We Like to Watch, or the Visual Pleasure of Lions, Tigers, and Bears

ebfrye — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 18:51:03 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot of Smithsonian Wild

Many of us are suckers for cute animal videos, trips to the aquarium, and documentaries featuring David Attenborough. We can now add to the list of ways to watch animals this new web feature offered by the Smithsonian, which gives us "a glimpse into an animal world that is rarely seen by anyone." The pictures are taken with secret cameras, promising the viewer a more authentic experience, one with minimal human interaction.

Image Credit: Screenshot of Smithsonian Wild

Looking at these photos causes me to think about what's implied by our visual engagement with animals. For obvious reasons, access to wild animals is limited; therefore, we regular folk are necessarily placed in the role of voyeurs (unless you're a crazy snake man in certain parts of Florida). Usually, the pleasure we take in watching animals is both excused and rationalized by our insistence that we gain from them a new sense of knowledge. Continuing in this rhetoric, Smithsonian Wild explains their mission: "Our hope is that while you are being entertained by the amazing photographs, you will also learn about the animals, their diverse habitats, and what is being done to conserve them."

Image Credit: Screenshot of Smithsonian Wild

However, with the anniversary of the death of the orca trainer at SeaWorld, I wonder if times may be changing for how we perceive the role of zoos and aquariums in our culture. I've also noted, and here I confess the time I've spent watching Animal Planet, the number of shows dedicated to what happens when people get too close. See these videos from Fatal Attractions, which offers a different sense of voyeurism.

Image Credit: Screenshot of Smithsonian Wild

Is digital access to animals the responsible way to go? Can these photographs provide a visual pleasure that replaces the guilt-inducing zoo experience? Indeed, the fact that many of these photographs were taken under night surveillance (look at those eyes!) adds an immediacy and sense of the forbidden. We're not supposed to be seeing what we do. Then again, I wonder if these photographs offer enough titilation for viewers who require a sense of shock, those who like cuteness as much as they like to be disturbed...

The rhetoric of wandering around your apartment in your bathrobe

John Jones — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 21:33:34 +0000

The New York Times has an article on architects Jeremy Fletcher and Alejandra Lillo of Graft, who have designed a new condo tower in Manhattan, the W Downtown, with glass walls. According to Fletcher and Lillo, the purpose of the see-through design is to “[work] out a dialogue between voyeurism and exhibitionism”:

Not only will the building’s glass walls allow W residents to see, and be seen by, passers-by on the street below, but Mr. Fletcher and Ms. Lillo have created peekaboo features within each apartment, like a window between the kitchen and the bedroom, and a bathroom that’s a glass cube, allowing residents to expose themselves to their roommates and family members, too. The idea, Mr. Fletcher said, was to frame and exhibit the intimate details of life, or at least ones that would be aesthetically pleasing, “like your silhouette in the shower.”

My first thought when reading this piece was that if someone wanted to expose his or herself to a roommate or family member, it could be done without peekaboo windows. More germane to this blog, I find the focus on performance to be very interesting. The author of the article, Penelope Green, connects this trend in architecture to Facebook and YouTube, where users regularly “expose” the intimate details of their lives for all the world to see. The difference between the two, Green points out, is that the information users post to these sites is “conscious,” that is, carefully chosen and scripted to present an image that the user wants to project, while the mundane details of day-to-day living is “unconscious.” Fletcher points out that his and Lillo’s design is open to the kind of careful choreography available online:

“We are creating stages for people to perform on in some way, but it’s a very scripted and considered display,” he said. “Cooking could be a display, for example, with your partner watching you from the bedroom.”

He talked about tuning the privacy of each room, using shades or scrims to have larger or smaller openings, as you would change the aperture of a camera. “So if you don’t want your partner to see you shaving your legs in the shower,” he said, “you can pull the shade.

However, the reality of living in a glass house seems more likely to lend itself to this experience:

In September, Curbed, the feisty New York City real estate blog, posted a photograph of a newly completed, glass-walled condo building on East 13th Street. You could see right into the apartments, which looked most like messy dorm rooms. It was a grubby retort to the marketing hoo-ha that surrounds these now ubiquitous buildings and trumpets a sleekly attractive lifestyle accessorized by midcentury modern furniture and designer clothing. There were unmade beds jammed right up against the glass, mangled paper Venetian shades, a towel over a chair.

The article then ventures into questions of what we will do if we have to perform all the time, without having a private retreat to some place where we can drape our towels with abandon. It’s an interesting read.

viz. - voyeurism

We Like to Watch, or the Visual Pleasure of Lions, Tigers, and Bears

The rhetoric of wandering around your apartment in your bathrobe