Berlin Gesture Center | Interdisziplinäres BGC-Kolloquium
What New York City Reflects: Car Bodies as a Medium of Communication
A PowerPoint Photo Presentation by Roland Posner (Research Center for Semiotics, University of Technology, Berlin)
Introduction
In the late 19th century the inhabitants of the growing metropolises of the
world became aware of a defect which increasingly seemed to affect their quality
of life: Their city had become so large that it could no longer be experienced
as such nor seen as a whole from any single vantage point. They tried to overcome
this problem with architectural innovations such as the construction of boulevards
converging towards memorials and other landmarks which embodied the whole of
their city at least symbolically. At successive world exhibitions starting with
Chicago’s 1893 “World’s Columbian Exposition”, engineers’
solutions providing distanced vantage points were propagated such as a Ferris
Wheel, a hot-air balloon or a Zeppelin above the city, and a radio tower in
its center. However, all such devices proved to be too static to capture the
restless urban life and make sense of it.
It was the 20th century that developed an appropriate means of self-perception
for the metropolis. This does not involve artificially establishing ever more
bombastic and more distanced vantage points, but rather returning to the small
scale and resting in the neighbourhoods. It consists of the millions of mirror
images simultaneously produced by the cars, trucks, busses, and trains which
incessantly move through a city’s traffic spaces. Night and day their metal
bodies and glass windows reflect the urban surroundings they happen to be in
– doing so casually in passing through the big thoroughfares or as their
primary task of moving on boulevards and plazas. Instead of frozen gestures
of mythical figures standing on memorial pedestals they present mobile pictures
of other vehicles, humans, and buildings. Instead of determining a unique perspective
and fixing just one point of view, they offer a constantly changing multiplicity
of perspectives and viewpoints. Only certain means of public transport such
as cabs and subway trains produce nearly no reflection, having been painted
with bright colors or moving through unlit areas, respectively.
In this form each metropolis now has available its own medium of self-presentation
carried by its infrastructure and distributed over its whole area. Being multiply
individualized, accessible to everyone, and functioning largely without administrative
patronage, this medium merits to be called “democratic”. Even when
its perception is so highly automatized that it is no longer noticed, as is
the case with many residents, this medium nevertheless remains responsible for
the fact that they miss something when they go to the countryside: the impression
of a dense life with abundant opportunities.
A car body not only reflects but also processes to a certain degree what it
shows: it dyes, brightens or darkens; distorts, divides or multiplies; reduces
or enlarges; contracts or expands, implodes or explodes what is otherwise accessible
to the eye only in an unprocessed form. And it is this visual processing which
molds what is taken by inhabitants and visitors to be their city.
As an example, New York City’s dynamic visions of itself are here documented
in a series of photographs showing selected automobile self-reflections from
Manhattan and surroundings.
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Automobile self-reflections from Frankfurt (Oder), all photographs by Roland Posner
