Vertical vision and atmocultural navigation. Notes on emerging urban scopic regimes

Abstract

This paper analyses vertical vision by tracing its possible genealogy and exploring the forms it takes in the contemporary city. In the first section, vertical vision is situated in the context of its cosmographic tenets. In the second section, the critique of verticality is complemented by a topological approach where vertical vision can be seen folding into a novel visual grammar. The lineaments of this grammar can be retrieved by attending specifically to algorithms and their role in contemporary urban perception, which we discuss in the third section. The fourth section implements the suggestions of two artists: Harun Farocki’s notion of navigation, and Hito Steyerl’s notion of bubble vision. Exposing the central role played by digital platforms in ushering in this novel paradigm, bubble vision can be reconstructed as the logical end-point of classical vertical vision. This comes in conjunction with the rise of a peculiar visual-cultural configuration, which could be called ‘atmoculture.’ Section five submits that atmoculture represents the cultural milieu of bubble vision. In conclusion, the paper invites visual scholars interested in the study of verticality to recognise bubble vision, together with its atmocultural background, as a new expression, and a reconfiguration, of vertical vision: similarly, centred and disembodied, exhilarating, and dangerously de-responsibilising.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

[1] ‘How could I take part in the exhilaration of the sky? I look: looking requires my petrified presence in this point of the world.’

[2] In classical culture, hybris indicates an act of human arrogance that is going to be met with punishment by the gods. Hybris always preludes to human disaster.

[3] To the earth, one must also add the city: ‘the advent of airplanes changed the image of the city as this would no longer be approached gradually and slowly, from the ground-level, as when arriving by couch, train or ship, but rather will appear ‘rapidly, from the air … oddly splayed in abstraction’ (Gordon 2008, 9).

[4] As Matteo Pasquinelli summarises, ‘an algorithm is an abstract diagram that emerges from the repetition of a process, an organization of time, space, labor, and operations: it is not a rule that is invented from above but emerges from below’, a form that is immanent to a given process which, by imitation, does encode, optimise and reproduce (2019).

[5] In the strictest Kantian sense, such algorithmic vision can be called ‘transcendental.’

[6] Virilio (2001, 186) defines this term as follows: ‘The idea of logistics is not only about oil, about ammunitions and supplies but also about images. Troops must be fed with ammunitions and so on but also with information, with images, with visual intelligence. Without these elements troops cannot perform their duties properly. This is what is meant by the logistics of perception.’

[7] Not coincidentally, the word ‘cybernetics’ derives from the Greek kybernetes, i.e. steersman, which in Latin translated as gubernator: the verb to govern initially developed from the field of navigation.

[8] It is worth quoting Benjamin at length: ‘The tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means – that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually taking their cue from tactile reception – through habit.’

[9] Hwang and Elish (2015) show for instance the way Uber works by showing ‘surge zones’ (where demand from customers is supposed to be high) to drivers, which are based on predictions which may work, or not: drivers will move around waiting for a surge to happen, and waste time and fuel if this is not the case (for an experiential take, see Poier 2018). Conversely, the app may show ‘phantom cabs’ to users in order to give the impression of high offer. Using a visual metaphor, Hwang and Elish note that Uber ‘has produced a mirage of a marketplace,’ concealing its invasive influence on the image of the city, under the rhetoric cloak of the ‘transparent software.’

[10] A reviewer has astutely noticed that the word ‘platform’ speaks precisely of a horizontal plate, plane or plateau.

[11] Authors such as Benjamin (2019) and Espeland and Yung (2019), for instance, have drawn attention to the racism that may be encapsulated in algorithmic language, and made accordingly invisible.

[12] These pictures are from project TimeMachine by the art group CADA. TimeMachine aims at capturing and visually translating the elasticity of time as it is experienced in everyday life. The project seems to provide an artistic visualisation of the navigational grammar of algorithmic vision. See https://www.cada1.net/works/timemachine/

[13] For instance, Airbnb reformulates what constitutes a home, Uber reframes the ideas and practices of the car and private transport, TripAdvisor rearranges the urban geography of enjoyable places (visiting a place, eating out), and so on.

[14] Something similar already happened with previous technologies. In the case of photography, for instance, see Blight (2019).

Additional information

Funding

Andrea Pavoni’s research is funded by FCT/MCTES under CEEC Individual contract [CEECINST/00066/2018/CP1496/CT0001].

Notes on contributors

Andrea Mubi Brighenti

Andrea Mubi Brighenti is a professor of social theory in the Department of Sociology, University of Trento, Italy. His research topics broadly cover space-power-and-society. His most recent book, co-authored with Mattias Kärrholm, is Animated Lands. Studies in Territoriology (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). Research website: www.capacitedaffect.net

Andrea Pavoni is a research fellow at DINÂMIA’CET, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Portugal. His research explores the relation between materiality, normativity and aesthetics in the urban context. His book, Controlling Urban Events. Law, Ethics and the Material, is out with Routledge.