Postmodernism is one of the most difficult terms to define because of its abstract and broad nature. However, one of the best ways to view the differences of postmodernism to previous periods of culture is to study the evolution of architecture as a system of communication. Early modernist architecture was characterized by stadiums and mass ornament; where a singular message reached a large group of people in close proximity to its transmission. Political rallies in Nazi Germany and the rise of international sports are primary examples of architecture galvanizing the masses towards a single message, a single goal. Late-modernist culture saw a singular message received through different channels and receivers in the form of radio, television, and movies. The movie theater, a staple of cities both big and small across the world, distributes a variety of films, on a variety of screens, to a variety of audiences. Now, postmodernism is characterized by a fragmentation of messages, channels, and receivers; it is almost too difficult to keep track. But, in today's culture, it is fair to say that we currently live within the messages. The messages surround us, we carry them with us, and have access to them wherever and whenever we please. The messages are all-encompassing. We are the message.
Today’s existence is chaotic and our architecture resembles this, if it’s not the cause of it. Our spaces are built with maximalist intentions and are overly complicated for human habitation. Capitalist excess comes to the fore. Natural landscapes have been diminished. We’ve traded city dwelling for suburbia, only to return to urban settings for a saturation of images and sounds, called, noise. This constant noise of urban centers in the 21st century arguably over-stimulates the sensorial functions of our body. Postmodern critic and theorist Frederic Jameson argues that the postmodern hyperspace requires us to “expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions” (Jameson 80). What creates these feelings of tension within postmodern architecture? When it comes to image and subsequent sound, screens seem to be one of the most prominent factors in our discomfort. The screens and their images are almost unavoidable today, nearly every public space has screens displaying varied and vibrant images, each one vying for our attention. As noted by Architecture Historian, Beatriz Colomina, “we are surrounded today, everywhere, all the time, by arrays of multiple, simultaneous images. In the streets, airports, shopping centers, and gyms, but also on our computers and television sets” (Colomina 7). She continues with a similar narrative to Jameson’s regarding our sensorial functions by stating:
“the idea of a single image commanding our attention has faded away. It seems as if we need to be distracted in order to concentrate. As if we—all of us living in this new kind of space, the space of information—could be diagnosed en masse with Attention Deficit Disorder.”
The manipulation of our own bodies for this new method of mass communication is rooted in the screen. The power of the screen is immense within our society today and our architecture utilizes them frequently in some of the most technologically advanced urban centers around the world, seen in the form of Times Square in New York, Piccadilly Circus in London, or Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo. In these examples, the screens become the buildings. The screen rests on the exterior of the structure, shrouding the people within the building with their monstrous size, and simultaneously enclosing the outside public with its imagery and projections. The screen and its images are omnipresent. The expansive, multi-screen displays are used primarily for consumer advertising, an anchor of postmodern culture. However, before screens became our urban landscape, they were used to access information interactively (typically found in military situation rooms), for education, and for entertainment in smaller scale presentations.
From left to right: Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, Times Square in New York City, and Piccadilly Circus in London.
Charles and Ray Eames notably transformed the use of screens with their multi-screen designs for displaying moving images. Their work was seen in 1959 for the United States in a national exhibit exchange with the Soviet Union, in which, they created a film showing a stereotypical American lifestyle. The project included the installation of seven video screens, with unique projections displayed on each one. The images moved quickly, exposing the viewer to rapid-fire snippets of information. Designer and collaborator Buckminster Fuller, who built the pavilion that housed the installation, described the Eames’s project as something “that nobody had done before and that advertisers and film makers would soon follow the Eameses” (Colomina 10). He was not wrong. The saturation of advertising images today on multi-screen displays, which contaminate our senses, stem from the same ideology that the Eames’s utilized. When describing a later project using multi-screen design, Charles Eames shared that “the idea was to produce an intense sensory environment” (Colomina 14). The intention from the beginning was to bombard the viewer’s senses, stirring some form of irregular, or, unnatural experience.
From left to right: Herbert Bayer’s 360 Degree Field of Vision (1930), Charles and Ray Eames’ “Glimpses of America” (1959), and a traffic control room in Minnesota (1993).
Bringing the focus back onto urban dwelling, Times Square in New York City is the most direct evidence of our habitation in Postmodern culture through multi-screen architectural design. The nine blocks that comprise of Times Square has always been an area of pleasure and entertainment. Dating back to the turn of the 20th century, 42nd Street was home to New York City’s shady theaters, gambling, and prostitution. Today, it has evolved into a less scandalous area, but the pleasures of 21st century life through low-end consumerism reign supreme. The screens display grand ads, the streets are bustling with performers and artists, and cheap gift stores and fast food restaurants compose the postmodern hyperspace. In many ways, Times Square is itself a “Fun Palace” (Price and Littlewood 130), or, “a laboratory of pleasure, providing room for many kinds of action.” Everything is there, accessible instantly. It comes across as chaotic (and it truly is), but, the masses that interact with the space find pleasure and relaxation in their cheap thrills. The postmodern arena becomes an exhibition for a new kind of social formation; one that blurs aesthetics with commodities and fetishizes the artificial. This designed chaos is Jameson’s main argument regarding our physical challenge to properly maneuver through, or inhabit, these spaces. With massive crowds, tightly compacted and backed up vehicular traffic, screens, stores, restaurants, and performers all competing for your attention, the distractions are endless. The area, like many other postmodern arenas, provides an illusion of infinite utopia, disregarding any notion of a neighborhood or the fabric of a locale. There is no clear beginning or end, rather a mere nebulous transition between acute chaos and… chaos. Times Square seemingly has succeeded in “transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world” (Jameson 83). Relying on the indulgence of kitsch and pastiche, Times Square is a postmodern hyperspace in which the inhabitant becomes lost in a new reality, enclosed by the totality of images.
While multi-screen designs have cemented our culture into a postmodern state, they have been used to express sentiments against their typical consumeristic uses. Contemporary sound and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda was commissioned to use the screens of Times Square for an art installation called “test pattern” in 2014. Ikeda’s work involves creating sounds and graphics that show the viewer the working systems within the screens. His exhibitions “datamatics” and “systematics” aimed to explore “the potential to perceive the invisible multi-substance of data that permeates our world” (Ikeda). Essentially, he reveals and materializes data found within screens through visual forms. With “test pattern”, he shows us the reality behind the digital advertisements that fill Times Square. The graphics are chaotic and disorganized and the musical score pushes the boundaries of human auditory capabilities with high-frequency sounds. The viewer is undoubtedly uncomfortable experiencing this installation, their senses pushed to extreme levels. Viewers are warned that the experience may cause seizures, especially for people with epilepsy. Ikeda is attacking our bodies, but he is merely exposing the reality of the postmodern hyperspace that Jameson was talking about. Ikeda’s work has been described by some as “post-digital”, a cultural phenomenon and artistic practice that rejects the saturation of digital images for a more human existence with technology. Ikeda’s role as an artist is not one that celebrates our postmodern obsession with digital imaging and chaos, but rather, one that exposes its flaws. Ikeda uses the screen to make us realize our humanity.
Our existence with screens comes as a double-edged sword within our culture today. What began as a tool for productivity and information encoding efficiency is still effective in this manner. But, it has ultimately also become a shroud over our lives. The screen is everywhere and is used for everything. While the problematic nature of massive multi-screen architecture is mostly contained into select areas of urban density, it is beginning to expand. In New York City, the screens have moved downtown in the form of large scale advertisement video projections on the side of buildings. In Tokyo, several more multi-screen enclosed cross walks have been built in other districts such as Ginza. The massive screen is spreading and soon we will truly be entirely engrossed by the images of advertising, consumerism, and media. But at the same time, smaller and more mobile screens are already becoming something of a veil over our experience of the natural world. Extended reality headsets enclose us into an virtual, artificial, often gamified world. VR, AR, and MR technology puts the screen directly in front of us and blends varying realities. As if navigating our physical reality was not difficult enough, now we must distinguish and operate between disparate worlds of divergent mediation simultaneously. Surely, our future will become increasingly digital. The abilities and performance of the human body will be extended and our productivity and efficiency will be increased. But, the way in which we function will need to change. Perhaps our sensorial functions may be pushed to either fatal levels, or, immunity. The screens will no longer merely surround us, but we will be truly embedded within them.
Pictured above: In Blade Runner (1982), screens make up entire buildings in mesmerizing fashion. In Blade Runner 2049 (2017), holographic images extrude off the building towards the viewer.
Citations:
Colomina, Beatriz. “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses' Multimedia Architecture.” Grey Room, vol. 2, 2001
Ikeda, Ryoji. “datamatics.” 2006, www.ryojiikeda.com/project/datamatics/
Jameson, Frederic. “Post Modernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism: a Reader, by Thomas Docherty, Columbia University Press, 1993
Price, Cedric, and Joan Littlewood. “The Fun Palace.” The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 12, no. 3, 1968