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June 13, 2010
I'm often travelling up and down the main road between Adelaide and Victor Harbor and I have begun to take photos along the way. This quirky picture was taken early Sunday morning, around 7.30 am:
The pictures taken with a prosumer digital camera are little visual sketches that are shot to see how the objects and scenes look photographed. If they work as photographs, then I'll return with a large format camera to re-shoot them in the appropriate conditions.
I've concentrated on the local because I cannot for the life of me represent the disorientated feeling of living in postmodernity, and in particular, the problems of positioning within and resistance to the world space and flows of transnational capital. We do not have the equivalent of a Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles in Adelaide to be able to walking around and within in order to make the theoretical movement from the architectural space of the hotel to the political space of late capitalism.
What I do know is that it is not possible to view the global economic system with critical distance because we immersed “up to our eyes and our body” in the “hyperspace” of this abstract world order. The global financial crisis taught us that.
Hell, I wouldn't even know what a full blown postmodern building looks like. Is it one that aspires to be a total space, a complete world? A huge shopping mall turned in on itself? One where the sign language of consumerism that screams buy buy buy has been learned from Las Vegas?
I avoid shopping malls because the timeless present of consumption makes me depressed.
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The big shopping mall being being built by Woolworths at Victor Harbor is not integrated with the older shopping strip on main street. It stands on its own surround by a huge car park.
This mall threatens means a transfer of commerce from High Street small businesses to transnational corporations. It is not so much that corporations like Woolworths or Big W do not exist outside of the privately owned space of shopping malls, but that locally owned small businesses do not exist inside.