Radio
Temporary Media Collective
Softening
Daunt
horn speaker, car mat, rearview mirror, air freshener
Caution: Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear!
Something about…
The diffracted reflection of the horn speaker coming in and out of view as you move.
Cars as a symbol of capitalist production.
Thinking about lost futures, disaster, hurtling towards something, dizzying stasis, sitting in a car watching the world pass by rapidly outside the window.
References:
Baudrillard, America
Adam Curtis, Hypernormalisation
Foucault, Of Other Spaces
“The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.” (Foucault, 1967)