Awe Studies: truck floating chips in the sky
This piece is part of a series that responds to the theme of the 2024 Cleveland Humanities Festival: “Awe.”
1.
If I follow the threads of my preoccupation with floating (as visual phenomenon; as idea; as emotional state), I find myself beside a Frito-Lay semi-truck driving west on I-70. I was one hour into an eleven-hour drive that I did too many times—back and forth between Kansas City, MO, and Gambier, OH—during a two-year teaching position that shifted my marriage to a long-distance relationship. My life felt fragmented in many ways, and these drives were a strange mix of caffeine-fueled space-time compression and welcome pause. Amidst the boredom of this 70 mph confinement, this truck caught my attention.
A large handful of “classic” potato chips floated against a sky-blue sky. As if tossed by some higher power, these chips were enlarged to show texture, induce salty-crunchy cravings and dreams of chips the size of couch cushions. It was a moving billboard created with the intention to elicit awe. Or, at the very least, to elicit a common reaction to the absence of awe—hunger. Like all manifestations of well-crafted packaging, this truck was both a vehicle to transport and protect goods and a sexy costume promising satisfaction and immediate gratification.
Unable to safely take a photo of this truck while driving, I opted for an equally unsafe text to my husband as note-to-return-to. It reads like the beginnings of a haiku:
Lays potato chip
truck floating chips in the sky
a screenshot of the original text message
This was the newest sample in my study of western culture’s ongoing fascination with floating objects and anything set against the backdrop of a blue sky. In all of these images the aim is to command an experience of awe, which is an extremely complicated emotional response. To feel awe is to be moved and full of wonder, but also to be confronted with the vulnerability of being alive. It is to acknowledge that whatever is generating this experience might be fleeting—just as our individual existence is fleeting. It can make us feel inadequate or, worse, powerless. Regardless, it is something that we want. This want is also what fuels the cyclical culture of consumption and our desire for newness. Advertisers know this. Designers know this. And they know how to use it to manipulate us.
2.
Floating objects are at once vague and unmistakably direct—the “yes” at the top of Yoko’s ladder or the frame of a James Turrell Skyspace. The backdrop of the sky similarly puts viewers into a position of looking upward; toward the heavens; away from the material realities of ourselves and the world. Rather than the actual feeling of calm that one experiences when looking up at the sky while floating in the water (an unfortunately rare, and therefore cherished, occurrence in my life), a consumer sky implies that acquiring the product floating against it will result in a sensation of calm. Ease and satisfaction can be found if this thing becomes yours. In contrast to the context-specific, fluctuating nature of the actual sky, a consumer sky is consistently hyper-saturated and as static as the injection-molded plastic it often accompanies. It is smudge-free and new—until it’s not.
limes in plastic netting float in the void
The most ubiquitous floating object is the silhouetted product that we continue to see in advertisements and online at the point of sale. It has remained the same because it works. Cut out and pasted against a white void, this removal of context transforms the object (and its material reality) into a speculative form that defies the laws of space, time and (of course) gravity. The intention is to make this object aspirational, but also universal. You can take this cutout and insert it into your own life; imagine it in your own space, on your own body, in your own meal. This object can, in turn, transform you. If you are seduced and have the means to purchase this floating form, then your relationship with it begins to change from the moment of that monetary transaction. You have now given something away in hopes of gaining something else. When that thing arrives you no longer have a speculative thing, but instead the real thing, and are faced with the actualities of material. A trajectory of varied emotional reactions and questions follow, undoubtedly shifting with your exposure to that material and its evolution. Is this as I imagined it? Was this the “right” choice? Do I feel any different? And later on, How is this aging? Oh, right, it (like me) is also aging. Maybe I need a new one. Maybe I need something else.
This newness is often what we are seeking from the start; something to change things up and ease the monotony of our daily lives. But how long is something actually new? Until it shows signs of wear? Until we have a newer new to step into its place? Despite what seems like a futile quest, we persist. We scroll in search of new. We read in search of new. We watch in search of new. We buy in search of new. And the marketing that pervades these activities promises that awe will be found here. This search for awe is the fire that fuels consumption. (Have you ever considered that the startup chimes of mac computers sound like elongated awe’s? They are the chimes of possibility.)
The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it.
—Lewis Hyde, The Gift
I want to say that I see awe in my students when they learn something new, that we feel it when we experience something that makes us realize how small (or big) we are; when we are witness to (or part of) acts of kindness, compassion and collaboration. However, I don’t think that awe is the emotion these experiences induce—it’s something more relational; something closer to kinship. They make me feel connected to other humans and living beings, and therefore part of something bigger, but that doesn’t carry the baggage of awe. Our ideas and definitions of awe are in many ways about an experience of something “greater” than humanness; something to be fearful of. I don’t know that I have experienced actual awe. I’m also not sure I believe that it is something to seek. Awe may be just another dangerous construct; a tool to maintain long-held power structures.
various floating icons: [left] image comparison via @enricjardi on X (formerly Twitter) [right] a priest rides a hoverboard in a church in the Philippines — via Novus Ordo Insider
3.
So what can we make of all the floating pieces of daily experience? In this world of production, productivity and products, I try to let myself float. I try to release the weight I feel and trust that I will remain buoyant. My artistic practice involves a lot of time looking and thinking and collecting—often (at/about) materials, but just as often (at/about) images. Sometimes these images are passively consumed and other times they are the result of intentional searching. Looking at the floating fragments of visual information that circulate online and via social channels, I wonder, is anything truly floating? I am inclined to see this searching as a tether that connects us in our striated existences—this fragmentation less a scattering of microplastics and more an infinite cluster of balloons, which inevitably loses some to the wind.
A green screen also allows for a sort of floating, fragmented object, but the tethers are there whether we see them or not. So why go through the fuss to hide and conceal? Again, the goal is to create spectacle and inspire something unworldly or superhuman—to invoke (or get closer to) a sense of awe. We all know that what we are seeing is a constructed, fabricated, fictional image, but the desire to feel this sensation we call awe seduces us into knowing delusion. To look at the realities of how these visual effects are created, though, is to feel a completely different spectrum of emotions. The green mechanisms that support and maneuver subjects through this composite space are absurdly crude, humorously precarious and often just ordinary human bodies in universally unflattering lycra suits. It’s also worth noting that these scenes closely resemble the sets of product photography—a series of scaffolds, tethers and backdrops that will later be digitally removed. The eventual keying out of these ordinary humans renders them invisible to audiences, and perhaps this is in fact a discreetly subversive act in which they are the ones in control. Isn’t invisibility the ultimate superpower?
various green screen mechanisms: [back] a production scene from Alice In Wonderland (2010), directed by Tim Burton [left] a production scene from The Matrix (1999), directed by Lana & Lilly Wachowski [right] a video still from Jokes on Every Wrapper (2020-2021) by Rachel Ferber, which uses a painted wooden spoon to enable the illusion of floating
Sitting with images that show the mechanisms behind these floating wonders can provide a bit of necessary grounding. They remind us of our fragility, of our precarity and of our humanness.
And can’t we still find something to inspire us in the material world? Can’t something on a string be just as impactful? I want to see the tethers! In this moment of AI everything, we need reminding that so much of what we see isn’t real. To stay grounded, we also need to learn to see the tethers that these technologies conceal.
installation view of Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber (1602) by Juan Sánchez Cotán at the San Diego Museum of Art
Our lives are in some ways just a collection of fragments; a stack of decisions and events; a collection of things tethered to other things. It’s no wonder that we want to create meaning. This text is a good example. It is the attempt to capture and glue together pieces of ideas and images collected on are.na and via notecards (note that the use of note cards also results in fragmentation as only a small amount of information can comfortably fit in the space). I don’t believe the threads of language that tether these pieces together will lead to anything resembling awe, but they are the artifacts of an attempt to understand it; the residue of the search. What would we search for if actual awe were attained? Do we really want to find it? Would there be any motivation to make or experience or live? Isn’t this all, in the end, about the search itself? Consuming something salty to soothe the anxieties of this endeavor may then be a necessary act of self-preservation. Or, perhaps, an act of perseverance. It’s a long drive after all.
a video of the semi-truck with the same imagery I observed, by fritotruckin4eva