli.
Additionally, seeing should not be considered as separate from other types of perception facilitated through our other senses, such as touch and sound. This ties in with the recent surge of interest in haptic perception. Such a broader con-ception of seeing makes it necessary to insist on a synesthetic, rather than a merely aesthetic perspective in discussions of spatial perception. In doing so, visual perception is positioned within a larger set of perceptual faculties.3 In Chapter 5 I will return to this perspective when I analyze what I consider a haptic engagement with space in interactive navigation. In this chapter, instead, I will discuss perception primarily as seeing in relation to motion–including principles of selecting and tainting–exploring the visual regime of navigation at play both in physical movement and virtual (mediated) mobility, without assuming or iden-tifying an absolute distinction between the different forms of perception.
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Visuality is not only the perception of the visible, or seeing; it includes the con-ditions by which we can see. This encompasses the visible world and the technol-ogies that facilitate viewing this world, yet also make it specific or give it shape, as well as the historically changing conceptions related to seeing. Or, as the Amer-ican art historian Hal Foster says pithily, visuality is “how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein.”
(1988: ix) In order to understand visuality in our contemporary moment, it is use-ful to examine this as a historical cultural phenomenon. This does not mean that every scholar should write the history of seeing; rather, the awareness that seeing has a history will inform even the most contemporary analysis of present prac-tices.
Visuality restricts and determines bothwhatwe see andhowwe see. The reac-tion of the individual subject–in this case the car driver–is both corporeal and psychological. The concept ofexperiencethat I use, here, does not make a distinc-tion between these two domains. Moreover, viewing entails agency, as an act that establishes vision: it is a performative act. Performativity, as conceptualized within the philosophy of language in speech-act theory, following J.L. Austin’s famousHow to Do Things with Words(1962), entails the potential of utterances to act. Acting is bringing about change. This notion that saying is doing, and hence also making, can be turned around as well: doing is saying. In this sense, seeing is also doing and vision is an act, one that makes, creates, and establishes.
Later, I will return to the notion of performativity in relation to perception and to the production and construction of space, as it is a key concept at the intersec-tion of mobility, mediaintersec-tion, and the construcintersec-tion and meaning of space, the cen-tral concern in this book. Here, the perspective of performativity helps us consider the panorama as constructed through the collaboration of construction, perception and experience. It is in experience that the‘act of looking’(analogous tospeech act) and the response to it come together. The specificity of navigation as a visual regime, as I will argue in the following, is situated in the intersection of mobility, perception, performativity, and the experience thereof. The movement of the gaze in panoramas, the body in motion in transportation, and the simula-tion of movement in virtual mobility all rely on principles of visual navigasimula-tion: the body of the spectator is positioned in the visual arrangement, perched on the lookout for where to go next.
The key terms in this consideration–mobility, perception, performativity and experience–find their nexus in the perception of moving images, that is, in the visual regime of navigation. Or to be more precise, they constitute amobile disposi-tif: a dynamic arrangement of the viewing subject within a spatial field of percep-tion, including the vectorialization of‘going somewhere’, the view or object of the gaze, and the media and/or transportation technology which sets this arrange-ment in motion. The significance of movearrange-ment for visuality is that it provides a productive perspective for examining the design of public space from a
cinemato-graphic,‘moving-image’perspective. What the cinema and highway panoramas have in common is a particular mode of vision geared towards moving images seen from a fixed seated position, either behind the glass windshield or in the darkness of the movie theater. Such an entry point brings up questions related to design and perception, but also concerning aesthetic and cultural norms. It can even be argued that a cinematographic approach to the highway panorama moti-vates the contemporary concern for the roadside design in spatial planning. Me-dia are pre-eminently relevant benchmarks for spatial design in terms of mobile viewing of‘moving images’. Therefore, a media-theoretical reflection as part of the way we think about spatial design and the view from the highway can help us understand how media work. In other words, through a comparison between the different types of experiences of and by media, the perspective of cinematography helps when conceptualizing the panoramic experience of driving–and the other way around.
The history of comparing spatial perception in motion with the perception of mediated moving images goes back a longer way than the more recent interest in mobility within media studies and the relevance of media for architecture and spatial design. In 1964, for example, the urban planner Kevin Lynch, famous for his book about perception of the city,The Image of the City (1960), co-authored a book with Donald Appleyard and John R. Myer entitled The View from the Road (1964), a study based on extensive photographic documentation. This book paved the way for an aesthetic approach to mobility. The authors used motion picture cells and interviews to analyze the visual experience of driving and the view both onandfromthe highway. In the preface the authors stress the double-sidedness of their project:
We became interested in the aesthetics of highways out of a concern with the visual formlessness of our cities and an intuition that the new expressway might be one of our best means of re-establishing coherence and order on the new metropolitan scale. We were also attracted to the highway because it is a good example of a design issue typical of the city: their problem of designing visual sequences for the observer in motion. But if in the end the study contri-butes something toward making the highway experience a more enjoyable one, we will be well satisfied. (1964: 2; emphasis added)
The authors refer to different media and arts when they write about the constant succession of movement and space, a statement which is used as a motto on the website of the Mobility Studio of the Interactive Institute in Stockholm, Sweden:
The sense of spatial sequence is like that of large-scale architecture; the con-tinuity and insistent temporal flow are akin to music and cinema. The
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thetic sensations are like those of the dance or the amusement park, although rarely so violent.4
The Mobility Studio provides this quote in the context of their more recent inter-est in the perspective of the car driver in theirBackseat Games project (2001-2006) that addresses very creative questions concerning possibilities for enhancing the experience of road use. This project explores the car as an interface for different purposes: work station, arena for entertainment, site of fiction, or soundscape.5
Interestingly, Lynch’s statement resonates with Houben’s perspective on the aesthetics of mobility, invoking different media and sensory experiences in order to highlight the aesthetic approach. This points to the properly synesthetic nature of the issue: an aesthetic that is built on the synchronization of the senses. As mentioned above, the synesthetic nature of experience in the visual regime of navigation is of crucial importance for understanding not only highway panora-mas, but the wider field of mobile screens explored in this book.6
These different studies on car mobility share similar interests with media-archaeological studies about the development, theories and practices of screen media, in the sense that both approach mobility as a perceptual and media-shaped experience. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s work (1986) on the impact of train travel on the experience of time and space has been influential for these media-historical studies. Similarly, other cultural historians have focused on the shifts in experience of nineteenth-century modernity and the place of both technologies of transport and of vision. In line with this reasoning a new generation of scholar-ship on early cinema has made important contributions to this‘modernity thesis’
about the reciprocal relationship between media and mobility.7
The combination of discourses on media and mobility, on perception and space, and the sometimes highly philosophical discussions about these topics within the fields of architecture and spatial design, raise fundamental questions about the paradoxical relationship between physical mobility on the one hand, and the experience of virtual mobility (mediated) on the other. For the reflection on highway landscaping, the question is how to move beyond mere analogy. I seek to understand how apparent similarities between aspects of media and mobility, between real space and the virtual, can provide insights into both domains that characterize contemporary culture.