The following essay was written by Mark Starmach 2010 as part of an undergraduate degree at UNSW with the School of English, Media and Performing Arts. If using this essay as a reference, please use the proper method of accreditation regarding websites.
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Crittercam, Pegman & switchboards: The power of optical-haptics
For Haraway, the human body is not a clean, definite, individual cultural entity, but rather a complex, indiscriminate, muddy entanglement of blurred consciousnesses, infolding of fleshes, and interspecies dependency (Haraway 2008, 249, 11). Put simply, it is impossible to determine where the human body ends and begins. The human body becomes particularly unwoven when envisioning compounds, compound bodies and compound eyes; sight which is added through the logic of some stringy, semiotic algorithm. In When Species Meet, Donna Haraway examines this algorithm through the phenomenon of ‘Crittercam’ – a National Geographic TV show offering a peep into the private life of various animals by attaching a tiny video camera to them – as a cycle of demands, inputs and feedbacks between humans, technologies and animals (2008, 263). In order to do this she employs phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s term, ‘infolding of fleshes’, to describe the knotty web on which fleshes and things overlap and are woven into each other, and through which the entanglements which position the human body are formed (2008, 250). This essay will explore how infoldings of fleshes facilitate embodiment, (that is what are their natures and roles in this process) and specifically focus on the pouvoir of optical-haptics in enabling the embodiment of humans with technologies. For this, Google street view’s ‘faceless orange man’ mascot, Pegman, will be biopsied and deconstructed.
Resonating Cyborgs and Symbionts, “the inextricable weave of the organic, technical, textual, mythic, economic, and political threads that make up the flesh of the world” (Haraway 1995, xii), it is only through the infolding of fleshes that worldly embodiment can be achieved (2008, 249). How fleshes are infolded though, is a separate question, and both Crittercam and Pegman infold in different ways. Both however, operate on the logic that the camera acts as a judge’s chambers, in which the photo-realistic or at least the ‘visually convincing’ determines facts of the world (2008, 251); photography is seen as truth. For Crittercam, the show’s producers herald this technology as being able to offer a never-before-seen unmediated glimpse into the animal world, totally removed from human interference. In actual fact, the process of creating this show is incredibly logistical and represents hours of work. Likewise for Google street view, the long and elaborate process of driving around and photographing the world’s streets in a specially designed vehicle with a top-mounted nine-directional camera (documented as taking several months for individual cities, and even longer for a country1), followed by sorting through this huge synthesis of images, stitching them together in a 360 degree panoramic interface and finally assigning them to a certain geocached location, offers to an extent the illusion of an unmediated glimpse of the pedestrian and quotidian. But this process too is heavily mediated. Number plates and phone numbers are blurred for privacy, as are faces2. The streets of the world are removed of any traceable human identities, they become anonymous, faceless, and the ability to judge anything (except through the lens of photo-realism) is removed. This logic shows that although certain media processes are heavily mediated, they become veiled under a cloak of a visually convincing interface, leaving a raw and visceral, unmediated appearance. Akin to the dirty, gritty world of Crittercam and naturecultures in which all traces of humans are removed, what we are left with in Google street view is the faceless world of navigation, a world comprised of pseudo-3D landscapes created through photographs and software, a clinical world of directions, information, distances, vehicles, road signs and street names. In both Crittercam and Google street view, the world is processed to become humanless, but in doing so our attention is drawn to the voids left which humans would ordinarily accommodate. There is space for humans left sculpted into these vast virtual landscapes. This is the compound world where embodiment can occur, and so the stage is set for Pegman to make his debut.
Pegman, an orange peg-like man, is the end result of Google’s labour. He resides on top of the zoom bar in the top-left hand corner of the Google Maps interface, where the user is encouraged to click and drag him onto the streets to explore3. As Haraway notes, humans can only enter the compounded world of infoldings of fleshes through the perspectives of surrogates, substitutes and sidekicks (2008, 253). In Crittercam, as the lens is championed to the critter, Haraway dubs our embodiment through the camera as becoming a ‘technological remora’, contrary to the producer’s claims that the show will make us become a wild animal (2008, 252). At no point during Crittercam do we ever completely evacuate our body. Instead, we enter a complex infold, a relationship where we commensally accompany the animal in a synchresis of sights4. We don’t hijack or leech parasitically off the animal’s vision, but rather we use it as a compound organ to extend our own, and so we are attached to the animal at the same time we remain separate from it, we merely accompany it. However, embodiment occurs in Crittercam in a starkly different way to that in Google street view. Pegman is not a remora, we do not accompany him. We are not championed to him because he cannot exist outside of us. He cannot stand alone (or see alone), as he is completely dictated and controlled by user input (clicking and dragging). In this sense, the relationship users have with Pegman is parasitic. We seize control of him, pulling him onto the street, spinning him around, zooming in, moving along a road; it’s as though we have tapped intimately into his nervous system. It is through Pegman’s compounded point of view, that the user sees the streets. What the user ‘sees’ though when hijacking Pegman’s eyes as their own sensory organs is an interesting question.
A peg, much like a knot, infolds flesh. It holds something together and pins it to a certain thread, a discourse or a narrative. However, unlike a knot, a peg has a temporary nature. It slides along a line, it is attached with the intent to be removed, it is disposable and slippery. Much like a jack on an old telephone switchboard, pegs contrast with the permanence and stickyness of Harraway’s entangled webs of fleshes and bodies. Through Pegman, the user slips into and out of an anonymous, faceless, nonlinear journey, one with no origin or destination, no time or duration, no driver or passenger. The capturing, editing and archiving process is completely removed from the final product. In fact, Pegman is entirely constructed, he is completely abstract to the broader Google street view process, and yet we need his eyes to see. This poses a paradox. If we are placed within Pegman, a panopticon of sorts, it is impossible to experience Google street view as a neutral, objective, humanless landscape without narrative or duration, and after all the efforts of developers to remove any trace of human mediation from this process, why then incorporate Pegman? It does seem natural though, to occupy the streets in this interface as a strange orange man, and to an extent Pegman serves an important role in humanising a humanless landscape.
On the power of hand-pictograms in manuals, designer Erik Adigard notes that in an increasingly post-humanistic and transhumanistic world, hands as semantic illustrations on machinic devices operate as a commentary to years of the human hand completing repetitive mechanical tasks, and how these tasks are gradually being replaced by machines. The pictograms implicate humans, they call for humans to use them, they leave space within the technology for humans to accommodate. They open up a relay between humans and machines. In the same way, Pegman is an abstract pictographic capstone to the long and elaborate Google street view process. He invites humans to use Google street view, he acts as a cohesive to the processes of infolding and the sacrifice of self-identity through the power of optical-haptics (sight and touch). As taken from Adigard:
“We still need to grasp and hold objects in order to make contact with the physical world, so we intently hold our computer mouse to touch information, we obsessively hold our cell phone to talk and now we choose our iPod as dancing companion. These devices are holding our hands and, if anything it is our eyes doing the touching” (Adigard, in Levy 2007)
Haraway too acknowledges that it is “the action in contact zones” which enable infolding, and so the inviting, humanising combination of optics with haptics between two bodies is the bridgehead between lifeworlds and the key to embodiment (2008, 263).
Just an abstract symbol without us, Pegman is a tool which compounds our eyes with Google street view. Pegman becomes human through us, through our inputs of touch and sight. At the same time, we become Pegman. Echoing Haraway, technologies and humans feed into each other, “they touch; therefore they are” (2008, 263). Like a hand unplugging and moving a jack across nodes on a switchboard, Pegman moves with our mouse along the virtual landscapes of Google street view, connecting two otherwise disconnected threads of consciousness, the user’s and the technology’s, and if I may indulge in the switchboard analogy a little more, it is through this connection where the conversation between fleshes can occur, bind and knot.
Notes:
1,2,3 These phrases are taken from Google street view’s “Behind the Scenes” section which is viewable here: http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/help/maps/streetview/behind-the-scenes.html
4 This idea of ‘synchresis’ was taken from film theorist Michel Chion. Chion originally intended this to describe the phenomenon when the aural matches the visual, however in the context of this essay, I am using it to describe the compounding of sights.
References:
Haraway, D (2008), “Crittercam: Compunding Eyes in Naturecultures” in When Species Meet, Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, pp 249-263.
Haraway, D (1995), “Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living together in the New World Order” in The Cyborg Handbook, Gray C (ed), New York: Routledge, pp xi-xx.
Adigard, E (2007), “Metropolis, Hand and Interface” in The Hand Book, Levy J-B (ed), Italy: Lars Muller Publishers.
