Enormities: Media, Space, and Large Systems

This dissertation explores how media—photographs, films, and especially video games—variously figure the continent-scale systems (or "enormities") that structure everyday life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing together problems addressed by prior scholarship under the headings of infrastructure, scalar mediation, cognitive mapping, and the production of space, I analyze media focused on three systems constitutive of everyday life in twenty-first century—containerized shipping, networked computing, and interstate trucking—to demonstrate the range of image-based strategies available for apprehending enormities. Throughout, I argue for the need to approach aesthetics through a theory of social space (and time) in order to accurately place media in relation to political economy and to account for the lived complexities of space. The goal of this work is to find alternate figurations of enormity capable of contesting some of the default diagrams imposed on the everyday, imagining other modes of organization driven instead by labor, difference, and dwelling. Each of my three chapters takes up a different set of media objects, working through relations between medium-specific forms and systemic operations. My first chapter, "Shipping Space," confronts the dominant tropes of containerized shipping with the practices of two artists, Allan Sekula and Peter Hutton, who offer labor-oriented counter-maps of the maritime world enabled by montage and the photographic. Chapter two, "Computing Space," delves into id Software's prototypical first-person shooter DOOM (1993) to interpret digital games as mise en abymes of space and technicity in the historical moment of their creation. Here I stress both the novelty of videogames as a generator of spatiotemporal experience and their capacity for foregrounding contradictions within dominant regimes of space. Chapter three, "Road Space," takes up a range of videogames describable as "trucking simulators," asking how these ludic versions of logistical space rhythmically rework the pains and joys of life on America's highways. In swerving from art photography and cinema to early shooters to ordinary labor simulations across this dissertation, I suggest that the material and aesthetic heterogeneity of contemporary media production is itself a resource for figuring enormities otherwise.