Zones of Theory
and Amusement:
Video Arcades
and Luna Park

Karen Burns

In that peculiar way in which a category identity is so often fashioned, in response to a perceived exclusion, my response to the DIA publication engages a desire to rewrite what counts as visual display. The paper analyses two kinds of visual display largely outside the parameters of the DIA collection : St Kilda's Luna Park in the early 1970s and the contemporary Time Zone amusement arcade in Bourke Street, Melbourne. I take both to be events (rather than objects, texts, bodies) that do not stop and end at the edges of a built environment, or at the edge of "The Body" (often cited as a singular noun and in capitals), or at the edge of a machine, or within the binary of the often quoted "human-machine interface". I prefer instead to frame both things as events, which attend to, dramatise, and display the paradoxes and vulnerabilities of corporeality, in the art of performance. The latter might be thought of as those codes that organise the social practices of self as a mode of display for others. In Australia, this often lurks under the heading larrikinism.

Amusement Parks in their current form, are largely an invention of North American enterprise in the latter part of the nineteenth-century. In 1906 Dreamland opened on the current St Kilda Luna Park site. Dreamland was a roller coaster decorated with white-painted pagodas and minarets, and its slightly tired structure still frames the edges of the site. But histories and critical analyses of amusement parks are dominated by the genre's North American origins. Inescapably, the genre's history is cast retrospectively under the shadow of Disney.

A semiotics of the amusement park organises the narratives figuring Disney Land in the 1981 issue of the Journal of Popular Culture. Disney Land's built environment, its rides, characters and costumes are construed as motifs within narratives of family, main street and patriotism. In her classic history of the American amusement park, Judith Adams' describes amusement park goers as pilgrims seeking the reaffirmation of values of corporate culture; such as progress through technology, control and organisation through managerial hierarchy and consumption. Even when people seek to be suckered, the stories generated by the genre of the Amusement Park sucker visitors in on another level, adding another twist to the screw.

In the predominantly North-American produced literature on amusement parks, these spaces figure as sites of writer's own theme parks; organised by such features as the Blockbuster Theme and Serious Encounters, generalisations about Man's showdown with Technology and Modernity. But "Man" as an embodied being is strangely absent in these encounters. In this landscape of critical digesis, Scott Bukatman is a solitary figure, a writer who analyses corporeality in an amusement park setting. In these spaces he observes, the body is constantly "recalled into being". For him, this is not an accidental, but a calculated strategy. His essay in the Visual Display collection,"The Artificial Infinite", is largely a reading of post-1960s sci-fi movies, with a few scattered comments on panoramas and the odd aside on the amusement park. Of the panorama he observes, it "..addressed the perceived loss of cognitive power experienced by the subject in an increasingly technologized world." For Bukatman, the amusement park industry and panoramic rides are comparable in their effects :as a means of inscribing new potentially traumatic phenomena and perspectives onto the field of the body.⁵

In an earlier 1991 essay on Disneyland ("There's always Tomorowland") Bukatman had argued that the spectator's journeys into technologically complex zones in Disney Land, "ultimately served to guarantee the continuing presence and relevance of the subject."⁶. On this journey, the Disney Traveller penetrates a series of impossible spaces, and at journey's end merges with The Impossible Space in a state of kinetic sensory pleasure, (an unremarked upon, classic gendered travel story.)⁷ In this narrative, the journey through such spaces produces an inscription on the body, a coding that "announces the human-machine interface, and technology thereby creates the conditions its own acceptance."⁸

In such an argument amusement parks and panoramas are motivated events. They conspire with a purpose. These sites of erupting symptoms display displaced trauma, and then enact certain strategies of adjustment and assimilation. Even when the Disney Traveller appears to be enjoying herself, she is working through a serious agenda.

In a number of essays, Meaghan Morris has objected to the ways in which the genre of "theory", unreflectively recycles a familiar plot.⁹ These are fables of realisation, ones in which the writer "discovers" in the things under scrutiny, a sociopolitical commentary serving as a mirror to the writer's own theory. The apparent object of analysis (such as The Amusement Park Traveller) operates to reaffirm or enact the writer's own critical activity. Bukatman's readings are a variant on this theme; his figure's glance in the mirror of theory reveals one visage (Pleasure), but this only masks the critic's own familar face, and his glance of recognition and assimilation, his pleasure, as the Traveller, enacts a Theory of the Acculturation of Technology.

The underground work of such critical commentaries is a latent psychoanalytic narrative. The theme park is the site for the eruption of a symptom; the trauma of technology. In a twist on the classic theory of displacement, (a narrative true to that genre would read the activities of the theme park as a displaced commentary on the social trauma of technology), technology arises and is introduced into the social at the site of the theme park. There are many comments one could make about such a reading, but I will confine myself to one. In this proposition Technology is imagined as infinitely elastic and interchangeable, an incredible shrinking and expanding Proper Noun. What happens to such a proposition if we visualise technolgogies as a series of specific competencies, for example the operation of a word processor or dialling a modem, competencies which do not guarantee that one can use a knitting machine or to be truly ridiculous, change a tyre.

Reading "There's always Tomorrowland", I experienced a dizzying loss of spatial coordinates not dissimilar to those I'd experienced on each visit to Luna Park. Here, in my rapid downhill slides on the Big Dipper, on my jolted rides around the ghost train, and in the Giggle Palace mirror, my foreign stare at an unfamiliar rubbery and wide body, the ontological ground moved from under me. My own readings and Scott Bukatman's are not grounded in the same amusement park universe. This maybe the difference between a vision oriented by Disney and one oriented by Luna Park. But it suggests too, the difficulties entailed in geographical and cultural transposition, and the rhetorical, strategic difficulties involved in maintaining a universal argument in the face of widely differing operations.It is as well, a comment on the mismatch of a particular genre of criticism with the genre it purports to observe.

Filed under the library-assigned genre of Amusement Parks, is a high- school physics textbook in which the roller coaster is used to pose problems of speed, slopes and gravity. I would argue that despite the existence of this interesting example, Luna Park is a site that plays mainly with comedy not gravity.

Reading Luna Park is, in part, a fable about genre competency, about being able to read genre cues and respond appropriately. My Luna Park is an event you need to read through the genre of comedy and if you're looking for gravity you can get all the genre cues wrong. Perhaps Bukatman and Adams have confused the plots of a certain subgenre of action movies, ones which are motivated by the hero's unmasking of a government or corporatist (sometimes even a feminine or feminist) conspiracy.

The amusement park event dramatises corporeal display. At the Giggle Palace in St Kilda's Luna Park, a number of inventions such as the distorting mirrors, air-vents which blew up your shirt or skirt produced embarrassment and somatic exposure. These dramatic tableaux present the bodies of slapstick and cartoons, sublimely indestructible substances. No matter how much their edges are stretched and subjected to speed, dislocating shocks, and loss of known spatial coordinates, they survive and bounce back to face another day.

It was kinetic overload rather than kinetic sensory pleasure that I found in these tests of the body's limits and endurance; reflexes, stress, noise, adrenalin, excitement, screaming , laughter, all ensured a loss of physical control. I remember it as a social event for which you needed to demonstrate panic management as a performance skill. It was a place in which anxieties about the body's fallibility, particularly in the face of others, were played upon and played down. You could scream but not chicken out.

Our stories were always about the corporeal near-miss. There was always some dude on the opposite side of the rotor who, once the floor had dropped out from underneath us and the machine was spinning would succumb to his own corporeality. He would throw up but somehow, miraculously, despite the spinning vomit, we would survive unscathed only to have the car stopped sometime on the way home for our own ritualised disgorging. We had our heads in the gutter at such an early age and perhaps this is what people mean when they write against the bad faith of amusement parks. I don't remember ever seeing anyone chuck in the rotor but it was one of the horror stories we told ourselves about visiting Luna Park. It was part of the group performance, before, during and after the site visit to relive the terror.

These motifs; sociability, groups and performance were also largely absent from the material in these texts on subjectivity and corporeality in the sites of the panorama or the computer. Perhaps because these events unlike amusement parks are solitary, or rather it is because a particular epistemological model prevails in these accounts of exemplary machines. Essays on Man and the Machine such as Bukatman's and Jonathan Crary's , dramatise this "meeting" as A Close Encounter of the First Kind : the one on one, solitary spectator, absorbed and engaged in the viewing act. It dramatises the meeting of Man and his Machine. (What happens to the human interface metaphor if there is a crowd?) Perhaps this is also a mis-en-abyme of the writer's own place of critical labour: the quiet study and humming computer . My visits to Time Zone and my remembrance of Luna Park past tell me otherwise, and theoretical analyses of technology, such as Crary's¹⁰ and Bukatman's, are still captured by an epistemological model of the sovereign self even as they seek to eschew that figure.

There is a paradox of course in these accounts of the "spectator " in which visual display is presented as an inherently unsociable experience, (the unidentified subject at the centre of the panorama, the computer geek /slash hacker locked in his room) whilst the scenario is analysed as absolutely social, since the encounter (in Bukatman's terms) manages the social inscription of a body.¹¹ But on visiting Time Zone , as with my memories of Luna Park, I was struck by the numbers of people competing on machines in pairs, and the others (friends or strangers?) who stood around and watched the game. A tableaux was being staged, a visual display, an art of performance, a Spectator Sport.

Time Zone, in Bourke Street, Melbourne, presents itself as a vestigal amusement arcade. But the long narrow horizontally aranged space of the older amusement arcade is turned around, oriented anew in depth, back into the heart of a city block. The sense of a historically continuous and shared form is I think, accidental, since the plan is organised purely by the spatial demands and cost of urban shop frontages. But the internal layout as well as the name plays on a historical continuity. Some of the video games could pass as vestigial shooting galleries and a shop desk and display cabinet near the front where you can purchase stuffed toys (some of them with tickets won from the games), balls, other souvenirs reminds me of the former life of the amusement park arcade.

Whenever I went to play these games my curiosity was drawn to the other spectators, some quiet and tableau-like, watching the participant/s at the game, others like my friends, who just mucked around and performed the art of not winning, but entertaining. These are not spaces designed for spectators (for example the Russell street video arcades are just holes in the wall ) and the spaces can become chock-a-block, congested, close encounters of a different kind.

The spectatorial relationship to what's sometimes called "popular culture" is often described in terms of distraction. Time Zone is an interesting example that puts such theories under pressure¹². Given the noise of the machines, the watching crowd and the focus on playing the game, Time Zone is often a test of skilled concentration, not distraction.

Curiosity is a word ,associated in its dictionary definitions with inquiry and speculation; the traditional stuff of research. What happens to this map when it meets the Time Zone territory? For here the games are formulaic and generic, a probing not of the radically new but the already known (like all games and research, rule driven, even if those working in the university name those rules 'disciplinary protocols').

When I play Alpine Racer at Time Zone, a game in which a skier navigates a fast-paced down-hill run, I love the music and the pace of the movement through the landscape. But the comedy lies in seeing myself as the generically represented helmeted skier boofing in and out of the frame, and in my case, magnetically attracted to every obstacle. Each time I hit the fence or pylon and the helmeted figure takes a spin I laugh at my own representation, and feel the sublimity of the identity gap, between the inscribed body and my own. Mine is the joy of non-identification, a calibration unmapped in Bukatman's terms.

The games Cyber Cycles, Alpine Racer, Manx TT Super Bike take the cliched spatial narrative of modernity (the dream of a journey through frictionless space), set this up as the motivation and the goal for the journey and then trash it. A journey without obstacles is not achievable. This is a materially grounded and resistant world, not a space without boundaries, a kinetic pleasure zone of merging. After a couple of goes you know the basic outline, The Formula, but the formula that doesn't diminish the reflex skills involved, or the obstacles hurtling at you with every bump and corner. A bit like trying to make a frictionless piece of theory. Of course if I wanted to be conspiratorial I could say that the formula with unpredictable obstacles is a really smart way of sucking people in again and again.

But I'm not so interested in the problem and rhetoric of being conned, one which often demands that you begin from a paranoiac position. Instead I'll present the formulai of the curious (speculative, inquiring) visual display and the conspiracy inscription of the trauma of technology with a few neat critical obstacles of my own; like the genre of comedy, sociability, the arts of performance, group spectatorship, vomit and panic management.

At the beginning of this essay I stated that my preferred term for the things described in this paper was not display but events. This was in part a strategy to displace the conventional focus of technology narratives on the binary meeting of a body and a machine. Attending to events involves engaging other rhetorics of description; to write of the various moments, moves and moods in particular temporal and spatial practices. It means imagining that such stories are open to difference and iteration, to the possibility that things may be other than as we know them.

Karen Burns
1996

Endnotes
1. The exhibition ran from August 22 - November 30, 1996 at the Stop 22 Gallery, St Kilda. Chad Chatterton, Annette Slattery, Ricky Swallow, Andrea Meadows, Alexander Knox and Edward Parritt all contributed works to the exhibition. Marion Harper, the Stop 22 Coordinator convened the Beyond Belief forum held in the gallery on September 19. The other speakers were Simon During and Robert Schubert. I would like to thank Marion Harper for providing the occasion for this paper.
2. Judith A. Adams, The American Amusement Park Industry A History of Technology and Thrills, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1991 p.xiv.
3. Scott Bukatman "The Artificial infinite", in Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (eds.) Visual Display Culture Beyond Appearances, Bay Press, Seattle 1995, p.254-283.
4. ibid., p.255
5. ibid., p.261.
6. Scott Bukatman "There's Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience ", October, no.57, Summer 1991, p.77
7. cf. Bukatman "There's Always Tomorrowland" : ". The body, and thus the subject, penetrates these impossible spaces, finally to merge with them in a state of kinetic, sensory pleasure.", p.77
8. ibid.
9. Meaghan Morris "Banality in Cultural Studies" in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, (ed.). Patricia Mellencamp, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1990, p.22-23.
10. Jonathan Crary's influential and amirable text, Techniques of the Observer : On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1992.
11. This is obviously not the case in Peter Wollen or Ed Ball's essays.
12. Some of these arguments have been analysed by Morris in "Banality in Cultural Studies" p.23-25.

Acknowledgment
Thanks to Helen Stuckey for help with reading material and conversation.