On the Nature of Intrepidness

So I was having some thoughts over the weekend. Here is the extremely incomplete result.
Also here are some reference materials.

A Confrontational Symmetry

I awoke on Friday to this footage of yet another fatal police tasering, this one having been filmed by a Canadian traveler, Paul Pritchard at the Vancouver International Airport. Skimming what details there are available at the moment, the unfortunate tase-ee was a Polish man by the name of Robert Dziekanski whose flight had landed there at VIA some ten hours before his death at the hands of four Canadian police officers. While little is known about his actions at the airport in the many hours spent there prior to his death, the iteration of the footage I saw recorded what were arguably the final ten minutes of the man’s life, depicting a confused and obviously upset Dziekanski pacing back and forth outside of the shatterproof terminal glass, picking up a table, throwing an object, etc – that is, until the authorities arrived to subdue the man, eventually tasing the shit out of him and then, after mistaking his subsequent ataxia for resistance, doing it again. This cycle is repeated until the man is no longer moving; or at least, that’s what it seemed like to me. Obviously there have yet to be universal usage standards for tasers as a paradoxically “non-lethal” method of controlling violent behavior and while that’s an interesting topic, I suppose that my own interest while watching continually came to rest on the recording itself and its intrepid author. While I have no designs on constructing any kind justification or defense on behalf of the deceased, I do think that in order to properly outline the particular psychological standoff that I witnessed, some dissection is needed beforehand.

-hit the jump for more...


At only a few seconds into the video, Dziekanski is seen to cross the area just outside of the terminal entryway carrying with him what to all appearances seems to be a wooden, collapsible TV tray. Breathing heavily, he then enters the terminal lounge with the table held to his chest, legs out, nervously gesturing to the trapped onlookers, of which our cameraman is one. This stance is, to my eyes, undeniably one of defense rather than assault; as Dziekanski grips the table, he seems to actively analogize it to an offensive shield (the stereotypical image of the lion tamer's chair seems appropriate) capable on its own of defense though active offensively as a deterrent. Altogether, the situation was quite obviously a stressful and frightening one for all parties but it should come as no surprise that it was filmed almost in its entirety because that action of filming itself plays the role of a mirrored defensive/offensive deterrent for our cameraman – the balancing half of an interesting symmetry. In the image above taken from the video we have an invisible and equal confrontation constructed of two men and between them, each their double-sided prostheses exemplified like so:

A x -----------x’ B
(From left to right: Dziekanski, the table, the camera, then Pritchard)
My question about this symmetry regards the defensive affects of the camera.

It has been shown elsewhere that the camera lens can be a deterrent, a weapon, a window: a tacit but real threat of forced intersubjectivity. While we often address the inanimate lens as an asynchronous stage or podium from which to confront a limited potentiality, that limit is set by the operator’s intention; and without the knowledge of that intention the photographed subject performs, quite literally, for all. In considering the camera as prosthesis of memory or vision, it should be also seen that the prosthetic effect extends both to the photographed or filmed subject as well as to the operator; that is to say that the camera has two openings: the lens and the viewfinder.

The HUD and the Solace of Distance

The concept of the viewfinder is a simple one, allowing the photographer to approximate a camera’s output by providing a hole (duplicating the format ratio of the film) whose negligible distance from the lens guarantees passable consistency between that which is perceived and captured perception. As technology has advanced, the viewfinder’s role has expanded somewhat to become a completely digital simulation of the lens’ exact point of view. Regardless of the type of camera or its feature set, the viewfinder already mediates experience for the operator though to what degree depends on other factors. The common move to digital cameras has allowed manufacturers to augment the once sole purpose of the viewfinder to include the display of technical information for experienced users (aperture, focal data, shutter speed, lighting condition, white point and so on) allowing a apt comparison with that of a HUD system.

The first HUDs were deployed in fighter jets, providing truncated synopses of critical flight data such as altitude and various kinds of gyroscopic readings. Now, as then, these displays are vital tools in helping to minimize a pilot's eye movement, reducing the amount of time her focus might need to stray from a more 'primary' field of view while allowing her the advantages of simultaneously presiding over the abstracted status of numerous instruments/limbs. A particularly relevant characterization of a HUD system would be as the prosthetic's prosthetic: providing streamed and ideally seamless data reports concerned with the integration of subject’s real or virtual extremities into a unified format. Upon using a HUD, a subject’s experience with the phenomenal world is fractured into specific-use modules; through the collaboration of GPS, "minimaps", specialized scanning, light sensors, image zoom, temperature and diagnostic readouts, a modular HUD display provides a measure of functionality (and at times multipresence) that not only could be understood to consoles the amputee but perhaps to provide kind of buffer against the ‘primary’ experience which it modifies; an experience whose nature, if traditionally in need of advanced display technologies, might already be described as critical, dangerous or stressful i.e. war and its siblings (the fighter pilot, tank operator, video game battles, etc.) The more precarious the balance of control between environment and the user or the more demanding the stringency or exactitude of this balance, the more reliant their practice becomes on technologies built to monitor the physics and minutia of the phenomenal and subsequently integrated into a HUD system.
The essence of the HUD however, has much to do with its physical immediacy (as a translucent overlay) in relation to a ‘primary’ perception rather than a complete replacement of it. The design of most consumer and professional camcorders already allows for a close juxtaposition of these two in that the viewfinder can be constantly mated with a particular eye while the other is left unobstructed by the camera apparatus itself. In the case of modern digital cameras (as differentiated from camcorders), the form factor precludes the same possibility though it is arguably accounted for in having a large LCD version of the viewfinder at its back to serve the same end – here, the viewfinder has already become the optional HUD, recasting the filmed experience “on the fly” from within the structure of the camera apparatus and available without obstructing the natural vision.

We might attempt to understand a HUD or viewfinder as a simulacrum, or as Barthes so aptly put it, "intellect added to the object" -- in this case, an object that may or may not have been quantifiable without the use of a particular prosthesis. If supposing a simulacra to de-realize phenomenal experience then it could similarly be said to distance or protect a subject from that experience. This is not to say that the photographer’s perception is only subject to derealization when in the presence of HUD-like auxiliary data, but that the presence of any codification of experience already implies the de-realization that a HUD system relies on. The constant mimicry of an experience over the digitized screen of a camera could literally show us that that experience is already, even as it happens, distanced from the camera operator, allowing them to interact with either or both as ‘primary’.

Considering again the symmetry posed above, is it a logical inference to say that the camera operator is protected from the events which he films? In looking for evidence of (what I’ll call) a confusion of distance in explaining the phenomena of the “intrepid cameraman” I waded through quite a few YouTube videos labeled with variations of the terms “amateur” “disaster” and “footage” though in the end, it is impossible to tell to what extent the viewfinder plays in their pillar-like constitution. In the end, I think I’ll need a lot more justification.