[ Media, Controversy, Empowerment]
Media technology has shown to be a vain and glorious species, as technology advances, its users gain access to its power in a democratic manner where anyone can grab attention, economic gain, or political agency. However, the promise of democracy in the mediascape has only been abused by centralised political authority and tech companies to enforce censorship and restrict data accessibility. The society as a whole needs to be challenged through a lack of censorship and authoritarian jurisdiction to visualise and mobilise active forces in participation of social changes. This challenge is attempted by an architectural proposition located in Beijing that materializes the decentralisation of media authority, demarcation of publicity and privacy, vulnerability of public ambience, symbolism, and a panoptical presence in an environment that is highly censored and charged with political and cultural attention. Without alluding in to any dramatic shift in political power, the Wall imagines a different reality where architecture exists in a disconnection with economy but draws inspiration from Chinese culture to contextualize a radical idea inspired by western literatures. However, it is the desire to push the possibility for architecture to initiate something outrageous evolving from the rapidly changing mediascape.
Comodification of Experience via Media
The point is, in the experience age, individual experiences have the value to be turned into products for consumption. In the industrial age, mass production turned art into a commodity (Benjamin, 1936), and the process of commodification also underlies a process of aestheticization.
“Just when art works become commodities, the commodity itself in consumer society has become an image, representation, spectacle. Use value has been replaced by packaging and advertising. The commodification of art ends up in the aestheticization of the commodity.” (Huyssen, 1986)
When individual experiences become commodities, the commodity itself in consumer society has become a situation, perspective, and participation. In the past two decades, developments in various industries have confirmed this commodification of experiences in markets, from social media such as Snapchat to VR in gaming, from self-driving cars to smart cities. Business and tech companies have been exploring the boundaries of technologies to capitalise on experiential innovations . An example would be the rapid evolution of cameras on smartphones. Half of the century ago when the idea of taking photos with a small mechanical eye can only be seen in spy films. Nowadays people are walking with those devices that are updated to match, even surpass, the capacity of human eyes. The ability to take and share these aestheticised situations of each of us is a product in this commodification in the experience age. In another article named Facebook struggles to stop decline in ‘original’ sharing, it said that the original status updates by Facebook users were down 21 percent (Efrati, 2016). People care about the reality that they can see, hear, and experience more than a reality said on the digital profile. The notion that I maybe the result of everything I’ve done, but I’m not the accumulation of it means a shift in people from a desire to leave some traces of life in the digital world to a desire to capture a visual, instantaneous, fast-paced clip of their experiences for others. You are not your profile, you are simply you (Wadhera, 2016).
What does this shift from the information age to the experience age inform us as architects? Maybe despite all the efforts to push the technological boundaries to follow the trend, we should be critical about how these desires will affect us internally. In other words, we might be able to live in an environment ultimately run by AI in all good ways, but the social desires stimulated by the media accustomed us to exposing, broadcasting, and eventually profiting on our own experiences. The prevalence of surveillance causes the fear of losing one’s freedom and identity, but as social beings we are controlled to be less resistant to sharing our experiences with others via media for consumption. We will eventually enter “a kind of exhibitionist regime that locates the individual within a polarized desiring structure, ‘to be seen’ and ‘to see’ thus always also has ‘to be controlled’ and to ‘control’.” (Mattsson, 2010) In other words, the commodification of our personal experience can collaborate with advanced information technologies to create a panopticon of the media, which led to a public life filled with staged “experiences” from individuals in a non-coordinated way, resulting a theatricalization of public life.
“In the age of globalisation, the panopticon of the media becomes the new disciplining authority, In the context of this development, the theatricalisation of all spheres of public and private life has proven one of the most striking features of our everyday experiences in contemporary culture.” (Frohne, 2002)
This new disciplining authority, however, creates a society closer to Deleuze’s societies of control rather than Foucault’s disciplinary societies. On one hand, the platform where the various media operate is not a fixed enclosure. The internet allows the instantaneous exchange of these experiential commodities in “a free-floating control” instead of a regulated time frame in an architecture of a closed system (Deleuze, 1990) At the same time, the consumption of others’ experiences is strengthened by the cycle of feedback. Feedbacks deliver values and participate, which in turn encourage creativity and products. It is similar to societies of control that “imposes a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests” and “perpetual training” (Deleuze, 1990). The producers of experiences will eventually receive visibility, influence, and capitals. In conclusion, the experience age will produce a decentralised media authority that exploits desires and creativity for controls in this society whose background will be rapidly advancing technologies to enhance, replicate, and archive experiences.
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FallBook [research and early experiments]
WinterBook [formal and techtonical studies]
