Disaster as Spectacle
Collaborative Project Fern Helfand and Portia Priegert
Interface
In August 2003, lightning struck a tree in Okanagan Mountain Park, starting a fire that spread toward Kelowna through the hills above Okanagan Lake. Rough terrain prevented effective control and the flames, whipped into a firestorm by strong winds, plunged one night into what officials call the interface zone – scenic suburban neighborhoods next to the forest, over 200 homes were lost.
Forest fires are common in British Columbia, but this fire was unusual. First, because it encroached on a major urban centre, and second, because it was possible to watch it in relatively close proximity from the opposite shore of Okanagan Lake. Although thousands of people saw the inferno firsthand, many others chose to monitor the fire’s progress on television or via the Internet. This dialectic between an unmediated experience of the fire and the mediated experience of watching it on television effectively created another zone of interface that raises questions about our culture’s dual fascination with spectacle and information technology.
Interface, a large-format digital montage of a group of people watching the fire on television rather than through their window, encapsulates visually some ideas about how disaster is experienced in Canada in the 21st century. It seeks to mediate between experiences of the fire from different vantage points, whether on television, in the fire zone or from afar. But Interface is itself a mediated experience that was created in a staged photo shoot after the fire. Digital techniques were used to create a somewhat believable space in which images of the fire on the television screen and outside the room were inserted producing a simulacrum of an event that never really happened. This project references what Jean Baudrillard calls the perfect crime, the extermination of reality. Although reality is not yet a corpse, people’s willingness to embrace televised coverage during one of the most dramatic events they are likely to experience raises many questions about how our culture engages with virtual reality.
Photographs and manipulation by Fern Helfand text and consultation by Portia Priegert
Published in in dANDelion Magazine issue 30.1 Disaster! University of Calgary, 2004
Interface
In August 2003, lightning struck a tree in Okanagan Mountain Park, starting a fire that spread toward Kelowna through the hills above Okanagan Lake. Rough terrain prevented effective control and the flames, whipped into a firestorm by strong winds, plunged one night into what officials call the interface zone – scenic suburban neighborhoods next to the forest, over 200 homes were lost.
Forest fires are common in British Columbia, but this fire was unusual. First, because it encroached on a major urban centre, and second, because it was possible to watch it in relatively close proximity from the opposite shore of Okanagan Lake. Although thousands of people saw the inferno firsthand, many others chose to monitor the fire’s progress on television or via the Internet. This dialectic between an unmediated experience of the fire and the mediated experience of watching it on television effectively created another zone of interface that raises questions about our culture’s dual fascination with spectacle and information technology.
Interface, a large-format digital montage of a group of people watching the fire on television rather than through their window, encapsulates visually some ideas about how disaster is experienced in Canada in the 21st century. It seeks to mediate between experiences of the fire from different vantage points, whether on television, in the fire zone or from afar. But Interface is itself a mediated experience that was created in a staged photo shoot after the fire. Digital techniques were used to create a somewhat believable space in which images of the fire on the television screen and outside the room were inserted producing a simulacrum of an event that never really happened. This project references what Jean Baudrillard calls the perfect crime, the extermination of reality. Although reality is not yet a corpse, people’s willingness to embrace televised coverage during one of the most dramatic events they are likely to experience raises many questions about how our culture engages with virtual reality.
Photographs and manipulation by Fern Helfand text and consultation by Portia Priegert
Published in in dANDelion Magazine issue 30.1 Disaster! University of Calgary, 2004