Cold Case: An Experiential Investigation 

In the North American service economy—dominant since the 1980s and 90s—where personalized transactions are valued above tangible products, consumer demands are increasingly met on an individual basis. We expect to be served as clients. We anticipate the same service in our cultural experiences—visits to galleries, museums, and heritage sites—that we do when we seek the services of financial consultants, manicure specialists, and sandwich artists. As our interests in being served persist, they morph into desires for engaging authentic experiences. In 1999, Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore suggested a reframing of our service-based economy as an “experience economy,” where consumers seek predominantly personal engagements and memorable experiences (1). In this experience economy, consumption is promoted through a “theming methodology,” where experiential harmony is guided by wider thematic structures in order to create lasting impressions (2). Such mediated experiences have provoked an emerging consumer demand for real, authentic experiences (3).

Cold Case mimics the experience economy model forwarded by Pine and Gilmore, taking up— through the theme of the crime scene—the question of how (or if) we can authentically experience something that can only exist virtually. The “somethings” we ask you to experience in Cold Case are predominantly site-specific artworks and cultural landmarks that have physically disappeared or transformed beyond recognition. Fleeting like the instance of a crime, the impermanent and intangible character of such sites may be defied by current virtual technologies. Taking advantage of various processes of reconstruction made possible by digital images and Google Maps, Cold Case offers you, as a participant-viewer, the opportunity to experience historical or no-longer existent cultural and artistic sites. Like a museum tour or pilgrimage to a series of remote sites, the path through Cold Case is mapped out and made accessible. However, it is only through an organically growing compilation of digital evidence and photo-documentation that each site, like the scene of a crime, becomes available. These sites are out of reach—both physically and temporally—but made available and rebuilt through the reconstructive and experiential powers of the virtual. While our needs to be individually and thematically served may be met on this tour, our desire for real experiences remain sadly, and sometimes frustratingly, unfulfilled. The sites on this tour can only be investigated virtually through the Cold Case website platform and the existing Google Maps interface. Like crime scenes gone cold, the ten sites on this tour require reconstitution in order to be experienced. You must search for and compile evidence of their existence.

The commodification of experience has been taken up in recent years by artists such as Fabrice Hybert, Bert Rodriguez, and Eduardo Sarabia, artists who address the customization and personalization of experience through so-called “service aesthetics”: the gallery-based replication of the personal transactions that define both service and experience economies. Offering specific services—such as haircuts or counseling sessions—artists working in this way reframe the viewer as the client. As Steven Madoff explains, these practices “affirm a sense of self for the individual client that may have gone missing in the congestion, freneticism, and disenfranchisement of service culture" (4). In such works, the intimacy of the transaction within the gallery is central to the visitor experience.

This new model of service aesthetics and experience-oriented art is mirrored in the ongoing restructuring of museums themselves. The increased popularity of informal mass education in experience economies has caused a shift towards what Roy Ballantyne and David Uzzell call “visitor-centered museums” (5). No longer exclusively concerned with housing and exhibiting objects, museums are increasingly operating within experience-based models. Competing for consumers, museums tailor experiences to individual needs and use digital media to facilitate engagement for visitors who are unable to physically navigate to sites.6 The virtual exhibition is but one method museums have developed to broaden their reach. In instances when visitors are less concerned with being in the presence of a historical or cultural object than learning about that object, virtual experiences, such as 3D digital tours of historic environments or virtual exhibitions [like Cold Case itself] are made available remotely.

Walking the Virtual Grid

With the aid of virtual experiences facilitated by digital technology, physical forms of travel are no longer necessary to access art historical and cultural sites. Just as the Internet has made it possible to “visit” many remote places without leaving your desk, it has made it possible to go back in time. Spaces otherwise inaccessible in real time and space—because of either temporal or physical boundaries and restrictions—can now be accessed virtually. Museums, heritage sites, and locations of site-specific art installations and performances are not only made accessible by established institutions; they are oftentimes democratically reconstructed by the viewing public itself. Photographic documentation of sites (both famous and obscure) are often virtually rebuilt through social image databases such as Panoramio, and these images are commonly plotted at the sites of their production on Google Maps. Cold Case offers participant-viewers the opportunity to engage with this process of virtual reconstruction. Like any good detective, you must examine the sense of authenticity these documentary reconstructions attempt to produce as you navigate your way through the Cold Case tour. You must account for documentation’s ability, as a performative act, to on one hand increase our access to the given object, site or event, and on the other, to erase its authenticity (7).

Retracing the footsteps of first or second-hand witnesses, who so readily made photographic documentation available online, you will use Google Maps to revisit and re-investigate what we have chosen to call “crime scenes.” Each stop on the Cold Case tour is a document, a case file you can open to re-experience, review, or judge anew. Each scene—a spot on the world map that has been pinpointed by Google Maps—can be perused digitally so far as the application allows. Digital photographs documenting the scene are presented for consideration. As you look at the selected sites as they exist today, we hope you can experience them as “crime scenes gone cold” while creatively unraveling the various artistic, social, and political injustices that have occurred.

In investigating these sites, we hope you can reconsider issues of representation, ownership and access that so often inform crimes.
The Cold Case tour begins at sites where crimes have appeared over time through the photographic medium [Antonioni’s film Blow-Up; Koester’s Occupied Plots; Abandoned Futures]. Here, it is the artist or filmmaker who has done detective work by providing photographic evidence. As you move along the tour, you find sites where the disappearance of an artwork is the crime in question [Serra’s Tilted Arc; Whiteread’s House]. Here, re-engineered public spaces stand as a reminder of what cultural markers have been lost. Digital photographs exist as their only remaining traces. From this point, you progress towards sites that, although deliberately temporal in their creation, take up issues of permanence, change, and ownership [Hayeur’s Fire with Fire; the case of the G’psgolox Pole; Gerz and Shalev-Gerz’s Monument against Fascism]. The reconstruction of these scenes—which were never intended to offer long- term access—echoes the very issues of territorial and ideological occupation with which they were once invested. The last three locations in Cold Case are sites of artworks and cultural artifacts that reflexively take up issues of access that are inherent to the new possibilities of Google Maps [Banksy’s Israel's West Bank Barrier Graffiti; Alÿs’s The Loop; the Large Bamiyan Buddha]. In our quest for virtual experiences, we find that scenes such as the site of the Large Bamiyan Buddha are inaccessible even digitally. Users who want to upload photographic documentation may be restricted or censored. Google street views are made unavailable. While the more popular destinations and scenes of clearly defined crimes on this tour are easily accessible and extensively reconstructed, issues of impeded simulation at sites of more politically charged crimes reflect a new type of erasure and censorship in the virtual realm. While technology may allow new possibilities to experience the inaccessible, larger political and institutional structures do limit what we can and cannot access.

All of the artistic and cultural sites in Cold Case have been selected for investigation because they mark locations that—changed over time by passing events, short-lived, destroyed, or restricted by security forces—can only be investigated with the digital and internet-based technologies that prove so useful to museums and cultural sites in today’s experience economy. When you enter this virtual exhibition, we invite you to open each case file by clicking on its icon. Venture to experience each site by clicking the documentation link. Here, you will find a virtual map to explore and photographic evidence to consider.

_______________

(1) Chip Conley, “Experience Economists,” Hospitality Design 32.8 (2010): 55-56.

(2) Ibid., 56.

(3) Ibid.  

(4) Steven Henry Madoff, “Service Aesthetics,” Artforum (September 2008): 165-169, 484. 169.

(5) Roy Ballantyne and David Uzzell. “Looking Back and Looking Forward: The Rise of the Visitor-centered Museum,” Curator 54.1 (2011): 85-92.

(6) For example, The Armchair Travel Company, who provide virtual tours and e-learning centers on site, provides accessibility where access is limited due to physical barriers. (http://www.armchair-travel.com/): William Donelson, “Accessing the Inaccessible: The Benefits of Virtual Access,” Access by Design 115 (2008), 12-15.  

(7) Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (1979): 75-88.