The Perception of Reality After the Industrial Revolution

The representation of the perceptible world has always been shaped by the technological and scientific advances of each historical moment. The earliest cave paintings were made with hands on stone; sculptures spread as soon as a resistant and durable material was discovered; the technique of lighting and shading could only be introduced once the chemical components used in paints allowed different colours to be mixed, darkened, or lightened. I would argue that one of the last great shifts in perspective began with the two great inventions of modernity: the railway and the camera. It cannot be said that it was a coincidence that the Lumière brothers chose to film a train when debuting their videographic device.

According to Weibel, in his text The Age of Absence (1992), it was with the train that humans were able to experience the world in a different way for the first time — things around them moved while they stood still. The elements outside the window lost their sharpness and became nothing more than lines of color manifesting across the landscape. The camera, for its part, emancipated painting from the realistic representation that had defined it; it was now free to unleash its subjectivity, rather than attempting to conceal itself in the illusion of objective snapshots. Both inventions gave way to Impressionism, and later to the other artistic vanguards that populated the landscape of representation throughout the last century. It is also worth noting that it was the train that officially launched the first stage of the industrial revolution, and with it, capitalism.

Both elements also brought with it the rupture of what had, until then, been an unbreakable relationship between space and time. The travel time between one geographic point and another was dramatically reduced. The distances between cities, which had once seemed eternal, were now mere minutes of a train journey. There were two distinct temporalities: one that operated within the bounds of a locality, whose rhythms were measured by walking or carriage travel, and one that was shaped by the timetables of the railway. The camera, for its part, established the eternal permanence of ephemeral moments, and their transfer into space. It could portray, in an exact and apparently objective way, a particular instant, in a format portable and reproducible enough to copy and send to any corner of the world with a postal service. This was a radical change: from that point on, portraits and memories, stored in photographs, were not only shareable on a mass scale but also transmissible, and no longer dependent on the fidelity (or lack thereof) of painting.

The possibility of reproducing, for the first time, the ghosts of the past, combined with the voracious pace of nascent capitalism (which carries within its spirit a positivist, evolutionary worldview fixed on future improvement) implied a shift in the focus of the average inhabitant of the Western world. Life, for the first time, extended beyond the present moment, and that brought with it its own set of concerns. The depressive episodes and anxiety attacks that grow increasingly common in contemporary society have their roots in this new modern perspective and were further aggravated by the transience of new technologies, the internet, and social media. 

Social media, perhaps the greatest contemporary mediator between reality and its representation, carries within itself an interesting, amalgamated notion of temporality that reflects the current outlook: past, present, and future are conglomerated into an amorphous mass that denotes a single thing — we will forever be what we were in the past. Everything is eternally recorded; there is no possibility of erasing one's own past once it has been shared, and we must share everything, all the time. There is no escape from oneself, no possibility of regret, we are prisoners of the past and condemned by the future. The instant ceases to be just that, an instant, for what remains of it is an indelible record, while at the same time it is thoroughly forgotten once shared, replaced by the next instant, in an eternal vertiginous movement that carries us from one moment to the next without pause.

There is no possible pause, and therefore no opportunity to reconnect with the present moment. Life is bound to the past or to the future. Rest is discouraged and infrequent. There is no recess, because recess implies lower productivity, lesser efficiency in the capitalist machine that demands perpetual progress. The present is unliveable simply because it is nothing more than the raw reality of routine, the seriality of days that repeat themselves identically, over and over. Memories materially stored through the reproduction of past images recontextualise what the present once was, colouring recollections with an invented romanticism. The present is never as good as the past was, nor as good as the future will be. 

Following this line of thought, I turn to R. M. Schafer and his treatment of sound in modernity: an element inherent to space. The chaotic modernity produces sounds that evoke, always, more chaos. Cities hum with disarray, layers stacked one upon another, building incessant, mechanical, loud, and grating noise. The sonic landscape constructed to accompany the image from the beginnings of sound cinema is, in principle, just that: an accompaniment. It supports the image but rarely expands it. Schafer writes on this:

As civilization developed, however, vocalizing gradually gave way to visualizing as the primary means for storing and transmitting information. Sound cannot be known the way sight can be known. No sound can be repeated the same way twice, not even your own name. And a sound heard once is not the same as a sound heard again. Interesting fictions have been invented for weighing and measuring sounds: alphabets, music scripts, sonograms. But everybody knows that one can’t weigh a whisper or count the voices in a choir.  (Schafer, R. M. 2005, pg. 13)

We are accustomed to looking, observing, perceiving the world through images, and we neglect what we hear, which oftentimes greatly expands our understanding of the world and helps us reconnect with the isolated present moment. The present is merely a gateway to remembering the past or projecting the future, as there is no way to live in the present without being tormented by reality. The only way to make contact with it is through its representation, the reflection of what we perceive, an ontological barrier that allows us to access the real world without falling into the total darkness of truth. As was previously stated, social media is perhaps the most effective ontological barrier of our time. We interact with each other without needing to share the same time and space; we are entirely out of step with the material reality of things. A general sense of derealization spreads.

According to Weinrichter, in his text Desvíos de lo Real: El Cine de No-Ficción [Detours from the Real: Non-Fiction Cinema], the twenty-first century brought with it a proliferation of documentary production, a cinematic genre crystallized in popular culture as an objective representation of reality, though these conventions have been questioned throughout the genre's history. The documentary, or non-fiction film (as the author insists on calling it), offers a commentary on the reality we inhabit daily. This growing wave of filmmaking within the genre is driven, in part, by an urgent need to experience reality from behind a barrier which, in this case, could be the camera. The author attributes this to the rise of television, but I would argue that it also stems from the easy accessibility of video cameras and editing software, and the aforementioned social media, which generate an urgent need to offer commentary on everything we encounter daily.

However, the text also points out that while production is on the rise, distribution and exhibition remain complex, making this genre difficult to reach audiences. I can infer, then, that while we feel the need to comment on lived experience, we have no interest in encountering it at any level beyond what we already perceive firsthand. The contemporary human cannot bear a greater dose of reality than what they already consume daily, much less someone else's commentary on it. The twenty-first century documentary that actually gets distributed is the content we habitually watch on social media.

In relation to this, Weibel refers in the previously cited text to the term "Aesthetics of Absence", a concept he explains as the replacement of a reality emptied of meaning with its representation. From here I can begin to analyse the aforementioned preference for perceiving the world through its audiovisual representation on social media, a phenomenon growing ever more frequent. The aesthetic characteristic of the capitalist vortex is precisely this: avoiding direct encounters with content, always seeing it mediated through a barrier (a screen, for example). It is this galloping rhythm that accompanies modernity — perhaps set in motion by the novelty of the steam train — that inspires this work. I attempt to illustrate, in this way, the instances of time and space, their relationship with reality and their representation, these two being the axis of all audiovisual work.