Media and Politics

Bookworm writes about an ‘art installation’ at the (taxpayer-funded)  Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Here’s how the museum describes the exhibition:

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s conceptual virtual reality installation  CARNE y ARENA (Virtually present, Physically invisible)  explores the human condition of immigrants and refugees. Based on true accounts, the superficial lines between subject and bystander are blurred and bound together, allowing individuals to walk in a vast space and thoroughly live a fragment of the refugees’ personal journeys. An immersive installation that reunites frequent collaborators Iñárritu and Emmanuel Lubezki alongside producer Mary Parent and ILMxLAB,  CARNE y ARENA  is centered around a 6 ½-minute virtual reality sequence for one person that employs state-of-the-art immersive technology to create a multi-narrative light space with human characters.

Here’s Bookworm:

That’s a pretty bland, abstract description. A pro-illegal immigration Proggie friend of mine, though, went and was blown away by the wonder of it all.  I’ve restated his glowing description in my own less glowing words, but the substance of what he said is still there.

The exhibition is meant to have you experience through virtual reality (it’s hot and sandy in the exhibition) what a Honduran, El Salvadoran, Merxican or Guatemalan experiences as he or she journeys north through the Sonoran desert to enter America illegally through Arizona. After you’ve signed a waiver, lest the good folks at LACMA make you uncomfortable, and taken off your shoes, your adventure begins.

Thrill to the experience of having border guards  surround you with helicopters and vans to arrest you. Then, having gotten yourself (as promised) hot and covered with sand, you get to see videos of real illegal aliens reenacting their experiences for the camera. (I assume it’s some form of PTSD psychotherapy for illegal aliens.)

(Much more at the Bookworm link.)  This exhibit is very much in the style of the ‘tunnels of oppression’ which have become popular at America’s colleges and universities.

I recently ran across a passage from a pioneering media expert, writing in the 1920s, who remarked  that social change could never be achieved merely via the written word; most people were inherently lazy (he argued) and were unlikely to pick up a book if it went against their existing views, or even pay enough attention to a leaflet for it have have real impact. So, oratory–the spoken word–was much more effective. BUT, there was a new technology which had still greater advantages:

The picture in all its forms up to the film has greater possibilities. Here a man needs to use his brains even less; it suffices to look, or at most to read extremely brief texts, and thus many will more readily accept a pictorial presentation than read an article of any length. The picture brings them in a much briefer time, I might almost say at one stroke, the enlightenment which they obtain from written matter only after arduous reading.

If movies have great potential in forming/changing opinions…and they do…then most likely an immersive experience such as the one at LACMA will be even more powerful.

The media expert cited above was named Hitler, and he demonstrated very well the degree to which political and social movements can be enabled by the astute use of media, and, in particular, new/emerging media. I am not, of course,    painting the LACMA people responsible for this exhibit as Nazis; I am asserting that media of this sort have a lot of power to bypass rational thought and lead the audience in the way to which the designer desires that they shall go.  More on this theme at my post here, which contrasts the graphical/sensorial means of presenting information with the text-based approach, as developed in the work of Neal Stephenson.  He includes an example of something which is very much like a ‘tunnel of oppression’, but is meant to drive the audience to a positive rather than a negative impression.