Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media, Volume 29, 2017
Abstract: The recent consumer phenomenon of the GoPro camera, suggests novel ways in which media corporations channel the value of affective experience into new forms of subjectivity and control through the creation of human-digital assemblages. This article examines these flows of consumer desire, capital, and affect that result from the GoPro user’s embodied experience as both filmmaker and viewer. The affective response that the GoPro elicits derives from a complex assemblage of bodies – camera, user, and subsequent viewer of captured footage – that forge an affective relationship through the camera’s mobility and standard point-of-view shot. The assemblage of the camera-body secretes spatial experience that generates a sensation of absorption, or when the becoming-viewer is placed into the experience of the “other.” These flows of affect among the GoPro and consumer, anticipate the construction of new consumer subjectivities and modes of control through the brand’s capture and commodification of the GoPro experience.
Figure 1. Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner plummeting to Earth from a stratospheric balloon and breaking the sound barrier at over 800 mph – on October 14, 2012. Screen grab from video available at:
In 2012, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner plummeted to the earth from a balloon that had reached the stratosphere, and at a speed that broke the sound barrier at over 800 mph. Landing alive on the earth’s surface, the entirety of Baumgartner’s experience was captured in a majestic point-of-view shot by the use of a head-mounted GoPro. His descent became an instant viral sensation. If the public was initially unaware of the inherent mobility and high-definition cinematography of the GoPro, then Baumgartner’s descent certainly provided a demonstration of its utmost capacities (figure 1). Developed in 2004 by extreme sports enthusiast-entrepreneur Nick Woodman in an effort to capture his experiences surfing, the GoPro initially catered to a niche market of extreme sports goers who, by mounting the portable, high-definition camera to their body, could share with the world the immediacy of their adventures. Yet, in its most recent ventures as a multi-million dollar media company, GoPro has branded the cinematographic uses of its camera far beyond the initial niche of extreme sportsmen, commoditizing its view of presentness to multiple consumer markets for both everyday and professional use, in turn, routing affect into unfixed and variable forms of control from which new consumer subjectivities emerge.
For understanding how the flows of the GoPro brand assemble affective experience, desires, intensities, and capital into new forms of subjectivity, philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control” is of particular significance. In his short, but impactful article, Deleuze suggests that society has transformed from that of Michel Foucault’s disciplinary societies of the 18th and 19th centuries structured by the social molding of a subject through enclosed institutions, to societies in which control is expressed through modulation, acting “like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other” (4). Deleuze’s modulatory control both organizes and captures subjects through its flexible forms of marketing and observation in which algorithms and protocols surveil and adapt to human behavior, anticipate consumer desire, and manipulate affective capacities. The consumer phenomenon of the GoPro camera reflects how the circulating flow of affect throughout the 21st century mediasphere produces new forms of subjectivity through modulation.
I argue that the affective response elicited by the GoPro derives from a complex assemblage of bodies—camera, user, and subsequent viewer of captured footage—that form a relationship through their affective capacities and prescribes to a sensation likened to an absorption of the other. These flows of affect between the consumer’s performance that employs the mobility, versatility, and quality of the GoPro when filming their actions in the world and the networked viewers of these GoPro experiences, anticipate flexible forms of modulatory power that construct subjectivity through the brand’s capture and commodification of affect. I use Deleuze’s materialist philosophy to explore the affective, embodied experience produced from the usage, consumption, and networked distribution of an emerging video recording technology and the way in which novel forms of subjectivity are organized within modulatory mechanisms of control. Deleuze’s politics and the flows of affect and desire within the logic of capitalist production allow us to consider how the unique imbrication between GoPro and bod(ies) can generate new possibilities for the sensory-perceptual experience of digital technologies.
Because of the GoPro’s picture quality and affordability, directors have begun to consider its POV shot to create entire films, while action shots via the GoPro have been used on popular TV shows such as Survivor and Top Gear. With the introduction of the palm-sized Hero4 as an everyday camera that captures what president Tony Bates refers to as “life’s great moments” through a 1440p 48fps wide angle lens, the GoPro brand is likewise capitalizing on a home-video market (quoted in Paumgarten). GoPro has also made sure to market a plethora of accessories—helmet mounts, chest harnesses, extension arms, tripods, and even harnesses for attaching the camera to a dog—to further emphasize versatility and indicate that anyone (or anything) can utilize GoPro cinematography to capture the world around them. Speaking to the virality of shared GoPro experiences, in the first quarter of 2014 alone, over 50 million hours of videos were viewed that incorporated “GoPro” in the video description or title (Lapowsky). The GoPro brand is also in the works of launching its own channel of captured user experiences via Xbox Live and has its own YouTube channel to distribute and share user-generated content with over 2.5 million subscribers. Yet, the GoPro camera possesses an output beyond commercial and entertainment purposes, one in which its mobility and high-definition quality distinguish it from other types of mobile media recording as what Eric Kluitenberg refers to as tactical media. Kluitenberg suggests that our current networked culture has given rise to tactical media as an aesthetic and political practice that emerged through readily available recording devices (smart phones) and the ability to rapidly share images through social media platforms. Through the democratization of media technologies, strategies of tactical media empower the public sphere through the occupation of certain hybrid spaces; the co-constitution of the physical, embodied presence of a contested space with its distribution across a network on various screens (8,11). In recent years, uses of tactical media have undergirded political movements such as the Arab Spring protest and the Ukrainian Revolution in 2014. I want to suggest that GoPro technology is embedded within the recent historical and material fabric from which tactical media has become apparent. Although its potential as a liberatory media apparatus is perhaps yet unrealized, the GoPro’s portability, HD cinematography, and ability to attach easily to a body, could be used to capture and share the immediacy of a subversive political demonstration, acts of police brutality, or perhaps the occurrence of a natural disaster.
The affective response a viewer experiences from GoPro footage through an assemblage of body and camera can be understood by examining Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema. Deleuze’s Cinema books have been acknowledged for breaking from the tenets of screen theory that emerged during the 1970s from the work of Laura Mulvey, Stephen Heath and Christian Metz among others, who suggested that the spectator is formed by and subjected to the ideological apparatus of the cinematic spectacle.[1] Thus while screen theory, through an understanding of semiotic, linguistic, and psychoanalytical processes, presupposes a well-constituted subject that passively engages with the images presented by a film, Deleuze’s philosophy considers cinema as a way to think about and image the world that is no longer attached to an embodied spectator’s unified field of vision. For Deleuze, cinematic affect is asubjective through cinema’s ability to present a sequencing of images in the world from all possible perspectives as opposed to an embodied view of the human eye (Cinema 1: The Movement Image 1-12, 56-87). Deleuzian cinema theory suggests that the concept of “spectatorship” emerges from new sensorial and perceptual possibilities generated from affective change within the body when in contact with the cinematic image.
It is important to note that by affect, I am referring to the term as it has been understood by Deleuze and Brian Massumi through the work of Baruch Spinoza, in which the individual nature of a body is constituted by its capacities to affect and be affected by bodies as they move into relationships based on their velocities and slownesses (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy 122). When bodies come into contact with each other, affect describes the changes and variations that result from their collision; the additive processes and expressive changes in perceptions and sensory experiences that emerge from the encounter of these bodies. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe affect as existing beyond subjective experience within a “bloc of sensations” being in and of itself something that flows and emerges between bodies (164). Affect, as Brian Massumi notes, is an unqualified force experienced in surplus to known, cognized perception, a “thinking-feeling”—autonomic, brain-body activity—that impinges upon a body before human consciousness can rationalize it. (145).
When a body mounts the GoPro camera in a centralized location, either the head or chest so as to produce a point-of-view shot, the camera forges a new relationship in which both body and device form an assemblage, which here I will refer to as the camera-body. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari express that the assemblage is “every constellation of singularities and traits deduced from the flow—selected, organized, stratified—in such a way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage, in this sense, is a veritable invention” (406). To Deleuze and Guattari, the coming together of “segmentarity, strata and territories” as well as “lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification” through their speeds and slownesses, produce an assemblage (4). As an organization of singularities, an assemblage can move into new relationships so as to be taken up and connected to other assemblages through the formation of new lines of flight and velocities that occur with the collisions of other bodies. The camera-body forms an assemblage from an interweaving of the human body that explores the world with a technological apparatus attached to it. The camera becomes the body’s eyes and images the word through its movements, while the moving body allows the GoPro to move and witness the world.
The GoPro through its adaptability could certainly form an assemblage with bodies other than that of the human. We might imagine that in an entirely new assemblage, the camera attaches to the mast of a racing sailboat, peering down upon the vessel’s busy crew through a birds-eye view as they maneuver through the sea. As numerous user-generated videos from GoPro’s YouTube channel indicate, consumers have found ways to use the camera that are not solely attached to the body, but rather to specialized mounts, animal bodies, commercial drones and other objects to produce intensities through novel imaging of the world. The camera-body is an assemblage that is post-human and non-anthropocentric in the way a body—whether animal, human, or machinic—coalesces with the camera.
To understand the mobility of the GoPro and the embodied experience it produces, we can turn to Deleuze’s Cinema books, where he establishes a philosophy that theorizes both movement and time in a relationship to thought and life, drawn from philosopher Henri Bergson and his equating of matter to movement. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image Deleuze draws upon Bergson to theorize movement expressed through a camera moving in a field of vision as the pure, mobile nature of life in which time is expressed indirectly as the linkage between one movement-image to the next. To Deleuze, all matter in the world is comprised of images; a thing that possesses matter constitutes an image in that it expresses movement, even if it is expressed on an atomic, molecular scale. Things in the world—the human brain, a clock, a house fly—are all images whose movement is comprised of a complex network of matter that expresses a continual flow of images. From Bergson, Deleuze extracts three primary expressions of images in the world: the perception-image, the action-image, and the affection-image. These images draw a relation to perception, as in what is seen, the interchange and positioning between characters on screen, and the internal emotions of a character (61-66).
As I have hinted at, Deleuze suggests that the camera’s ability to image the world through varying shots, presents us with an expression of the movement of life and with it, an indirect sense of temporality. To Deleuze, the camera possesses its own thinking and ability to express this movement of life to which “the shot…acts like a consciousness…the sole cinematographic consciousness is not us, the spectator, nor the hero; it is the camera- sometimes human, sometimes inhuman or superhuman” (20). Deleuze explains that this ability for the camera to “think” and perceive the world through an indirect vision of movement liberated from the conceptualizing of human perception, is understood through certain images that allow for us to witness movement asubjectively, removed from a linear, cognized perception of time and opening up the movement of life imaged through diverse points of view. For understanding the affective capacities of the GoPro, Deleuze’s treatment of the perception-image is most relevant. The perception-image can be framed as the camera’s ability to provide an “image of perception” that indeterminately moves between an objective perception of the world, the camera observing the world in which shots are equal in their relationships to each other, and subjective perception in which images are organized around the distinct view of a character. For Deleuze, it is this “centre of determination” between the objective and subjective that comprises the perception-image (63-76). From this understanding of the term, we might assume that the GoPro perceives the movement of its wearer in a prolonged, subjective perception-image, yet as Deleuze describes:
…the camera does not simply give us the vision of the character and of his world; it imposes another vision in which the first is transformed and reflected…we can see images in the cinema which claim to be objective or subjective- but here something else is at stake: it is a case of going beyond the subjective and the objective towards a pure Form which sets itself up as an autonomous vision of the content. We are no longer faced with subjective or objective images; we are caught in a correlation between a perception-image and a camera consciousness which transforms it (74).
Here, the prolonged, subjective perception-image that results from the body wearing the GoPro is not just the perception of its user, but rather it becomes through its autonomy, a pure image of this prolonged perception created through the “thinking” camera and moving body that is no longer solely bound to the subjective view of its user. This pure image of subjective perception is what I refer to as the absorption-image, of which I will return to shortly and clarify in more detail.
The assemblage of the GoPro and body produce novel affects, perceptions, and sensations through the body’s intensive qualities that flow outward and reverse into extensive surroundings that the GoPro images. The intensive qualities of the body are tuned inside-out and made into extensive, spatial experience produced through the GoPro’s ability to image the body’s direct movements. In his treatment of the dancing body, Jose Gil suggests that the body secretes space as opposed to moving through space when in the process of dancing. The intensive qualities of the dancer flow outward from the surface of the skin, transforming Cartesian space into the intensities of the inner body. A coextension is formed between the interior energies of the visceral body and the exterior gestures of the body as it performs its dance (85-88). As an example of this coextensivity, I turn to the usage of the GoPro in its traditional context of extreme sports, and in particular, the downhill run of extreme bicyclist Tomas Slavik at the 2015 Cerro Abajo race in the streets of Valparaiso, Chile. The Cerro Abajo race, in all of its high-speed insanity, pits extreme bicyclists against each other in the form of a time trial, in which each contestant attempts to make it to the finish line of a course that weaves throughout the streets of Valparaiso, with stairwells, narrow corridors, massive gap jumps, wall rides, and the occasional split second dodging of a dog that often wanders onto the street (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Tomas Slavik, Screenshot from the Cerro Abajo race in Valparaiso, Chile 2015, video shot with GoPro, 2015. .
Slavik’s 2015 run utilized a GoPro camera attached to his body so as to image the entirety of his trial. Here, the camera-body becomes a heterogeneous part of a larger, more complex event that is the race itself. This new assemblage forms from the camera-body entering into a relationship with a bicycle, the aura of the Valparaiso cityscape, the tradition of the race, so as to allow for the creation of new, unqualified intensities to flow forth as they are secreted by the camera-body. Like Gil’s dancing body, Slavik’s camera-body assemblage secretes space as it blasts through the city’s streets and its inner intensities are released. The unqualified emotion, fear, exhilaration; the intensities that emerge from the camera-body navigating the streets and manipulating the bicycle through tight alleyways and stairwells, percolate from the kinetic potential of the body and produce the exterior space through which the camera-body moves. This interior-exterior coextension also manifests, as I have mentioned, through the consciousness of the GoPro camera. Affective experience secretes outward from the camera-body in the form of Massumi’s concept of a “thinking-feeling” that lurks somewhere between the encounters with other bodies within the larger assemblage of the race and the cognized decision of the camera-body on bicycle to react to the foreboding layout of the streets. The variations that result from the encounters of the camera-body with the architecture of the course, the spectators, and the surrounding cityscape, generate flows of affect that are witnessed by the eye of the GoPro.
When the spectator of the GoPro video watches the intensities that are secreted outward in the pure form of the perception-image, a new assemblage is created that takes up the spectator into a relationship with the camera-body. These intensities are mediated to an audience through “clusters” of affect as a perception event. Affect produced by the camera-body circulates and enters into new assemblages which generate affective sensations codependent of the technical and social dimensions of the perception event. This circulation of affect by way of distributed GoPro footage, enters into assemblages with media platforms such as video sharing sites (You Tube, Vimeo), social media (Facebook, Instagram) and with diverse viewing audiences that come into relationships with these affective clusters through televisual and mobile screens. Different orders of affective sensations are produced when an assemblage is formed between a high-definition television, an audience who are fans of urban BMX racing, and a streaming media device that relays the intensities produced from Slavik’s camera-body, compared to an assemblage between a viewer and her cell phone who watches the same perception event. Thus the type of intensities produced by the GoPro user and their production of intensive-extensive space, generate and circulate affect throughout various assemblages at differing levels of sensory and perceptual experience. When these intensities produced by the camera-body circulate throughout an assemblage, the pure perception-image generates a bodily sensation likened to that of absorption, or being pulled into this intensive-extensive space in a process of becoming, of transitioning into the mediated experience of another. I will refer to this perception-image of intensive-extensive space that the spectator experiences as the absorption-image.
In order to further elucidate the concept of the absorption-image, it is important to trace at least a brief genealogy of the first-person, subjective shot and the affective response it elicits. In his analysis of the first-person shooter (FPS) genre in interactive gaming, Alexander Galloway indicates that the first-person subjective shot has traditionally been used in cinema to provide the spectator with a disembodying effect through the “psychological mimicking of actual vision.” The camera merges with the vision of the character so as to place the viewer into their perspective of the world (40-43). As Galloway suggests, the language of the first-person shooter borrows from elements of the cinematic subjective shot and uses this perspective continuously within “fully-rendered, actionable space” that is inseparable from the vocabulary of gameplay. The affective nature of embodying the first-person shooter is experienced through the autonomous, pure form of this subjective vision (63). Here, Galloway looks at the way in which the actionable, rendered space of the video game in the form of the subjective view of the FPS has crossed over into contemporary film in what he calls gamic cinema (62). On several occasions, Steven Shaviro discusses this sensation of actionable space in cinema drawing from the point-of-view shots depicting virtual reality headsets within Kathryn Bigelow’s film Strange Days (1995):
These sequences are tactile, or haptic, more than they are visual. The subjective camera doesn’t just look at a scene. It moves actively through space. It gets jostled, it stops and starts, it pans and tilts, it lurches forward and back. It follows the rhythms of the whole body, not just that of the eyes. This is a presubjective, affective and not cognitive, regime of vision (quoted in Galloway 62-63).[2]
This “regime of vision” described by Shaviro and taken up by Galloway in the algorithmically-designed space of the FPS, can also be thought of in terms of the mental affect that flows between the assemblage of the camera-body and spectator of the GoPro’s imaging of intensive-extensive space. The absorption-image results when a spectator is drawn to the pre-subjective “regime of vision” captured by the camera-body. This type perceptual-affective response communicates what Shaviro has called a post-cinematic affect that prescribes to an emergent media regime in which digital technology articulates new modes of experiencing, witnessing, sensing, or to quote Shaviro, “what it feels like to live in the early 21st century” of the control society (2).
The post-cinematic affect elicited from the absorption-image relays the intensities of the camera-body, the intensive-turned-extensive space of the other, into a new perceptual event experienced by the viewer. This viewing event unfolds through a process of mediation in which technical, perceptual, and neurophysiological mechanisms produce an affective encounter that is residual to the camera-body’s intensities through what Matthew Fuller refers to as a type of transduction, or the forces of organic bodies that are abstracted and reproduced within the technological (71). As a wonderfully creative example of GoPro filmmaking beyond extreme sports that arguably creates a smooth space for movement to flow, director Ilya Naishuller’s low-budget music video for the Russian punk band Biting Elbow’s song, “Bad Motherfucker,” is filmed using GoPro cameras so as to elicit a sense of post-cinematic, absorptive affect from the viewer. The performance of the actor in the music video plays like a live-action, first-person shooter using a head mounted GoPro. The protagonist, who is initially held captive at the film’s commencement by a group of men in suits, makes his escape from an office building in which he fist fights and shoots his way out in an attempt to gain control over a mysterious device that allows for teleportation. As he is being pursued, while simultaneously pursuing a henchman carrying the teleportation device, the actor engages in shootouts while driving at high speeds, acrobatically leaps across the tops of buildings, and even plummets through several stories in a building under construction (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Ilya Naishuller, Bad Motherfucker, video shot with GoPro, 2013, .
Naishuller’s novel use of the GoPro produces absorption-images in which bodily sensations emerge through a process of experiencing another’s organic motion transduced into a digital photographic recording. As Richard Rushston has noted, from a Deleuzian perspective, the spectator when watching a film, experiences a sensation of bodily absorption where subjectivity dissolves and they engage in an “objective spectatorship”, moving beyond a notion of a passive viewer and toward “the possibility of becoming other than what one is, of being someone (or something) else” (50-51). When a viewer enters into an assemblage with the camera-body that produces intensities through the absorption-images of Naishuller’s video, affective experience is relayed through the process of watching the video, resulting in a partial dissolving of the self and a felt surplus of bodily sensation. When the film’s protagonist scales up the side of a building on a rope while firing at his enemies below, the felt affective response is one of being transposed into the bodily experiences that are generated from the camera’s consciousness and the acrobatics of its user, a perceptual burst or shock of the sensation of accelerating upward within actionable space. When the camera-body jumps from a loading dock onto a wounded enemy’s chest causing blood to spurt from his mouth, the viewer senses the absorption-image in terms of an addition to conscious perception, through what Brian Massumi has referred to as microperceptions, or a bodily registering of something felt before conscious rationalization occurs (4-5). This pre-cognitive, “in-bracing” as Massumi calls it, is experienced before any notion of a subjective spectatorship becomes apparent. The bodily sensation of being another is felt as a shock that must be cognized before the next interruption occurs, and as I will now turn to, this series of microperceptual shocks that constitute the affective nature of the absorption-image, have been channeled into new forms of subjectivity through modulatory forms of power.
As a media company, GoPro’s success in constructing new subjects through modulation has largely been a result of their aggressive yet flexible marketing in recent years. As I have mentioned, the GoPro brand has moved beyond extreme sport consumers to capitalize on new markets through the exchange of affective experience. This commoditizing of affect through the absorption-image organizes consumers into what Deleuze has referred to as dividuals, or constantly reshaping subjects that are generated from the variability of one form of modulation to the next (Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” 5-6). As Deleuze notes, corporations within in the control society take on the properties of “a spirit, a gas,” through forms of modulation that organizes new subjectivities (4). Media corporations of the 21st century are not concerned with the character of an individual who within Foucault’s disciplinary societies is formed through institutions of power that observe and assesses a subject in conjunction with a specific societal norm or standard. Within the control society, modulatory power only seeks to surveil, store, and influence extraneous patterns that consumers generate within a media network. When a collection of persons produces patterns of code through online interactions, the corporation quickly adapts its marketing tactics so as to align with specific categories that will potentially appeal to a consumer subject. Contemporary networked society enhances the very possibilities for the dividual to become segmented. As Gerald Raunig argues, the status of the dividual as an entity that is continually divisible, or what he refers to as dividuum, is at the crux of capitalist production, particularly as it pertains to computational networks in the digital age. To Raunig, networks typify dividualization; the processes through which data points that stand in for an individual are continually reconstituted into variable groups of data. Within digital networks, the dividual is always primed for new modes of interacting with data sets; given data points that represent an individual’s patterns are always ready to be combined and rearticulated into other groupings of dividuals that share certain characteristics with it. Raunig states that when ”…individuality mobilizes dissimilarity to emphasize the respective being-different, demarcation from everything else, dividual singularity is always one among others, dividuum has one component or multiple components, which constitute it as divisible and concatenate it with other parts that are similar in their components…” (67). The divisibility of beings that form possible aggregates of data in a network is witnessed in the work of algorithms that quantify and store an individual’s online activities. Raunig indicates that when an individual performs a Google search, buys items using Amazon Prime, likes posts on Facebook, or is given tailored recommendations for films on Netflix, they engage in a type of self-division through “machinic recommendation” (125-126). The individual user’s activities—both the request for and collection of data—is transposed into potential data sets through which consumer identity is continually de- and re-subjectified.
In response to this process of a self-dividing entity within computer networks, David Savat points out that while Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power forces an individual to prescribe to a “stable shape” maintained through enclosed institutions that examine and gauge the character of an individual against a particular standard, modulation functions by mechanisms of prediction and anticipation of the actions of a collective (Savat, “Deleuze’s Objectile: From Discipline to Modulation” 52). An individual is no longer required to adjust their behavior to match a set of criteria within institutional frameworks, but instead the external environment adapts to and organizes the dividual through modulatory mechanisms that observe and record data produced through a consumer’s interaction with digital technologies. In the control society, and particularly with the case of GoPro’s marketing tactics, modulatory power places the corporation one step ahead of the consumer through their ability to anticipate projected desires and program for them beforehand, which are often presented as something as subtle as making a choice regarding which GoPro products and accessories to purchase (52).
With the GoPro brand, modulation shapes the dividual into the subject of amateur-turned-professional through the cinematography and mobility of the camera. It is not just the camera that GoPro sells, it is a desirable experience of capturing and viewing the absorption-image; to be placed within the transduced experience of the other, or to image and produce professional-looking content for others to view. In an article recently featured in the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten suggests with the rise of GoPro culture, the user of the camera “reveals himself to be something else: a filmmaker, a brand, a vessel for the creation of content” through “its sublimated conveyance of self, its sneaky tolerable narcissism…” The GoPro filmmaker demonstrates the “Here I am (or “was”) ethos; the “worldie” as Paumgarten puts it, as opposed to a selfie (Paumgarten). Here, modulatory power that works toward predicting various manifestations of the dividual, places the GoPro user as both a producer of content who desires to record, edit, and share their “worldie” image through social media and video sharing sites, but also delineates the consumer that desires the sensations that emerge from the GoPro footage of others, the circulation of affect throughout our networked digital culture that assemble with viewing audiences and diverse screening technologies. Thus the dividual as amateur-turned-professional is situated within a larger technological and social assemblage of participatory culture in which GoPro footage and the affect it generates function as a type of performative exhibition-image, one that places the user on display for audiences to observe. Through modulatory mechanisms of observation, and particularly the observation of external consumer patterns, GoPro is able to commoditize these user-generated exhibition images within the flows of participatory culture in networked society, erasing distinctions between what is amateur content and what is professionally-produced film.
As I have mentioned, the status of GoPro video as an exhibition image defines the subject by both its role as audience and producer, hence GoPro’s marketing slogan to “be a hero” implies a consumer desire to capture experiences for others to be absorbed into, but also a desire as viewer to experience the felt sensation of being another through the “here I am” footage that users generate. In the creation of new consumer subjects, it is important to understand how the GoPro brand is able to channel desire, as a dynamic of affect, into the formation of new consumer subjects. Desire functions within the assemblage of GoPro cinematography captured by the user and subsequent viewer of the user’s experiences to augment and construct social formations and produce intensities, generating affect within new events in which the GoPro is used. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue against desire as a lack of something to be obtained as it has been traditionally understood within the psychoanalytic frameworks of Freud and Lacan, instead positioning desire as a productive force within society. Deleuze and Guattari state that desire functions as a “desiring machine” whose circuits plug into the desiring object that is positioned as another desiring machine. The relays between these machines create, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, desiring-production that constructs reality and in doing so, social formations (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1-16). Deleuze and Guattari see desiring-production as a universal entity; something that underlies social and psychological processes, circulating throughout them as a non-subjective force that can, however, organize new forms of subjectivity through its flows (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1-16). With the GoPro brand, desiring-production functions as a means to fabricate new forms of subjectivity that are captured and made apparent through the manipulation of affective experience within modulatory transitions. The human body itself operates as a type of desiring-machine with numerous possibilities depending upon how it integrates into other assemblages in the world and diverts particular flows of desire. Participating in a marathon, the body becomes a running-machine; in a process of deep sleep, the brain, a machine in itself generates dreams, constituting the body as a dreaming-machine. When the body as a desiring-machine plugs into the GoPro, a recording-machine, it produces the camera-body as a desiring-machine through which consumer desires express a constructive synthesis among things. With the camera-body, the affective experience of GoPro cinematography functions as a desiring machine in which the GoPro user and viewer plug into other desiring machines—assemblages, linkages, syntheses among bodies within the social field—diverting flows of desire into the formation of new consumer subjects. The camera-body that wears a GoPro while kayaking along an underground river within a cavern channels desire into the production of a new machinic formation of kayak and camera-body. When such footage is shared, the machinic assemblage of camera-body and kayak plugs into and diverts affect and desire toward other desiring-machines within a network; combinations of bodies, video-sharing platforms, and screens through which GoPro footage is viewed.
The dividual as amateur-turned-professional filmmaker is articulated through desiring-production in which flows of desire are channeled toward the capture and production of life’s footage made extraordinary through the mobility and cinematography of the camera in both POV shots as well as angles that employ the use of stands, mounts, etc. For example, Mark Peters and several fellow fishermen were attempting to catch tuna off the coast of Santa Cruz, California when they lowered a GoPro into the water and happened to capture a group of Pacific white-sided dolphins “dancing” in synchronization below the surface. Upon witnessing Peter’s dolphin video which looks as if it has been produced with considerably more expensive film cameras, GoPro transformed the content into a commercial for their brand that is featured on their YouTube channel (Cooper). In a similar occurrence between animal body and camera, David De Vleeschauwer and Debbie Pappyn were able to create remarkable footage by attaching a GoPro to a golden eagle as it took flight over the Atali mountain range in Mongolia. While in a seemingly more mundane context, a GoPro user video that is showcased on the company’s YouTube channel features “Baby Antoine” from Lorient, France pushing his toy stroller around his house filmed from multiple angles. Upon witnessing this produced content, GoPro transformed these user experiences into online commercials for their camera, through a team that specifically seeks out extraordinary amateur videos that can be translated to television or online content for marketing purposes. GoPro’s Vice President of Marketing, Paul Crandall recently addressed the company’s push toward scouting out and commoditizing user content by stating that under his watch, a company team sifts through the internet to look for GoPro content, “…constantly looking for nuggets, little gold chunks from our users” (quoted in Bergen). Flows of desire to capture life’s footage via the GoPro and share such “Here I am (or was) ” moments are channeled into the formation of the consumer as pro-filmmaker through modulation as a type of flexible marketing. As Woodman recently stated in an interview with Anderson Cooper regarding this marketing strategy:
It’s a marketer’s dream and it’s all based off of authenticity, right. It’s our customers doing interesting things around the world. And they’re so stoked that they’re able to finally self-document these things that they like to do and share it with people. They’re so stoked at how good they look in the video that when they share the video they often give us credit: My GoPro ski trip, my GoPro day at the park with my kids (quoted in Cooper).
Here, modulation works in terms of incentives for users. If user content is extraordinary, and GoPro marketing executives deem it worthy footage that demonstrates what can be done with their product, then it becomes an advertisement for the GoPro brand. Spectators plug into the content produced by other users and divert flows of desire into the formation of new consumers. They become the dividual as filmmaker in that content is widely distributed via online platforms. Subjects within our networked society, through the cinematographic abilities of the camera, capture and produce extraordinary footage, even if that footage is of ordinary subject matter as the case with baby Antoine’ s stroll throughout the house.
In response to user content that has moved beyond uses of the camera for extreme sports, GoPro has sought to continually redesign their camera as a means to flexibly cater to observable trends through YouTube and other video sharing sites. For instance, the release of the GoPro Hero3 offered users a lighter form factor for increased mobility along with a wide-angle 1440p 48fps lens in response to consumers who were displeased with the fish-eye effects of previous models (Teal). With the introduction of the Hero4, the company added a touch screen that can be connected to the camera in anticipation of a broader demographic that would value an intuitive design allowing for one to be able to see what they are shooting. Likewise, the company has introduced editing software such as CineForm and GoPro Studio that allows users to further enhance footage of a child’s first birthday party or an annual ski trip. It is the creation of absorption-images and other movement-images that through intuitive editing processes and technical improvements present a renewable affective experience. The distribution of ordinary-turned-extraordinary user-content remarkets itself back to the dividual as filmmaker.
Perhaps the most striking use of modulatory control is GoPro’s ability to construct as well as anticipate new subjects through the observation and surveillance of specific database patterns. David Savat proposes that a significant component of modulation within the control society is an ability to pre-emptively[3] observe and recognize emergent patterns of code from consumer activity. Thus, within the control society, observation no longer focuses on the individual body and its actions, but rather looks at patterns that a body creates through activities within cyberspace on social media platforms, video sharing sites, online shopping platforms, streaming media sites, and other potential databases that collect, store, and analyze consumer behavior (Savat, Uncoding the Digital 28-29). These modes of observation within the control society are expressed through the surveillance of patterns and activities generated externally by a person as opposed to Foucault’s disciplinary forms of observation that asses the character of an individual in comparison to an established standard of measurement. Within the control society, modulation often works through what William Bogard has referred to as simulation, or in the case of vast media networks of the 21st century, the way in which generated patterns observed through a user’s online activity function as “surveillance in advance of surveillance, a technology of “observation before the fact””(27-29). As Bogard states, simulation acts as a mode of observation that caters to and anticipates the formation of consumer subjectivity through database technologies that profile certain populations, software and statistical modeling that project risk analysis, as well as technology that allows or disallows access based on visual, haptic, and aural recognition of a person (27-29). Hence, through metrics and algorithms that provide precise classification and ordering of online populations, media corporations can analyze and adapt to projected consumer desires before the consumer even realizes they need or desire a commodity such as the GoPro and its related accessories. In Bogard’s terms, simulation within societies of control produces an image of the real that for consumer populations functions like a “self-fulfilling prophecy”, articulating a consumer’s need before they are even aware that a particular commodity is in fact, needed (27).
It is important to think of the GoPro as a camera defined by its cinematic quality and mobility that was able to successfully merge into the larger assemblage of broadband technologies, social-media, and video sharing platforms that have experienced an exponential increase in recent years. As a heterogeneous component within a larger, technological assemblage, the distribution, sharing, and virality of GoPro videos are integral to the technology itself within the 21st century mediasphere in which the “here I am” or “look at me” mindset is ubiquitous.[4] Videos that become viral sensations through GoPro’s YouTube channel are those that produce affects in which the viewer experiences new perceptions and sensations through the singularities of what a camera-body can do or what the GoPro can image. In thinking about Savat’s concept of modulation as something that predicts consumer patterns, it is important to note that the GoPro brand has recently sought to observe what users are doing with their product through a metric known as BARE (brand audience rate of engagement) that tracks the activity of its audience on the GoPro Facebook page. The BARE metric examines any form of user interaction, whether posting, liking, commenting, etc., on the GoPro page (Foster). The company also observes consumer activities by posting incentives on its Facebook page with features such as “Video of the Day” and “Photo of the Day” that showcases user content demonstrating novel uses of the camera and regular contests in which projected categories of populations can submit video footage in exchange for winnings.
Likewise, if we consider YouTube as a database that stores and archives a collection of video, then the featured GoPro YouTube channel also points to ways in which the company has sought to observe consumer behavior through a database. The company’s online scouting of user-generated content as a means to further reshape the dividual is evident through the categorization of the video content. The main GoPro channel subdivides user content into areas such as those that deal strictly with “animals”, “human flight”, “underwater”, and even “music” in which a majority of the user content includes talented musicians playing their instruments with the camera strapped to their body so as to provide a new perspective on their process of music making. Of course, the channel features user-generated staff picks that feature, for instance, “life’s precious moments” such as a video of Cole and Holden Osborne with their dog Ozzy spinning around on a tire swing in slow motion (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Screenshot of Cole and Holden Osborne on a Tire Swing, video shot with GoPro, 2014, .
In another instance of observation of consumer patterns, the company’s website suggests specific bundles that can be purchased based on whether consumers enjoy hunting and fishing, rock climbing, or are in the military. Modulatory modes of observation that are expressed through the tracking and categorizing of the patterns of code a user generates allows for the gaseous corporation to flexibly anticipate and market to new consumers by programming specific uses, identities, and lifestyles ahead of time that correspond to the collection and analysis of externally-generated patterns of behavior. By categorizing these usages into subdivisions of the dividual via playlists, and providing suggestions for bundles that one can purchase to fit their lifestyle, the company is successfully anticipating and responding to a broadening of their customer base through flexible forms of marketing that suggest to the dividual new consumer identities they might remold themselves into through such modulatory transitions. If the dividual shapeshifted from one who used the camera in extreme sports scenarios to the amateur who turns any footage whatsoever into a professional film, now the dividual continues to fluidly manifest itself in new consumer subjects: the musician-cum-filmmaker who captures a sense of presentness through the absorption-image while on tour; the bass fisherman who films his best catches of the day; or the military personnel who uses his Hero4 in conjunction with the separately sold Night Vision Goggles (NVG) headmount so as to show a perspective of a soldier’s nightly excursions in hostile territory.
With the recent introduction of a Wifi BacPac that can be plugged into the GoPro camera, the company has further anticipated emergent trends in consumer activity by analyzing the metrics of social media platforms and user-content on video sharing sites, which indicate an increased desire to share captured footage of anything-whatsoever. With the Wifi BacPac, the consumer can capture video footage and then share it immediately via email and Facebook or upload it directly to the company’s YouTube channel using the GoPro app. GoPro has also enabled real-time streaming of footage via their app in conjunction with the Livestream video platform. As Woodman has recently commented on regarding the use of live streaming by a father to upload and share a child’s first moments, “If we make this easy enough, why wouldn’t you use it to capture your precious moments?..It’s not just about you being rad. It’s about your family being rad, and about you being a rad dad”(quoted in Burrows). Savat further mentions that modulation often adjusts the environment so as to accommodate behavioral trends, and particularly in ways that implicate the body as becoming increasingly integrated with digital interfaces (Savat, Uncoding the Digital 53).
With GoPro’s introduction of WiFi and live streaming capabilities, the consumer body is beginning to mesh with its surrounding digital environment through modulation. The dividual continues to shapeshift into the consumer who sees fit to instantly film and share life’s precious moments. The dividual who re-forms through a modulatory transition that allows for the quick and easy sharing of their daily life, also manifests as a hero; as “rad,” for having the camera ready in hand to stream such images live and possessing the filmmaker’s editorial eye in knowing when to film footage worthy of sharing. This manner of a reverse panopticon that initially took shape with smartphone technology, allowing for the user to film nearly everything and anything, has also become apparent through the activity of the most recent manifestation of the GoPro consumer. This inverted panopticism implies increased viewing activity within the surveillance state in which consumers watch, for instance, Baby Antoine move about with his stroller.
Within our networked, participatory culture that allows the exhibition image of GoPro to circulate, everyone is able to watch everyone else. The panoptic observation that defined disciplinary modes of power reverses back in upon itself. As one might predict, this sense of reverse-panoptic surveillance will only become further heightened through the current usage of GoPro technology in military applications in which they are attached to the head of drones that surveil enemy territory or to surveil domestic populations. At the same time, the proliferation of GoPro technology might indicate that these same military drones can be watched by enemy or consumer drones that also possess the same GoPro camera. With a recent call for increased police surveillance via body cameras in response to racial turmoil within recent years, we might imagine the GoPro brand catering to the surveillance needs of police departments while GoPro technology could also potentially empower citizens in demonstrations of social justice.
As much as the GoPro brand has employed modulatory control as a means to construct new consumer subjects, it is my contention that the technology itself, through its quality cinematography and mobility, can liberate the shapeshifting dividual and provide a point of resistance from reterritorialization by capitalist regimes through the creation of unqualified intensities via the camera. To return once more to Gil’s notion of a dancing body, he suggests that it resembles what Deleuze and Guattari have called a body without organs (BwO), or what they describe as an assemblage comprised of its heterogeneous components, which has been hollowed of its organizing, signifying foundation so as to produce a smooth space for intensities, movements, and lines of flight to flow through.[5] The BwO allows for new modes of becoming through its destratification, yet at the same time, it is never entirely free from the organizing strata within society. Gil indicates that the dancing body forms a type of BwO in that gesture “empties the body of its organs, destructuring the organism, liberating the affects and directing movement toward the periphery of the body, toward the skin” (103). The camera-body as it enters into specific assemblages possesses the ability to construct a BwO through the body’s intensive qualities that project outward through the GoPro’s cinematographic consciousness, creating new modes of becoming through these intensities.
How does one construct a BwO that is able to resist capture by capital and use the GoPro to generate a liberatory, enunciative act? How do we know what constitutes a liberatory media event in which a smooth space is created opposed to repetitions and cycles of commodified subjectivation? Perhaps breaking away from the modulation enacted by capitalistic regimes through the creation of a BwO would mean to use the camera-body to capture footage of an event that was not considered “life’s precious moments”; a way to use the absorption-image so as to place other viewers within the presentness of a politically or racially charged situation—riots, uprisings, even the capture of daily life in the slums of the third world. We might even project a scenario in which the camera-body “guerrilla” sky dives or base jumps into an area that is classified, where access to video capture is entirely forbidden by the organizing principles of the State apparatus.
In 2012, “bandit jumper” Andrew Rossig with two other accomplices illegally jumped from the top of a tower in Co-op City in the Bronx using the cover of night. Rossig managed to film his descent from the building using a GoPro. The group of base jumpers were witnessed by a passerby and police were soon able to identify them based on security footage. Rossig and company turned themselves in whilst also sharing with the world their stunning descent through the darkness of the city skyline. Within a week, they had several million views of their video and instead of turning such a viral event into a commercial, the GoPro company decided not to associate themselves with the illegality of the act (Paumgarten). Maurizio Lazzarato refers to this manner of rupture within organizing structures as enunciation through parrhesia, a term he borrows from Michel Foucault in which a situation interjects and disrupts the significations that capitalism assigns to subjectivities through the self-creation of speech and signs that are no longer codified by dominant structures (173-174). As Lazzarato suggests, the parrhesiatic act functions as that which is spontaneous and through its rupturing, opens up flows of possibilities that are unspecified and unknown (Lazzarato 2014, 173-174). Clearly, this manner of potential for the GoPro in destructuring capitalistic regimes and creating anti-consumerist communities has clearly not been realized. Yet, destabilizing such structures through spontaneous, parrhesiatic uses of the absorption-image might require a few more base jumpers to leap from another tower in which access is restricted, or wear a chest-mounted (and perhaps concealed) GoPro during a racial demonstration, in order to recognize the extent of such liberatory media practices.
Works Cited
Bogard, William. The simulation of surveillance: hypercontrol in telematic societies. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 1996. Print.
Burrows, Peter. “GoPro Widens the View of its Customer Base.” Businessweek. October 19, 2012. Web.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Print.
—. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October no. 59 (1992): 3-7. Print.
—. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Print.
—. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Print.
—. What is Philosophy?. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Bell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print.
Foster, Tom. “How GoPro Measures Social Engagement.” Inc. 2012. Web.
Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Print.
Galloway, Alexander. “Origins of the First-Person Shooter.” Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 39-69. Print.
Gil, Jose. “Paradoxical Body.” Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory and the Global, Ed. Andre Lepecki and Jenn Joy. London: Seagull Books, 2008. 85-106. Print.
Kluitenberg, Eric. Legacies of tactical media: The tactics of occupation: from Tompkins Square to Tahrir. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011. Print.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014. Print.
Massumi, Brian. “Of Microperception and Micropolitics.” Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. No. 3. (2009): 1-20. Print.
—. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Print.
Paumgarten, Nick. “We are a Camera: Experience and Memory in the age of GoPro.” The New Yorker. September 22, 2014. Web.
Raunig, Gerald. Dividuum: machinic capitalism and molecular revolution. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016. Print.
Rushton, Richard. “Deleuzian Spectatorship.” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009):45-53. Print.
Savat, David. “Deleuze’s Objectile: From Discipline to Modulation.” Deleuze and New
Technology, Eds. Mark Poster and David Savat. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 45-63. Print.
Savat, David. Uncoding the Digital: Technology, Subjectivity and Action in the Control Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.
Steven Shaviro, Steven. Post Cinematic Affect. Winchester, UK Washington US: 0-Books, 2010. Print.
Shaviro, Steven. “What is the post-cinematic?.” The Pinocchio Theory (blog). August 11, 2011 (9:48 pm), http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=992.
Teal, Brian. “GoPro Hero3 Interview: Not Just for BMX Videos Anymore.” Videomaker. 2012. Web.
Woodman, Nick. By Anderson Cooper, “GoPro’s Video Revolution.” 60 Minutes, CBS News. 2013. Web.
Endnotes
[1] For a succinct overview of screen theory see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 no. 3 Autumn (1975): 6-18., Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” Screen 17 no.3 Autumn (1976): 68-112., as well as Christian Metz, “Some Points on the Semiotics of Cinema,” Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: O.U.P., 1999) 68-75.
[2] For the entirety of Shaviro’s treatment on Bigelow’s Strange Days, see Steven Shaviro, “Regimes of Vision: Kathryn Bigelow, Strange Days,” Polygraph 13(2001).
[3] Savat borrows the term “pre-emptive” from Brian Massumi. See Brian Massumi, “National Enterprise Emergency: Steps toward an Ecology of Powers.” Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 6 (2009).
[4] For an understanding of how this particular “mindset” relates to mobile technologies and online networks, see Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, Networked: The New Social Operating System (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 101-108.
[5] For at least an introductory treatment of Deleuze and Guattari’s complex notion of a body without organs, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4, 150-152, 506-507.
BIO:
Eddie Lohmeyer is a PhD student and media artist in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at North Carolina State University. His work explores the aesthetic and technical development of digital media environments, with particular interests in video games and glitch.