The production of atmospheric interpellation: light shows at Civic Centre, Shenzhen

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ideological valence of atmosphere, grounding the notion of interpellation in investigating the widely welcomed light shows at Civic Centre in Shenzhen, China. Combining theoretical development and empirical research, this paper examines how these light shows generated particular atmospheres that impinged upon the formation of spectators’ subjectivity. In a time when atmospheric staging is widely adopted to engineer urban space and events, ideological interpellation has become increasingly atmospherically diffused. Meanwhile, material contingencies and lived varieties of atmosphere also condition and potentially disturb the communication of ideological messages. Atmosphere thus needs to be considered in terms of its conceived, perceived and lived dimensions. This paper draws from Henri Lefebvre’s space triad and rhythmanalysis to outline a framework for tracing the production of atmosphere, and applies it to empirical data to illustrate how light shows at Civic Centre generated ideological appeals through the atmospheric constellation of content, environmental materiality and subjects. It is through atmosphere that we grasp and imagine what the world is. In critical response to atmospheric interpellation, new modes of the reproduction of life derive not from an atmospheric outside but precisely through a reorientation from within.

KEYWORDS:

• Atmosphere
• ideology
• interpellation
• light show
• illumination

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my dissertation panel (Professor Richard Allen, Professor Maurice Benayoun, Professor Damien Charrieras) for providing valuable advice on my paper, as well as my research participants for accepting my interview invitation. I’m also grateful to reviewers and editors of Geografiska Annaler B for their generous feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Chinese, ‘深圳 (Shenzhen)’ ‘市民中心 (Civic Centre)’ and ‘灯光秀 (light show)’.

2 The estimated urban population of Shenzhen in 2000 was 800,000 in the 1986 document. That figure jumped to 4 million in the estimation of the 1996 document. Consequently, the government decided to move the urban centre from the old Luohu district westwards to Futian district for habitable flatlands.

3 According to governmental documents, Shenzhen as the Pilot Demonstration Area is positioned to be a model city featuring high-quality development, the rule of law, urban civilization, citizens’ well-being and sustainable development in the new era of developing socialism with Chinese characteristics. It sets out to ‘explore a new path in the construction of a strong and modern socialist country, and offer strong support for the realization of the Chinese Dream of the great renewal of the Chinese nation’. See http://www.sz.gov.cn/en_szgov/news/infocus/pda/introduction/content/post_6616962.html.

4 Sporadic discontent was found both on social platforms like Weibo and Wechat, and during fieldwork.

5 The third light show in 2021 used a different prelude but with similar sensory elements (e.g. red waving flags), and omitted sound effect and the fourth sequence. It also added illuminated drone performance to aid the narrative of sequences, with drone formations picturing Tian’anmen, blue roc, the party emblem, and the famous local statue Chuang (Venture) – where a muscular man pushes snapped a doorframe above his head.

6 All interviewees’ names have been changed or only partially revealed.

7 Nye drew from the Kantian sublime to develop this concept. According to Kant, individuals experience sublime when confronted with objects that exceed the capture of imagination, or in other words, perceptual apprehension. Of key concern to the Kantian sublime is the simultaneously repulsive and pleasurable experience where individuals come to the awareness that, despite their perceptual and physical powerlessness in front of the sublime object, the superiority of their reason will keep them from subjection (Kant 1987, 103–117).

8 As Berlant put it: ‘ …  … at the end of one kind of fantasy we need to be lured toward better ones, new misrecognitions of the relation of the materialized real to a projection but now a projection that reorients us to a different, better mode of the reproduction of life, a different sensus communis, a different structure of feeling associated with the good life’ (Helms, Vishmidt, and Berlant 2010, 5).