In a short essay called “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” Hito Steyerl suggests the idea of “free-falling” to describe a particularly contemporary dysphoria. Opening with a bit of information about the sextant (which uses the horizon line as the marker by which orientation is constructed) she chronicles a skeletal, not wholly idiosyncratic history of visual modalities including single-point perspective, cubism, experiments in abstraction, collage, followed by photographic and filmic technologies such as superimposition, montage, green screen, overlapping computer frames, and multiple screen projections. These artistic innovations are followed by radical intellectual leaps in theoretical physics and then myriad forces of industry brought to bear on our perception: the conveyor belt, warfare, advertising.[1] The preponderance of aviation in turn expands possibilities for collisions and nose-diving, and the age of space exploration breeds hundreds of camera-cum-satellites. We’ve now been thoroughly inundated with “aerial views issuing from the military–entertainment complex.”

Steyerl suggests that this shift to what she calls vertical perspective—a looking down on earth, or yourself, or the “ground,” this gaze situated on the “y-axis”—might be a radical one. Not only because it transfers the locus of an internal, embodied point of view to a vantage that is external, as she says, “a subject safely folded into surveillance technology…a disembodied and remote-controlled gaze,” but because this new mental orientation also generates a new kind of subject, one that is floating, looking down at a multiple, fragmented, collaged imaginary “ground.” She suggests that “the horizons have, in fact, been shattered. Time is out of joint and we no longer know whether we are objects or subjects as we spiral down in an imperceptible free fall.” Of course, this type of extreme loss of orientation (especially in the context of a kind of throbbing, gigantic effluvium of fragmented hyper-realism and purely visual, severally displaced story–apparati) indicates a new kind of looker, one that is somehow multiple, many, a creature-becoming or perhaps a kind of flayed, woven desideratum, “created and recreated by ever-new articulations of the crowd.”

Read the full text here.

I have been spending time recently reading the letters of influential Southern writer and activist Lillian Smith. I am working on a lecture for an upcoming symposium on arts and social change organized in her honor. Smith’s life work was dedicated to ending social and racial injustice. She did not see a division between art and politics and in her own life did not see the role of artist and activist as separate. Most people, she felt, are too quick to separate means and ends. In a letter that she wrote to an editor at the New York Herald Tribune, Lewis Gannett, she reflected on what the role of artists should be in a politically tumultuous, strained, and divisive America. “But of course there are times when we can take no more. We must have something to cheer us, to divert, amuse. But we should not ask our serious artists and novelists to be ‘good therapy’ for us; nor should we ask them to show us the ‘best America’—whatever that is. It isn’t fair to ask an artist to do anything but reveal to us human experience as he knows it; as he has felt it, dreamed it, experienced it.” Smith believed in the power of letters to affect change, and letter writing was part of her activism. Post-election, many of us have also been writing letters, mostly to our local representatives.

In 2015 I attended one of Fred Moten’s lectures at which he read several gorgeous, rich, and vulnerable emails he had written to his friends and colleagues. His words reminded me of how I want to communicate and how I want to reflect on what I encounter in my life. Inspired by his talk, I began a mostly weekly practice of writing letters to beloved friends scattered across the world. Letter writing is a form that I have come to embrace and use often for communication; the form lends itself to intimacy, to a kind of address that feels deep and direct.

From one of Moten’s poems:

the absence of your letter

shines in absent distance.

Read the full article here.