Houses, Cars, and Flow, Oh My! [Core Post, Laurel]

In the section of “Domesticity at War” discussing inside/outside and the new sociability of television, Beatriz Colomina quotes Patricia Phillips as saying, “Just as the public space has become diminished as a civic site, the home has become in many senses, a more public, open forum” (9). In her own article, Colomina troubles this easy re-placement of the civic into the home by examining art projects in which the inside/outside and home/public divide is refigured through the television screen. These projects are interesting, I think, in conversation with Margaret Morse’s “An Ontology of Everyday Distractions,” as three of the projects Colomina examines address a collapse between the automobile and the home. Going off Morse’s contention that the freeway and television are analogous, it’s interesting that three of the four art projects involving television screens that Colomina examines in the article involve both the television and the automobile, the “iron bubble” that allows a driver to create a “miniature idyll” (Morse 199) on the freeway.
With Michael Webb’s “Drive-In” House, for example, the house is literally composed of pieces of cars. In Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s “Slow House,” the house can only be entered by car, which the resident drives straight into the house. Through the windshield, the car’s occupants can see the house’s main screen/picture window—before even leaving the car, the viewer is already confronted by the televisual screen. In Len Jenshel’s photograph “Sterret, Texas, 1985,” a reference for Diller and Scofidio, a television sits inside a car, while a viewer watches from outside, in the desert. In this photo, the television, the vehicle for bringing the outside in to the home/automobile, rests “inside,” while the man sits outside, looking in at a machine that ostensibly displays images from outside.
Morse spends much of her article establishing common ground between (watching) television, (cars on) freeways, and malls. In both the space of the home (where the viewing of television occurs) and the space of the automobile on the freeway, Morse claims, a private, enclosed space also becomes a space where “sociality with the outside world” is reenacted through transmission technologies - the car radio, the television. Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that art projects interested in screens are also often interested in cars, potentially even pointing towards the “one great machine” that Morse predicts the television, freeway, and mall merging into (212).

From my own experience, I can clearly see a similarity between the experience of driving down the freeway in a car (or better yet, as a front-seat passenger) and the sorts of “flow” that we have discussed experiencing today, whether the flow of Netflix’s next episode auto-play or the endless scroll of the social media feed. I can also, however, see this flow/distraction in experiences of travel wherein one is not in control, and usually is physically present with other people: as a passenger in a car or on a bus - which does, I admit, often take place on a freeway - but also on trains, whether on city metro, commuter, or long-distance. Though Morse presents the automobile on the freeway as a space in contrast with that of a train (an opposition often constructed between the two) (209), I would argue that there’s no distinct difference between the two modes in terms of flow or distraction. As an only child in a family that took frequent road trips, I spent many hours of my childhood immersed in the state of distraction that Morse describes, both aware of the world passing by outside, and completely immersed in my own inner worlds. (I’ve also spent countless hours since learning to drive myself in Morse’s freeway fugue state.) Similarly, on public transit, I often enter the same “spaced-out” mode no matter how many opportunities I have to engage in “the here and now of face-to-face contact” (200). I wonder if this kind of distracted state has always been a function of forms of travel where you can observe the scenery passing by,¹ or whether it is a newer phenomenon that has developed along with (private) screens, from television to smart phones.

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1. Interestingly, I don’t experience this same state while flying - I don’t know if it’s the same for anyone else.