I feel sick, visual over load, acid like trance 25-9-2010 - 1300




Even though I pretend that i'm not here as a tourist, seeing NYPD police officers on the street creates a vivid sensation of nostalgia and recognition, it's impossible to avoid. Film history is infused so indelibly in to this city that you immediately feel as though you are living in cinema. This feeling is followed by the urge to replicate this cinematic form and at same time make it your own authored historical object by photograph them.

This same recognition and re-enactment seemed to be going on in Times Square and here the visual overload and barrage of light - which made me feel physically sick - creates an atmosphere and lighting effect that actually makes you feel as though you are part of the advertising. The interactive, digital display that mixes real-time footage of passer-bys in to the advert makes the next logical step in immersion.

In spite of being violently rendered in to this ad world (drawn there initially by the idea of the spectacle and tourist tick list) it was interesting that, in performing the tourist photographic ritual, tourists were, in photographing themselves in front of the screens, re-marketing the brands for free. Like the interactive advert, they were putting themselves in to the adverts also taking these adverts away with them and integrating them into their personal space and history making the marketing ever more invasive.


Sitting on the terraced seats at one end of the square there is no narrative pretence here, just pure spectacle. Here public space, historically, a place of relative freedom, the meeting place and social forum, is entirely mediated as a private one, commodity is inescapable and smothers the sense of the public space.

Most of the photographs taken in Times Square seemed to be taken on digital cameras; not creating the same physical document that analogue photography creates this seemed to alter the way in which the photographers perform as tourists. Rather than creating an object around which to centre memory, they were carrying out a double performance; the performance for the photograph and the touristic performance of re-enacting the image of infinitely photographed Times Square itself. In this city of uncanny recognition, spectacle and tourist re-enactment / experience have become entirely symbiotic and they circle endlessly around each other in the creation of innumerate non-existent images.