Erik Davis: Uncanny TV

[anna balint]

Uncanny TV
-----Original Message-----
From: Erik Davis [mailto:erik at techgnosis.com]
Sent: 2001. szeptember 13. 0:25

Subject: Uncanny TV


        So I set there in front of the television Tuesday morning, with a
wimpering woman by my side and the old tribal programs of vengeance and
lament booting up in my breast, watching the 70s disaster flicks of my youth
remade in hardcore,  21-C stylee.  The now familiar scenes of the United jet
slicing into the upper stories of the south tower, soon to collapse to its
knees like a dispirited giant, were unnerving enough. More to the point,
they were unbelievable and so, as many would say that day, "surreal" -- our
word for that reality we are programmed to disavow even as it swamps us like
a dream tsunami.
       That morning I also saw some genuinely uncanny media: a few short
seconds of live broadcast that rank as some of the most disturbing moments
of TV I've had the mixed blessings to see.  A blond female reporter was
standing on the trashed streets of southern Manhattan, narrating her
horrifying and, for a journalist, exhilerating morning. (Forgive me if I
recall neither the network nor the name of the journalist, but the TV became
a babelbox that morning, a slice and dice machine of affect, image, and
information.) The woman, who was only moderately in control of herself, was
clutching a piece of paper in her hand. After finishing her brief tale she
asked the cameraman if he could close in on the item, which, she said,
resembled much of the debris about her.
   The pink paper was some sort of  invoice, and its entire edge was burned
like some ancient map. As the camera zoomed in, nearly filling the screen
with the document, the woman pointed at the address in the upper-left hand
corner, which read: One World Trade Center. But as she read "One World Trade
Center," some electromagnetic djinn  decided to fuck with the feed, for what
I then saw and heard was an eerie one-second loop of voice and image: "n
world trade centerŠn world trade centerŠn world trade center," over and over
a half dozen times, her staccato finger jabbing at the address  like a robot
on the fritz. For a moment the TV became a portal into some mad domain of
media. And then the invisible studio editors sweating over their live decks
switched away from this abysmal mantra to another, more familiar feed.
For a few strange moments, the news stream so many were feeding off of that
day erupted with information's terror: noise.  The transmission snafu
reminded me that explosions do not just happen in the material universe of
airplanes and stock brokers; info-bombs also rupture the noosphere,
dividing, confusing, and destroying minds, our minds, even as the machines
that network those minds - the telephones, the web servers, the satellites -
groan under the weight of our sudden compulsive need to tune it, to talk, to
witness. Our helpless but strangely reassuring envelopment in a frantic
media storm was, of course, part of the spectacular plan, admirably
orchestrated by these terrorist DeMilles and utterly unavoidable. With our
eyeballs glued to the tube, our symbolic landscapes ruptured, we were got
good. But for a few seconds, even that symbolic turbulence was disrupted by
the tape loop,  filling my throat with the  Real. The glitch was abstract,
an artifact of data transmission, and yet it radiated like shrapnel through
the Mobius strip of media. This is the trauma that changed everything, and
us, in the blink of an eye.
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