Page 74 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

The Fate of the Iconic Sign: Taser Video 65

photographic is parting company with our everyday social understanding of
the video that we encounter in the non-art situations of surveillance video, etc.
We used to be able to count on such markers as poor focus or poor resolution
to help us tell the difference between social functions of the video picture. The
price of higher resolution has been coming down and surveillance video is
ever better (and so are the cellphone cameras that people have been using to do
their own surveillance). For instance, Janis Krums‘ cell phone picture of the
emergency landing of an aircraft on the Hudson River, in January 2009
[Krums], is a beautiful picture with old master overtones, and not at all what
we expect of a snapshot taken from a cell phone. Can the iconic sign continue
to function in a world where it can be a paintbrush for a new virtual creation?
The ever-increasing quality of inexpensive video recorders is already
bringing about a convergence of entertainment data streams and
reportorial/documentary data streams, so it is difficult to distinguish them on
the basis of their appearance. The claims of poor police, poor technicians will
no longer hold up and the distinctions that finders of fact will have to make
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will be ever more complicated by our habitual experiences of the medium.
The roughhewn handheld video output of amateurs that was imitated in a
film like The Blair Witch Project and conferred on it a mark of (seeming)
authenticity, has since become just a style. On the one hand, we will see that
which is represented with ever greater clarity. On the other, we may be less
and less able to separate one kind of video from another as other photographic
media are deployed in our documentary as well as fictional lives. Where does
a gigapixel photograph of Vancouver that allows us to peek into real people‘s
apartment windows fit? Are we spies or voyeurs or just grooving on the
pleasures and powers of our digital tools? [Vancouvergigpixel]
The demanding process of creating photographs in the medium‘s infancy
has been replaced by technology that is small, can ―remember‖ many pictures,
and can do this at great speed, so anyone can be a photographer. Not only do
average people make pictures, lots of them [Higonnet], but in urban areas
especially, they are also used to being on camera in public places. Even in
smaller towns, public buildings, banks, etc. are equipped with camera
surveillance. Reality television, ―The People‘s Court‖ and its many offshoots,
and now YouTube and other video hosting sites on the World Wide Web,
present a huge variety of non-professional people in front of cameras as well

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Richard Sherwin‘s When Law Goes Pop takes up the blurring of law and popular culture.
[Sherwin]. While this is certainly relevant, I discuss the video medium itself in the
communicative stream and not so specifically its narrative characteristics, especially
because tasercam video is without self-conscious storytelling strategies.