Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art

3. The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic: Moving Images, Time, and the Car

\\ 115 the affective time of the Car i often show the car in my work as it represents being in between, neither here nor there. gregory Crewdson, “artist talk: gregory Crewdson” cars are extensions of our body and our ego . . . when we see an automobile destroyed, in a way we are looking at our own inevitable death. this moment is, because of its inherent speed, almost invisible. we have slowed the event via film and video but only from a camera’s perspective. . . . this piece offers the viewer the ability to examine in three dimensions the collision of these cars. A moment that might take a fraction of a second in an actual collision will be expanded to take days. . . . this piece by changing one of Chapter 3 m o vin g im Ages, tim e, An d the cAr the now s of the Automotive Prosthetic 116 // Automotive Prosthetic the key variables removes and changes the nature of the event. what was life threatening is now rendered safe. what was supremely spectacular is now almost static. the wreck has been broken down to its newtonian components . we are left to contemplate our own mortality our own newtonian components. Jonathan sChipper, desCription oF SLOW INEVITABLE DEATH OF AMERICAN MUSCLE: SLOW MOTION CAR CRASH the car ran into stalled traffic before it reached second Avenue. he sat in the club chair at the rear of the cabin looking into the array of visual display units. there were medleys of data on every screen, all the flowing symbols and alpine charts, the polychrome numbers pulsing. . . . he used to sit here in hand-held space but that was finished now. the context was nearly touchless . he could talk most systems into operation or wave a hand at a screen and make it go blank. don delillo, COSMOPOLIS The most common conception of temporality with respect to the everyday uses of technology is linear speed. It is the time of instrumental use, which in space unfolds according to two nodes: beginning and end, A to B.There is little consideration of the time in between, the temporality that is described above in the descriptions of works ofart by Gregory Crewdson and Jonathan Schipper and in the literary prose of Don DeLillo. We use technology expecting direct utilitarian effect, and often, at least stereotypically and on the surface of experience, without great rumination about the tool at hand. We use it not so much mindlessly but in automatic fashion, with our emotions as an unconscious response to malfunction, the unforeseen, and, at times, the travails of life as they simply impinge on dailyactivity. From cars to computers , these technological tools are intended to make life easier. It follows thus that technology enhances the efficiency of life. “Life” from this perspective is constituted by a rote set of exercises and duties to be completed efficiently. Understood according to a checklist of things to do, life as such is markedly bereft of emotions—absent the rich and depthless fount of affective response and expression. One walks into a room, flicks a switch, and the room is lit. One starts a car, pulls out of a driveway, enters the road, and proceeds to move from point A to point B. One opens a laptop, waits impatiently for theweb browser to appear, and instantaneously roves about digital space, moving between various portals and pages of information in layered The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 117 real time. We prize the unidirectional swiftness and seeming affectlessness of these experiences, and have come to expect them without question or doubt. We have naturalized our relationship to the switch, wheel, and keyboard , relying on them to work effortlessly. Theinterruptionoftheirclean-lineaerodynamicpromiseoffunction,that is, their failure to work as expected, sets in vivid relief the spatio-temporal complexities of the machine-human matrix. When they do not function as expected, the seeming affectlessness veers into affect, and the emotional experience of living with technology becomes palpable. In catalyzing emotions of rage and frustration, technology’s failures show us not simply that we are angry when things do not work as we want them to, but rather, that more broadly speaking weexist emotionally with technology. Rage and frustration are just two sentiments within an infinitely complex psychosocial spectrum ofaffect.Theyare but twoof the manyexpressive responses towhich humans are predisposed, and more precisely, ones that they have cultivated in a life collectively habituated and...