"On the last day of the 3rd European Social Forum, held in London from October 15 to 17, 2004, there was an anti-war demonstration, in which 20-25,000 people marched from Russell Square to Trafalgar Square protesting the American occupation of Iraq and Britain's support to the US.
At the concluding Trafalgar Square meeting / concert, there was a large screen set up beside the stage, constantly showing images to go along with the music. All these images were carefully selected to get their message across without any cognitive delay. There were pictures of political leaders, pretzels, Ronald Mc Donald, hamburgers, bombs dropping out of fighter planes, caricatures of Bush and Blair, guns, tanks, Disney-Paris, American troops in the Middle East, Arundhati Roy in the Narmada Valley, anti-WTO protesters in Seattle, South American farmers, Guantanamo Bay, Donald Rumsfeld, riot police, etc. etc., i.e., contemporary images, taken from war, dissent movements, world politics and American pop culture in general, especially aspects of it that Europeans tend to dislike.
So far, so good.
What I found appalling and abhorrent was that the Abu Ghraib pictures were also up there.
It is not clear to me why it's alright to put photographs of torture in loops and play them like music videos at a concert in the open air with thousands of viewers, even if it is a gathering of protest. It's not like anyone had a choice -- you couldn't turn the images off, because it wasn't your private television you were watching. You were forced to behold these atrocious sights, huge, lit up, unfolding in the historic heart of London. There were children in the crowd, as many people had brought their kids along, the demonstration being held on a Sunday afternoon.
Displaying the human rights violations and crimes against humanity of Abu Ghraib in a public setting without giving viewers a discretionary option -- to me this seems like a gross misuse of the media. It is an assault on the viewer and also disrespectful to the victims whose misery is turned into a global spectacle. War crimes must have witnesses for there to be justice, but an anti-war demonstration is not a space for acts of witnessing that have any standing or use in a court of law. As participants in the demonstration, we were all forcibly turned into spectators equally of the cruelty of the perpetrators and the suffering of their victims, the debasement of the American soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners. If my act of witnessing cannot serve a legal purpose or a political purpose or even a moral purpose, I do not want to be arm twisted into this kind of spectatorship. Images of torture are not entertaining, not instructive, not informative, and not valid instruments of propaganda that purports to be non-violent in its methods, its medium and its message.
Perhaps resorting to such explicit images of violence is an index of the frustration, even impotence, that many in dissenting sections of European society feel when confronted with the power of the current American administration and its allies. By descending to the level of splicing in Abu Ghraib footage, those protesting American -- and in this case British and Israeli -- occupation and domination in Iraq and Palestine appear to be no less desperate than the terrorists who make videos as they behead their hostages and then want these to be aired on television channels across the world. But even if it is the case that all players have been pushed to the wall by an intransigent world power like the United States, such extreme tactics have to be condemned, no matter which side employs them and which side we would like to support in these terrible conflicts.
Some years ago in India, I came to know and like Daniel and Mariane Pearl. Danny's horrendous execution at the hands of kidnappers and its recording on film were not just traumatic and tragic events for his family, friends and colleagues: the whole civilized world was in shock. Today decapitation videos are par for the course.
What is more egregious -- that innocents are butchered at all? That their murder is filmed? That such films are broadcast? That such broadcasts become routine and lose any meaning whatsoever?
This perversion of the media in the very last hours of the European Social Forum left a bitter taste in my mouth. No one can deny that the world is radically mediatized. Media will service any ideology without much discernment. But there must be limits and rules to the mediatization of war. Recall Guy Debord: "[Life in the era of spectacular technology] no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. (...). The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep." (The Society of the Spectacle, 1:20-21). Making a spectacle out of the monstrous acts in Abu Ghraib is an entailment of political slumber that also perpetuates that slumber..."
Ananya Vajpeyi: list post @ underfire
~I don't get a sense of the size of the images being projected or how easy it might've been to move through the crowd to avoid looking at them. However I'm certain not all public gatherings 'go-better' with images.
There are marketing companies using text screens for advertising messages at gas pumps, atm machines and public restrooms and there may be a time when flat screens will be cheap and flexible enough to wear as clothing and people will walk around like video sandwich boards projecting images as commercial or fashion statements, but even those examples are different than a wall sized video projection of images displayed to a captive audience.
Maybe visual pollution, visual noise should be redefined? Start with the Fortune 500's presence in your town and the various governments and utilities infrastructure and zoning variances. Expect than demand aesthetically designed commericial and public spaces? Maybe then rally organizers wouldn't presume to subject their invited guests to home movies no matter what their content.