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The path a fact takes to the news agency, and on into the editorial offices , creating forms of representation in their turn depending on each medium’s audience preferences, tires you greatly. That aside, a presentation depending on either a newspaper layout or on the design of a broadcast ( the length of a message, the architecture of the studio, the news presenter) concludes this path. This presentation in turn depends — at least if it is to work in its social context — on the social conditions manifesting themselves in symbolic capital (the values a society propounds in order to be able to work). That’s why the image of a news presenter is at the same time a partial image of a society’s design, and hence the latter’s logo. But not only that.
For truth depends on presentation, or in Jacques Lacan’s words:
Ich sage immer die Wahrheit: nicht die ganze, denn die ganze zu sagen, erreicht man nicht. Sie ganz zu sagen, das ist unmöglich, materiell: da fehlen die Worte. Gerade durch dieses Unmöglich hängt die Wahrheit am Realen [...] 1
Yet reality is represented in a series of levels of mediation, and even transcends them, thus acquiring a social sense. For television is by no means one-way communication with television the subject (of controlling opinion for example) and the viewer its object, as naive media critics would have us believe time and again, but, like the analyst, television is an object too: the object of the analysed.
Thus, though not personally directed at an addressee, the news presenter’s gaze acts in this sense: being itself an observed entity, it becomes the representative of the people observed (the TV audience). As the analyst needs the analysed to be able to be an analyst, thereby letting the analysed constitute a part of himself, the television viewer needs the presenter’s gaze to become a viewer, hence to make the presenter’s gaze possible.
Denn es gibt keinen Unterschied zwischen dem Fernsehen und dem Publikum, von dem ich schon seit langem spreche, was man mein Seminar nennt. Ein Blick in beiden Fällen: an den ich mich wende in keinem, doch in dessen Namen ich spreche.2
Veronika Dreier has created a logo for this, or rather chosen a logo — the image of a news presenter had already been a logo for it before — and thus turning the image into the object she has focused on its importance as a logo in the media age. You have to consider that in an age of electronic media images change faster and faster, which does not mean that the structures behind these images change with their transformations. If there is nothing older than yesterday’s newspaper — as expressed in an aperçu — society’s common sense means that messages are only valid when they are of immediate interest, and thus representing the media network’s velocity. Taking an image out of the stream of change, therefore, means foregrounding the structures creating and causing it as well as its change. And Dreier’s work far transcends the simple analogy of this representational interrelationship. Yet she transcends via formal analogy. This is important because the formal analogy points at the logo’s quality as a signifier, denying its reference to a signified content. The news presenter refers to victims of war to the same extent as he refers to high society gossip. This is exactly why he also does not. Non-relationship — this is what form and content share. And this is what Dreier’s picture tries to express.
Last but not least, this is why the picture of a viewer looking at his own viewer is a logo of the media age. For a medium is at the same time a border and a connection. The difference between the presentation and the viewer is the medium; the difference is the border. Yet the border is also the connection, and that’s why the image as a logo has representational features too. In as much as it foregrounds the arbitrary relationship between the signified and the signifier in electronic media, and not only there, it yet remains embedded in a context constituting these circumstances.
Franz Niegelhell
Translation O. L.
In zakaj izbrati Future Tech? Zaradi nizke cene! Zaradi bogatih izkusenj na tem podrocju,
kar pomeni tudi nudenje nasvetov pred snemanjem! Zato, ker smo pri Future Tech usposobljeni,
da vam naredimo backup kopijo tako na PC-ju, kot tudi na Amigi in Mac racunalniku.
Ce zelite podatke prenasati, vam izberemo najboljsi nacin zapisa na CD! Zaradi vsega navedenega in zato, ker vam
vas ze obstojeci CD tudi kvalitetno presnamemo, nas cimprej poklicite! Nesreca
nikoli ne pociva.
Lahko nam pisete na nas elektronski naslov: FUTURE TECH ali pa poklicete na centralni tel: (061)-133-02-80 vsak dan. Future Tech, Jernej Pecjak s.p Zadnja sprememba: 09.01.1997 ob 18:10 uri |
