911 in American Culture by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759116344
Publisher: AltaMira Press
Published: 2013-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, but Maybe Later: A Critical Focus on Shifting Images

Bert and Bin Laden show that it is impossible to keep an image in one culture as global access makes that uncontrollable. A critical culture of shifting image may ask for ways to transfer these images that say nothing into information. First, an education toward an image competence avoids a colonialization of other image cultures. An image has to be recognized and reconquered as a form of cultural knowledge and a means of participation. Viewers need the ability to contextualize the image as active spectators to become culturally competent. The aim is not find out what is the truth behind an image but to ask, Which images do others make invisible?

Image clusters have to be reframed and put into a critical discourse about how images are used to produce political and cultural meaning. This would enable a critical and non-hegemonic look at the political and social complex that infiltrates the field of vision. The image galleries of the WTC attack on the Web do not intend to provoke a critical or curious gaze. The whole complex of images related to the attack does not make meaning alone. So, they have to be filled with proposals for symbolical meaning to allow people to work with the images. As active spectators, we must come to an autonomous imagineering against economical and political interests. It is amazing that in the case of the WTC attack, people already have found a way to deal with the event through their own image productions via the Net. Viewers are encouraged to put unknown and unusual transformation of images in public space by collecting and rearranging these images. Viewers must be included as coproducers of cultural meaning. As situated viewers, we must repopulate space through recognizing its constitutive racial and sexual obstacles (Rogoff, The Production of Space, 1999, p. 22). Rogoff described space as constituted out of circulating capital and that obstacles never allow us to actually see what is there. We are not asking to “see” behind the image; we are asking what other images are behind the one that is visible.

One approach would be to watch and encode the politics of visibility that deny the transparency of events because they are embedded into discourses of power. Images cover other images. Censorship is no longer the basic strategy to prevent specific images to get visible. Now, an overvisibility of a controlled imagery causes an information overload that chokes questions for the other possible images. A critique of the current image culture has to refer to this shifting image. The constant process of moving the boundaries of visibility should be followed to transform these enigmatic images into cultural knowledge that may question the politics of visibility.

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