MEDIASCAPE / The landscape that runs through us

Arturo / fito Rodríguez Bornaetxea

Landscape.
It would be a shame not to use the term mediascape literally, adopting the position implied by
the idea of landscape.

Although it is a repetitive way to begin writing, landscape and all that it implies - point of view,
horizon line, perspective, etc. - gives us a rich variety of approaches which, even coinciding with
other texts in the landscape resort, may come to produce interesting resonances at their
intersections. I am referring to the collisions possible on interpreting the media (as landscape)
from the same point of view; to the collisions and coincidences that would result from observing
visual culture on the same horizon line; or to the fact of using the same gradient in the use of
critical perspective.

Because if any consensus exists, it is in that the term mediascape defines, beyond the
existence of a new cultural paradigm, the need for a common place from which to observe it
and, therefore, to take hold of and possess the (real) observatory of this landscape, the best
angles, the most complete general view. In coherence with our characteristic of eminently visual
beings, there is thus a struggle for access to that privileged place which, although it has been
previously delimited, defines an area of power when in reality, what is truly urgent is the access
to new lookout points, inventing schemes and artefacts that offer us new perspectives. Today,
that search would be the best start to interpret our relationship with the term in question,
clarifying its meaning, as well as discovering its variables and its possible perversions.

The switch
It is impossible to resist the temptation to put it in writing: everything is mediascape. The term
has such force and, at the same time, such voluptuousness that it can assimilate almost
everything. Or infiltrate almost all the attempts to describe our surroundings. This inflation of the
idea of mediascape is probably the easiest way to express, on the one hand, the complexity of
the new cultural framework in which we float disoriented (call it visual culture, iconosphere or
infosphere), unable to find the tools that explain it.

And on the other hand, perhaps it is the easiest way to make visible the cruel simplicity
exhibited by power today, reflected in the mirror of the media and unapproachable in its
virtuality. But the fact of making this whole panorama visible, of mapping it and offering it as a
landscape, as an “open territory”, does not precisely imply a position of resistance or opposition,
but that of subordination to its capacity to permeate. It should be asked, to what point the idea of
mediascape as a cultural symbol of modern society does not function as an “off” switch for
analysis and criticism of a politico-economic system finally fused together with its
representation. We should ask ourselves to what point certain concepts with great capacity to
spark the contemporary imagination, when put into circulation, in reality act as true inhibitors of
rebellious frequencies. And we should ask ourselves about the real possibility of creating blind
spots in the landscape, liberated enclaves in the global vigilance that is inserted in this
hegemonic idea of landscape that is the mediascape (see: www.paneldecontrol.cc)

Bauman’s liquid modernity, the hypermodernity of Lipovetsky, or Bourriaud’s late post-

modernism and post-production are only a few examples in this (dazzling) reading of
contemporaneity, the background landscape of which is the mediascape, and the true desire of
which is to control the landscape of the future.

The current artistic practice, each time further from social and closer to sociologism, has been
able to accommodate itself in these already pre-established terms (the liquid, the hyper, the
post), although on counted occasions, it is possible to see an inverse process: art and artists
serving as a reference in the formulation of contemporary theories with a real background in
critical thought. When this happens, and it is possible to see it in projects, interventions, and
even exhibitions and biennials ;-), we recover a certain sensation of synchrony with our time and
destroy the difference between thought and action. When this happens, artistic proposal
reclaims its place in the mediatic sphere, the place that corresponds it as an area and stage for
discourse. Small possible landscapes sketched in the margins of the screens.

Tele-visuality
We could agree that the phenomenon of television is the one that puts forth the drawing of the
media in terms of landscape in the first place. Television as a window and the sophistication of
contemplation; that is, the rehabilitation of the idea of the viewer, with its most solid arguments.

With the passage of time, television has modified audiovisual language, until it transformed it
into a complicated mortar of not at all innocent icons, signature tunes and messages. Today,
trying to cut through or look for a pause in this vociferous mass that is television programming is
a mission impossible which, unfortunately, will not work even if we disconnect our electricity.

Because, in effect, television can be turned off, but the imagery created by it cannot, so that the
audiovisual tends to turn into the language of our imagination. Or our imagination does not know
how to exist without the technical assistance of audiovisuals. And thus, taken over by this
mediatic over-exposure which turns into a “form of thought”, we succumb to intellectual laziness.

Given a generalized situation of indolence, when there is no more censorship in the television
discourse and when politics fatten up in the same breeding ground as all addictive things, we
see ourselves sweetly defeated. It is the moment in which we finally feel part of a landscape, the
mediascape, an apparently safe and comfortable place.

Those interventions that, at some inaugural moment of the audiovisual media, could be
classified as “militant” and wanted to place landscape “off camera”, to escape from the
mediascape, have today been sucked dry by advertising with its multiple forms of camouflage.
Guerilla marketing slips into the mind by unlikely paths, in precise actions directed towards a
triumph in very concrete market niches, and always with a creative cunning that challenges art
and seeks to replace it. Political marketing, the true gospel of our times, sells us the leader as a
saviour product, infiltrating him beyond the campaign, because the political arena is already
continually electoral.

The delimitation of a global informational panorama on the part of the large media groups
determines a single landscape: the same style, same finish and same varnish for all the
inhabitants of the planet, independently of their local circumstances.

“Information flows proceeding from the mediascape influence the collective mind,
define areas of discussion, delimit what may and may not be seen, and establish the
priority hierarchies of the collective attention” (Franco Berardi, Bifo)

The move from television to the extended landscape of the digital and the web has opened new
windows, but the landscapes, their views, the horizon line on which milestones y rites are set
are still basically the same, although in the multiplicity, peep-holes that allow cultural divergence
still appear.

Landscape politics
Until now, we have understood the landscape as a series of external arguments organized
before our eyes, and however, there is a clear component of the internalization of all this caudal
of information that is the mediascape. In some way, the application of the idea of landscape to
the term mediascape has passed through our eyes, and it is now when all these arguments
(poly-saturated, shiny and in 3D) are organized just behind our eyes, in a sort of modulation of
our presence in the social space.

This new landscape takes shape with attitudes, decisions and responses. The mediascape is
thus desire and fear, it is exaltation and depression. It is not simply a vehicle of emotions, it is
the emotions. In fact, this landscape has turned into our link with others, in our umbilical cord,
with the spectacle of the crisis; it has turned into model and counter-model. But it also plays an
important role in calling each and every one of us to surrender to entertainment at the same
time and in the same place.
In his book “La movilización global. Breve tratado para atacar la realidad” [Global mobilization.
Brief Treatise for Attacking Reality] published by Traficantes de sueños, http://traficantes.net/,
Santiago López Petit says:

“The false «death of the ideologies» has paved the way for entertainment as a natural
and sole format of experience. It is the model of television. Entertainment extends to the
most diverse fields of knowledge and activities. The rules of television are three: 1) Do
not presuppose prior requirements (learning, knowledge...). 2) Do not cause perplexity
(which would imply an effort of comprehension, motivate a memory...). 3) Avoid
explanations as they are boring and tiring. When everything is read, seen or interpreted
in the key of entertainment, censorship is no longer necessary. In the framework of
entertainment, everything becomes irrelevant, is degraded, confused... We cannot fail
to remember that the primary objective of entertainment is to infantilize.”

Thus, the mediascape becomes an entertainment framework, which is attributed with

homologated forms of thought, of behaviour, of relation. The place of art in this context is
imprecise; it floats in and out of this frame in search of its reason for being while it hesitates
between assaulting “communication” as a political act or approaching it as a formal game.
Once again in the words of Bifo: “Communication is not an instrument of political action, but
political action itself”, so that work from the artistic environment should take into account not
only the production relationships established and with whom they are established, but its more
than inevitable dilution (weakening), as it is part of a landscape capable of devouring itself
through consciousnesses.
Something like “Stomachs - consciousness” and “regurgitated landscape”.

But this metabolic end of the idea of landscape is nothing but a reading in totalizing terms, yet
another one, exactly the same as that with which we began, and wanted to overcome in this
essay. The circle closes to return to the same place, as ever; the only place in which art runs
headlong into its time, its circumstance, which is none other than social responsibility,
commitment, its emancipating usage…

If one of the characteristics of a landscape is its mutability and the variables it presents
depending on the seasons, climate, action of external agents, etc., we would have to conclude
that any attempt to influence the mediascape must unfailingly be understood as a political
project, in view of the ideological variables and those of the management of information and
content which shapes our point of view.

To assume that it is possible to put new forms of intervention in the media landscape is, more
than ever, creative work and at the same time, one of the best ways to clear the way to an
updated definition of visual arts as a general cultural environment.