3,537
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    12
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Emancipating the Image: The Beijing Olympics, Regeneration, and the Power of Performance

      research-article
      Architecture_MPS
      UCL Press

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisher
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          “In China, what makes an image true is that it is good for people to see it.” - Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1971

          In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau gazes down upon New York City from the 110 th floor of the World Trade Centre and sees the island of Manhattan as an image. In particular, he witnesses the famous Manhattan skyline as a powerful ‘image-text’ containing a multiplicity of meanings, interpretations, and symbols. Considering the possibilities of the city as visual simulacrum he asks: “[i]s the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes anything more than a representation; an optical artefact?” Twenty or so years after De Certeau wandered the streets of New York and pondered its pictorial power, such a perspective can be applied to Olympic and Post Olympic Beijing.

          The Olympic Games gave the world an opportunity to read Beijing’s powerful image-text following thirty years of rapid transformation. David Harvey argues that this transformation has turned Beijing from “a closed backwater, to an open centre of capitalist dynamism.” However, in the creation of this image-text, another subtler and altogether very different image-text has been deliberately erased from the public gaze. This more concealed image-text offers a significant counter narrative on the city’s public image and criticises the simulacrum constructed for the 2008 Olympics, both implicitly and explicitly. It is the ‘everyday’ image-text of a disappearing city still in the process of being bulldozed to make way for the neoliberal world’s next megalopolis. It exists most prominently as a filmic image text; in film documentaries about a ‘real’ hidden Beijing just below the surface of the government sponsored ‘optical artefact.’ Film has thus become a key medium through which to understand and preserve a physical city on the verge of erasure.

          Most cited references8

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          ”A Very Natural Choice”: The Construction of Beijing as an Olympic City during the Bid Period.

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Olympic Beijing: Reflections on Urban Space and Global Connectivity.

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              Blow Up Beijing: The City as a Twilight Zone.

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Amps
                Architecture_MPS
                UCL Press
                2050-9006
                January 2013
                : 2
                : 1
                Affiliations
                [1]Media School, The University of Bradford, UK
                Article
                10.14324/111.444.amps.2013v2i1.001
                4a6e01b2-90c8-4308-adf6-30a9fbe90cac
                Copyright © 2013 The Author(s)

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

                History
                Page count
                Figures: 3, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 21, Pages: 19

                Sociology,Political science,Political & Social philosophy,Urban studies,Architecture,Communication & Media studies

                Comments

                Comment on this article