Bent Fausing

SOULFUL TECHNOLOGY
Everyday Aesthetics in New Media

“The stammering (of the motor

or of the subject)
is, in short, a fear: I am afraid
the motor is going to stop.”1

The soul in the digital machinery

In 2008, Samsung introduced a mobile phone called "Soul" made with a human touch and
including itself a “magic touch”. Through the analysis of a Nokia mobile phone TV-commercials
I want to examine the function and form of digital technology in everyday images.
The mobile phone and its digital camera and other devices are depicted by everyday
aesthetics as capable of producing a unique human presence and interaction. The medium, the
technology is a necessary helper of this very special and lost humanity. Without the
technology, no special humanity, no soul - such is the prophecy. This personification or
anthropomorphism is important for the branding of new technology. Technology is seen as
creating a techno-transcendence towards a more qualified humanity which is in contact with
fundamental human values like intuition, vision, and sensing; all the qualities that technology,
industrialization, and rationalization, - in short modernity – have taken away from human
existence. What old technology has removed now comes back through new technology
promoting a better humanity.
The present article investigates how digital technology and affects are presented and
combined, with examples from everyday imagery, e.g. TV commercials and internet
commercials for mobile phones from Nokia, or handheld computers, as Sony-Ericsson prefers
to call them. Digital technology points towards a forgotten pre-human and not only post-
human condition.

The media as a promoter of a special kind of humanity

The sight is connected to physical and mental circumstances rather than being an isolated
sense in itself. The body is the basis and the frame from which we perceive things. Images
exist in and via the perceiving body’s reactions. It is the affective body which creates the final
image. Affect is inextricably bound up with imagery. The unframed, formless, and bodily empty
digital data are made somatic and sensual through meeting and decoding. The technology is a
mediator for the creation of the experience.

1
These thoughts do not solely exist in new theories of experience and digital aesthetics. In a
later section I will discuss them in more detail in connection with the term extended image that
relates to the sensoric or perceptual images which are created constantly by all the senses of
2
the body. In addition, I will consider the notion of synaesthesia. The concept of technology as
a mediator and creator is also part of modern marketing and TV commercials for mobile
phones from e.g. Nokia whose slogan is the well-known “Nokia Connecting People.” In this
article, I will take a closer look at the status which the body, the affect, and modern
technologies are given in two TV commercials for one of the most successful contemporary
media – the mobile phone.
‘To burn through the TV screen’ is an expression we often use in Danish and other
languages about a person or an incident with such a strong presence/effect on us that we
forget the screen, the medium. Instead, we feel that we are part of the event or face to face
with the person. An exceptional human relation and interaction are created despite the screen
because of the special human qualities of the person or of the televised incident. Some
technologies are especially good at eliminating the screen; it is via technology that the
unexpected and unforeseen insights of intuition are established. ‘Screen [skærm in Danish]’
etymologically comes from a word that means skin. Taking this line of thought further, one
might say that some exceptional human qualities are capable of ‘breaking through’ and making
the skin alive, as if interacting directly.

Pre-humanity and post-humanity

In the TV commercials, signs of a pre-humanity are appearing. The pre-humanity is in its
embryonic stage and needs the transcendent possibilities of technology to be brought to life.
Instead of a post-humanity, a pre-humanity is forming, i.e. an original and genuine humanity,
which has been made available through new digital technology.
Post-humanity is here seen in the light of a pre-humanity which also has traces into the
future. Pre-humanity contains a techno-transcendence which is also included in the term
dream images invented by the cultural analyst Walter Benjamin. We seem to be returning to
an undisturbed humanity which was taken away from us with industrialization and modernity.
This undisturbed humanity centers around terms like sensing – understood as intense
perception and experience of synaesthesia, intuition - understood as anticipation via

2
Fausing 1999:13ff, Damasio 2004:318f, Hansen 2004:13.
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unexpected pre-conscious and pre-verbal insight, and dream – understood as the possibility of
imagining something different.
The post-human theory tries broadly to determine humanity after the Renaissance and
the following secularization and the birth of technology during the first, mechanical and, not
least, the second, digital industrialization. What is specifically human after the emergence of
these digital technologies? The theoretical field is very broad and the terms post-human and
post-humanism are used to signify widely differing concepts. In a generally positive critique of
N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman (1999), the sociologist Andrew Pickering
3
notes how Hayles “overheats theoretically”. This statement might be applied to all publications
on the post-human since the level of the theoretical discussion has been high, its range wide
and its intellectual suppleness frequently pronounced. At the same time, however, this
approach has resulted in an analytical and aesthetic impoverishment of the publications. The
analytical material is generally limited to short exemplifications, descriptive summaries or
theoretical litmus tests where the analyses are dipped in theory in order to prove the latest
mentioned aesthetic correctness. The analytical-aesthetic field has its own power over,
uncontrollable objections to and discussion with theory. Thus, on the one hand we have a
versatile field with many different tracks among which Hayles’s techno-optimism and Hansen’s
search into neurobiology to find tentative answers regarding the specifically human have
interested me. On the other hand, neither these nor any other tracks have been covered in
depth analytically and consequently, they are not of great importance for this article.
Therefore, and because, in general, I believe that theory has to be measured against
practice, i.e. analysis, I will examine a concrete example from everyday aesthetics: How are
people and technology regarded in TV commercials for mobile phones? I will show that post-
humanity takes the form of the pre-humanity mentioned above; it is a search backwards to
apparently genuine human values and skills which technology can contribute to foster.
By taking an example from everyday aesthetics, I dissociate myself from the post-human
theory with its exemplifications and analyses (if such methods are even used) that focus
almost exclusively on established Art. I believe it is important to examine the ideas and
conceptions that are added to the contemporary technologies in everyday aesthetics because it
is via the latter that the majority of imaginations take form. Hence the focus on everyday
aesthetics and the detachment from the post-human theory although this theory has also
provided inspiration.
3
Pickering 2000:392. There are exceptions to this rule: Hayles’s (1999) literary analysis, Weiss’s (1999) short mention
of the memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir, Hansen’s (2004) suggestive analysis of video installations.
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Myth and modernity
We take part in TV commercials in a more and more subtle way. We interact or - using a
relevant expression from this commercial - we connect with TV commercials and vice-versa.
How does that happen? Are modernity and its technologies a rationalization or is it an opening
towards dreams, intuitions, and visions which enter into the interactions? The first-mentioned
approach has the sociologist Max Weber among its proponents; the semiologist Roland
Barthes, too, discusses it in his early works where he emphasizes that today’s mythologies are
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social creations. According to Barthes, the mythologies are cultural imprints, which have
nothing to do with the real mythology and metaphysics. The world has been de-mythologized.
The second approach represents the opposite viewpoint, expressed by Walter Benjamin
who stated that modernity is not a de-mythologization and rationalization. On the contrary, the
commodities and their images make it possible to revive the mythical and religious aspects of
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life. They are images of dreams of longings and sensations which have not yet been fulfilled.
Thus, we are still tied to something pre-modern and something futuristic.
The following analysis supports the latter approach as a sign in TV commercials today. I
want to discuss five issues in particular: First, the bodily affect, which is related to the broader
term image. Second, the post-industrial longing for the non-industrialized; the pre-human in
the post-human one might say. Third, the fact that TV commercials have become self-
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referential. TV commercials have created a closed universe of self-oscillation which only
communicates from one designer to the other. In my view, this self-referential world is not
directed towards a close internal circle, but has an outward direction being a part of this
communication interaction: see our self-reference, break our codes, solve the riddle, take part
in the mythology, and enter the images of dreams. Self-reference and repetitions are contained
in the stuff that new and old myths are made of. Fourth, the aesthetic motifs of the
commercial: communication, sensing, transportation, transformation, telephone lines,
filaments, the passage of birds, apples on strings, empty places and the interruption of music

4
Barthes 1996.
5
Benjamin 1989. Later similar thoughts can be found in the works of the philosopher Charles Taylor (Taylor
1991:61ff), but without the aesthetic and perceptual complexity which Benjamin’s fragment contains. The
anthropologist Bruno Latour (Latour 2006: chapter 5), too, shares this opinion in his own way, as he emphasizes that
we will never be modern. We have never been able to distinguish between nature and culture, faith and knowledge,
thing and human being. We did not do that in the pre-sciences like alchemy, astrology, and phrenology either. Also,
with gene technology, ozonosphere, test-tube babies, etc., it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between
nature and culture Latour takes a more dystopian view of the dream images of modernity.
6
Christensen 2001: 11ff.
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and images. These motifs are connected with interaction, the restoration of dreams in
modernity, and our participation in the self-reference. All this points towards a fifth point of
view: loss and the fear of loss. This angle gives the TV commercial a seriousness which can be
seen as an objection to the irony of post-modernism.

From SMS to MMS

The TV commercial for Nokia 7250, a mobile phone with a digital camera, moves between
macroscopy (we get a whole world in 30 seconds) and microscopy (we get a lot of close-ups of
faces, eyes, fingers, branches, apples, and wheel tracks).
A close-up of the face of a woman starts the commercial. Then we see a close-up of a
single eye which blinks and ‘takes a picture’ like a camera. Next, a close-up of two eyes. The
eyes overlook what in the following pictures turn out to be an empty parking lot where a lonely
woman is standing with her back towards the observer overlooking the parking spaces.
This lonely woman is then caught in the display of a Nokia 7250. She has been
photographed, ‘taken’. Has she been ‘taken’ by the eyes or the mobile phone with the digital
camera? This strikes another important theme: the sliding between thing and human being,
the anthropomorphication or the personification of Nokia 7250. In several cases, the images in
the commercial ‘blink’ rapidly, like we do with our eyelids when we are scared or taken by
surprise or when we wish to clear our eyes to be able to see better.
Eye, mobile phone, camera, and TV-screen are all united. The technology is a natural
expansion of the human being, not an artificial prosthesis as we know it from the first
industrial, mechanical revolution. In the second industrial, digital revolution the technology is
an organic and mental extension which is invisible or hardly visible because of the
amalgamation in the design. The thing is human and expands the human register by giving
back the human being the hidden – i.e. intuitive – insight which was taken away by modernity.
It is difficult to see where the human being ends and the technology begins.
It is a classic TV commercial composition with a stream of sensing containing images,
sounds, and music without text or speech before the last sequence when a voice-over says:
“From eye to eye. The new Nokia 7250. With built–in camera”. At the very end the logo is
presented. The music is a connecting link throughout the commercial and is only interrupted
by the sound of the camera – or the eye – that clicks and takes a picture. These clicks are a
distinct rhythm in the pictorial and musical sequence. At one point, there is a sudden break in
the pictures and the music, as if a transmission has been abruptly stopped.

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 The colors are conspicuous in the way they change and consequently, so are their
rhythms. There is also rhythm in the many horizontal lines, which are broken by marked
vertical lines taking form from the mobile phone, the woman in the parking lot, and the pylons.
There are rapid shifts from warm, golden colors to cool, bluish colors. The worship of the
solitary figure in the deserted human landscape and the melancholic ambiance, which the blue
color universe is an essential part of, are atypical of TV commercials but becoming more and
more common. The color gives associations of the blue hour, l’heure bleue, when day turns
into night and colors and moods are fading. The mood is wistful and erotic. These bluish
tableaux have golden close-ups of earth, faces, and eyes. It is more a feeling than a narrative
which is shown. Rows of images are presented rapidly after each other as engaging still-
images, snap-shots without any immediate mutual relationship. The commercial takes the
shape of kaleidoscopes of dreams, or fragments of memories, or swarms of associations, or
abrupt intuitive insights which run with a marked breath as rhythm.
In the age of mechanical reproduction, the uniformity of the assembly line was the ideal
for production. This ideal has been succeeded by the bio-cybernetic reproduction and the
unpredictable possibilities of cloning combining technology and biology. During the first era,
the copy was a loss of authenticity, of aura (Benjamin); during the second, the copy is
considered as good as and often better than the original. One has only to think of the pictures
of an image program on the computer.
An essential question in the age of digital image combinations, cloning, artificial
intelligence, plastic surgery, and interactive media, is this: What is the genuinely human at
present? Is it the affects, the sensations which are the mark of the particularly human? Even
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rather intelligent machines, realistic images, and robots cannot sense or be in affect.
The mobile phone is presented as a digital multi medium and not least as a digital camera
8
with a screen (display) which promotes snap-shots and photo-chats. As it has frequently been
pointed out, photography has been led into the digital age in a continuation of rather than a
9
break with tradition. The force of this kind of multimedia is that it can register the affect and
the disconnections and be part of the breaks connected with it as well as part of the solution.

From eye to I, from human being to human being – via digital technology

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I emphasize that the human being is able to contain these qualities because it can reflect on the sensing and the
affect. A machine, a plant, or an animal cannot do that.
8
Koskinen 2002:11ff.
9
Lister 1995:1ff.
6
This TV commercial even has a title, From Eye to Eye, referring to the central role and position
of the eye.
The title also strikes the personification or anthropomorphication theme: it is from ‘eye’ to
‘eye’, not from ‘eye’ to ‘mobile phone’. It is the ‘face to face’ which is the issue here and thus,
technology helps the pure, human, bodily being along. The latest craze in high technology is
only a helping hand in the service of better human interaction. We are talking about a subject-
to-subject connection, an I-to-I relation between the human being and the object. One might
just call it an ‘I-to-you’ relation but the intimacy, which is part of the TV commercial’s approach
to the commodity, makes me go a step further and turn the ‘you’ into an ‘I’. It is the
integrating and intimate connection between human being and technology which makes the ‘I’
and the ‘you’ fluid and symbiotic entities amid all the technology and at the same time assured
by technology. The human being is not a subject, and the technology is not an objective thing;
these floating and porous distinctions are to a certain degree beyond any subject-object
dynamics and play with these dialectics. Via technology we communicate as if there were no
technology between us. This is at least the impression we get when watching the commercial
and which many other commercials wish to transmit, among others, Samsung with their latest
model called “Soul” featuring the special “magic touch”.
Shortly – 8 seconds – after the Nokia TV commercial begins there is a close-up of an eye
which blinks and takes a photograph of something red-brown. On closer inspection it looks like
folds or lines in the ground which meet at an acute angle. I interpret this as close-ups of wheel
tracks in reddish soil or sand. With one second intervals the picture changes between the folds,
which are being photographed by the eye, and the eye itself, which blinks and takes a photo of
the tracks. The eye notes the wheel tracks, absorbs them, and takes a photo – and in this
process the tracks are changed by the eye of the beholder. This demonstrates clearly that the
shifts between the streams of close-up images of the eyes that watch and the parts of reality
that the eyes perceive are not supposed to show merely what the eyes register. We, the
viewers, should get the feeling that something else, something bodily-mental is happening at
the moment we absorb the physical phenomenon.
We enter into what we have perceived and we put it together in our own way and make
new images; we make mental montages. The sight and the body are open for something else
and the commercial seems to say: something more human, something intuitive and sensual,
which involves memories, mythology, and vision. This comes later in the commercial - after 16
seconds: a close-up of a face with a hand covering the eyes at first. Then the hands slowly

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glide away to let the eyes face the world. The human being opens its sense of sight – the
internal world meets the external world. This impression is made clear by a stream of
associative and dreamlike images which follow immediately after. There are images and
montages of images which give the viewer the impression of having gained access to the
perceiving person’s internal storeroom of memories, dreams, and visions, and of being able to
put these together with concrete external registrations.
The sense of sight plays a central role in the commercial and this is underlined by the
close-up of an eye at the end. A wide-open eye fills out the screen with a dark iris and black
pupil in focus and with a white dot (of light) in the middle of the pupil. This picture moves into
another picture of the Nokia 7250 with its built-in camera. The human eye merges directly into
the camera lens of the mobile phone. The tight relation between human being and new
technology, the Nokia, is emphasized, and the expression ‘from eye to eye’ is uttered as a
person-to-person relation, not a human being-to-machine relation. The technology has become
human.
Also, the sense of touch – symbolized by the hands – has a substantial function in the TV
commercial. About 18 seconds into the commercial, we see images of four hands gliding over
each other, so close to each other that they seem to float together. The sense of touch and the
sense of sight have a close relationship in the reciprocity they are both based on. The eyes
give expressions and take in impression and we cannot put our hand on another person’s arm
without sensing the arm as well as our own hand. This direct reciprocity is missing in the other
senses. We can use the hand to hide the eyes – which the TV commercial also shows – in order
to protect us from impressions. The sight is also the only sense which we can shut off - by
closing the eyelids or covering the eyes with the hands. This shows that the sense of sight
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takes in many more impulses than any of the other senses. There is a close connection
between sight, face, tactility, hands…and anxiety. New theorists like the historian Martin Jay
11
and the pictorial theorist W.J.T. Mitchell as well as figures and narratives from classical
mythology, for example Oedipus and Medusa from the Greek and Odin from the Nordic
mythology, link the sense of sight and visuality explicitly with anxiety. This concept also fits
into the digital, visual interaction which takes place in this commercial. However, here, with the

10
Fausing 1995:54f. Here you will find a more detailed record of the different signals which various sense receptors
send to the brain per second; the vast majority of these signals are sent by the eyes. See Manfred Zimmermann “The
Nervous System and the Context of Information Theory” in: R.F. Schmidt et al, eds. Human Physiology 2nd Edition,
Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1989:166ff.
11
Jay 1994:11 cf. also the title of the book. Mitchell 2005:342.
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right phone at hand, one is clearly rescued from the threat to the ontological security
(Giddens).
In addition, Nokia’s logo shows two hands which meet, an image that makes one think of
Michelangelo’s fresco painting of the creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. The scene does
not show the physical creation but the transmission of the holy spark – the soul – whereby a
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dramatic confrontation between human being and God arises, phrasing the art historian H.W.
Janson. Nokia assigns near-divine qualities to its mobile phone. Sparkles appear several times
in the commercial, shown either symbolically or directly as electric lines or as drawn light
strokes or doodles very close to the face of the woman, as if they came from inside the brain.

Bridge or network
The dreamlike and associative in the TV commercial make it open to many interpretations;
there is not only one bridge, but many potential crossings. The bridge leading to the right
interpretation is confronted with a network of possibilities which it is up to us to use as we like.
There is not just one single explanation, only at the very end where there must be no
doubt and the logos (from Greek: ‘reason, word’) is introduced: Buy me, remember the brand
which is the door to countless splendors and exciting universes. At last everything falls into
place, the mobile phone rotates backwards into a row of 7250s. Their displays show scenes
from the commercial, but the phone we have been following does not do that; instead, it
shows Nokia’s logo: the two hands that meet. The commercial tells us that the vision of
genuine human interaction has been carried via technology. Again, we have the statement
about the technology that eliminates itself in order to potentiate the real interpersonal
relations, the face-to-face contact and communication.
It is in the TV commercial’s many network-like branches that I see the potential positive
self-oscillation. Instead of following the pure formula and choosing the clear solution, we
oscillate between different possibilities and it is up to us as part of the late modern self-
reflexive project to find our own approach to these. The fact that everything is put into place in
serried ranks and with the right logo at the very end is another matter which has to do with
the fundamental anxieties and the right buy. This is what all TV commercials are about: buy
and you exist. I buy, therefore I am; consumo ergo sum.
One example of this reflexive administration could be the whole form of this commercial
with its large variety of images and impressions that we, the viewers, must put in order and

12
Janson, vol. 2, 2003:209.
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prioritize ourselves. We can go our own way. Another example is a single frame from the
commercial: a close-up shown about 20 seconds into the commercial. It comes right after the
close-up of the hands gliding over each other and thus connotes both laying of hands and
erotic presence. The background for the woman’s face is the same as for the scene with the
hands - is she actually present together with the hands? Are they the hands of the woman?
The woman is lying on her side, her hair falling over her face covering her mouth and cheeks.
Only her eyes and nose are visible. The eyes are wide open and seem to be watching
something outside the screen which apparently brings her into affect – or is she just looking
99into the emptiness, another deserted parking lot, and more naked trees? The eyes express
longing, eroticism, loneliness, and melancholia. Or? The montage combining the previous and
the following pictures with the flicker of sensual hands have the effect of making the final
statement uncertain because many possibilities are available.
The woman’s face suggests many meanings pointing in many directions which all depend
on the eyes of the beholder. These directions and the pictures they create in the external
montage and mentally in our internal mind are being brought together. The face in itself is
diverse and uncertain, in the terms of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and the film
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philosopher Gilles Deleuze. When a face is then also put into an abstract context, the
potential meanings are almost limitless. The close-up of the face gives us associations and
appeals to our empathy.
When perceiving, the receiver is creative, using his or her own fantasies and internal
images, an exchange of individual and inter-subjective fantasies, narratives, and associations
is formed – intermediate images as I have termed them. The many close-ups underline the
open trend which is general in the modern lifestyle commercial. The close-up is transparent
and magic fields where internal and external interact. The close-up is not an end, we cannot
get any closer; it is an approach as well an optical extension, to use a term invented by the
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phenomenologist Henri Bergson, which unites and dissolves the subject and object dynamic.
The close-up is a place that opens itself to associations, sensations, and excessive thoughts.
The close-up is the unsteady point in a structural sequence because of all that it is capable of
absorbing, condensing, and spreading. The close–up is therefore also the opening towards the
entire gamut of human emotions – again the affective.

13
Cf. Fausing 2002a:36ff.
14
Bergson 1991:277ff. Cf. more about Henri Bergson’s term ‘extension’ in Fausing 1999:26ff.
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Take me
The music, which is the soundtrack throughout the TV commercial, is by the African group Zap
Mamma. The number is called “Take me Coco.” Ethnic music and technology are united,
mythology and electronics are sampled. Africa and the Western World, the pre-modern and the
late-modern are put together.
The music completes the symbiosis of human being and technology. The music is a
cappella featuring choral and sacral song including sound from the release button and sharp
sound fragments. The song is sung in an African dialect and therefore – at least for most
people outside of Africa – a sequence of incomprehensive sounds and words. The music follows
and brings together the images in a repetitive respiration rhythm; as mentioned, the music
stops in the middle of the commercial because the pictures are frozen and alternate three
times without music. The last freezing is a total showing a migration of birds and as soon as
the picture starts moving again, the music also begins. The visual and the audio-visual are
merged closely.
There is technology as well as meditation in the music. The sacral repetitions of sounds
from the voices and the samplings, which do not give any immediate meaning, point to the
fact that meaning is also established through other symbols than the discursive. It is this open
pre-conscious, non-discursive field which the TV commercial has emerged into, stirring up
many emotions, meanings, and interpretations. However, in the end all these elements are
brought together with a single reference.
One might also say that the many different images, sounds, and signs are an invitation to
use intuitive insight instead of or together with discursive understanding. Reason works
discursively, from one point to the other, in fixed terms and in a logical order, an order which
has been broken up in the commercial with its abrupt images and impressions, similar to the
way intuition works via sudden insights and impulses. Reality is life, movement, and extension,
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Bergson emphasizes, and it requires intuitive, sensory elaboration to be decoded in all its
depths, emotions and forms.
The music stops when an image is frozen. This activity is twofold: On the one hand, it
means that the picture is fixed and that we get a stronger, more accentuated impression of it.
On the other hand, it indicates that the connection and the meaning are broken and dissolved
because they have been removed the context, cf. the break in the music and the petrified
movement. Also, this way the classic theme that all TV commercials are based on is also

15
Bergson 1991:277ff. Bergson here also comments on the special quality of insight in dreams.
11
suggested: the fear of not taking part, of being isolated, alone, without connection,
disconnected. Buy a mobile phone and get in connection, be connected.
We also see images of apples hanging on strings on branches without leaves. Something
lost seems to be in need of repair. Similar themes are suggested by the pictures and the music
which stop and are put into motion again. All the time an interruption or a loss of connection
may occur. Technology is able to repair the anxiety allowing you to go back without fear
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because it will help you from now on:

The viewer’s drive towards the images and other aesthetic devices used in TV
commercials is not primarily the need for the security, comfort and love they promise. The
most important drive is the anxiety which is a threat. While the social circumstances of a child
are communicated or hidden by parental relations, the adult person is directly exposed to
them. When the adult cannot understand these circumstances and their mechanisms and is
unable to make any images of them (i.e. when a grownup feels the powerlessness of a child),
the compulsion returns in imageless and impersonal ways. The anxiety now seems like an
exaggerated preparedness without fixed contours and figures. Through whom and with what
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can we now define ourselves? This is where the aesthetics of commodities and the media
enter the picture because they can use the blurred anxiety which appears without object and
therefore is more accessible to aesthetic concretion and visualization. Logo, brand, and
ontological security are brought closely together. The logo, the special commodity, and
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technology will protect you in the future.
16
This model is originally from Fausing 1995:165. Here it has been slightly changed because of the more obvious
affective marking and the bodily branding (cf. page 17ff in this article).
17
Cf. Haug 1964: 14f.
18
I will support the thesis about the connection between logo and ontological security as well as the stability of the
self-identity by two quotations. It is indeed characteristic that you find these statements in connection with two
persons who are in shock and who use brands as ontological security to maintain an unchangeable identity and reality.
The following quotations are thus merely an intensified expression of the common use of brands. The first quotation is
from the loss of Estonia in the Baltic Sea in 1994: “Mother Sweden herself greeted me up here – but without saying a
word. Together with her colleagues she slit up my clothes. I was about to protest against the cutting open of my Bill
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‘Where the film broke…’
There is no difference between the big and the small losses. The end of the world can be
experienced in so many ways. It may be losing one’s best toy, a treasured object, a unique
possibility, money, work, one’s home, a friend or a faith. Or a loved one through illness, a
society due to a flood or a hurricane, or a whole culture because of war and destruction. There
are plenty of innocent victims when it comes to experiencing the end of the world. A certain
moment strikes abruptly, allows no excuses and gives no second chances. Our present anxiety
is blended with archaic anxiety in our experience of the fragility of the world.
Many children’s games, fairy tales, and electronic games deal with the possibility of being
eliminated from the world or losing control of reality. There is a danger to overcome and a
possible redemption to gain which are experienced instantly through the game but which also
draw on old cultural anxieties about the end of existence. The primitive pains and the
unthinkable anxiety, as they are called by the pediatrician Donald W. Winnicott, are the basis of
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children’s games and of adults’ heritage of imagination. These pains and anxieties come from
stories and conceptions about falling to pieces, not having any contact with the body, losing
one’s sense of orientation, falling continuously, not continuing to exist, being in total isolation
because there is nobody to be in touch with – to connect with. The term disconnection is used
by Winnicott about the young child’s movement into the open space away from the illusion of
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connection and it is linked to the terms transitional object and transitional experience
concerning the process where the child finds a new object to relate to after its mother. One
may regard the commodity and the aesthetics of commodities as an extension of this
connection and transitional experience. Disconnection creates a basis for archaic as well as
present anxieties. The anxieties and their configurations are omnipresent in children and
adults. They are also important for this TV commercial. It is not the need for security which is

Tornado trousers, which were my cherished possession, and the boots, which were brand new, but I did not have the
power.” (Hviid, Morten Boje “Estonias forlis: En danskers beretning” in: John Carey, ed. Øjenvidner til historien.
Copenhagen: Haase 2003 (1999):796f). The second relates to one of the so-called black widows, who did not have the
courage to bring her bomb belt to explosion at a café in Moscow: “”They dressed me up so that I looked a Muscovite –
very flashy. When I looked into the mirror on my way out, I liked my looks very much. I have never had that kind of
clothes before. I was even happy for a few minutes. Fancy clothes, a mobile phone and more than one thousand
rubels. (…) I didn’t call anyone but I did like the phone. Nokia, it was so stylish. I’d never had a mobile phone before.”
(Jørgen Staun “Selvmordsterroristen der ville leve” in: Berlingske Tidende 7.4.2004. At this place, I will elaborate no
further on the relation between ontological security and brand but refer to a larger, forthcoming work of mine entitled
Screen Society.
19
Cf. Winnicott 1971:38ff, Stern 1991:209, Fausing 2002a:103f.
20
Winnicott 1971:13, Bertolini 1999:269ff.
13
the motivating power in this commercial and commercials in general; it is the fear of not
having contact, identity, and existence.
Our memory is closely associated with visualization and so are traumas. The trauma has its
origins in an event which has been hidden. One could say that the trauma insists on a past
which has never been made present, i.e. visible. Therefore, it is very important to visualize the
21
images of trauma. It always takes two traumas to create a trauma : the hidden trauma and
its substituting visualization.
The trauma is a nonverbal part of our consciousness. The images of the trauma show
something which cannot be coded, a meaning outside of the language. To give meaning is a
social and institutional act with the purpose of integrating people. Every code is both rational
and accidental. Thus, entering into a code is a way for us to test ourselves through freedom as
well as reason. Both these elements are eliminated in the trauma which in turn offers an
excess of unbearable reality that is just there, an empty nothing or a place we know that we
22
disregard. We overlook the emptiness in favor of other ideas of the trauma. Instead of the
real trauma and its event, other images enter which can function as part of social and
relational acts. The historical and social activity, which is included in coding and decoding, is
lost in favor of a more anthropological, mental, and timeless reaction, the affective shock of
the trauma. In the Danish language, we have an expression: ‘where the film broke’. Even if it
does not exist in other languages, it is readily understandable when translated; it reflects the
general impression that reality has turned into a movie with images that are out of focus. We
just let the movie of realty pass by until a fragment of extra intense reality breaks through the
flicker and stops the time, place, and image in a special image which makes us open our eyes
wide and catch our breath.
It is significant that TV commercials seek the timeless and universal mythical sceneries in
the present and that they do so via optical media – the television and digital cameras – which
simulate reality and the present, because through their lenses they can show the direct and
realistic references. Such visualizations can lead the senses to the agony of the trauma; just as
the stopped rhythm in sounds and images reminds us of the clipped breath which is essential
memories from the affect of the trauma. When we can no longer breathe freely, we become
aware of the naturalness of breathing because something – a special event – stops or inhibits

21
Cf. Laplace 1989:88, Fausing 1999:269ff.
22
Cf. Bollas 1995: 112,114.
14
it. The voices in the soundtrack are marked by the rhythm of the breath and it is this rhythm
which suddenly stops.
It is here, too, we as perceivers are drawn in because we experience the stop bodily,
tangibly when sounds and images disappear. In this way, human beings and technology
merge: we and the TV commercial.

The three forms of affect

Affect has two basic forms, which in this case are brought together in a third form. First of all,
the experience of affect can be an isolated penetration of overwhelming happiness or grief.
Secondly, the experience can be like a continuous stream of minor sensations which are with
us all the time.
The first experience is the sudden and brief manifestation of fundamental affects like
happiness, sorrow, indignation, anger, and shock. The second experience is toned-down and
23
continuous. This last form, the psychologist Daniel Stern calls vitality feelings; they should be
understood as a discrete backdrop of sensations and sensitivity which is always present in the
existence. This backdrop is similar to the continuous creation of images by the human body
24
and mind described by the aesthetician Susanne K. Langer . Unlike the sudden penetration,
the continuous stream is perceived as positive or just neutral because we do not take notice of
it. The stream or backdrop is a gentle experience of our own vitality and the feeling of being
alive. It is a mild biological repetition and rhythm which is tied to elementary life processes like
breathing, feeling hungry, falling asleep, and waking up, and to the feeling of thoughts coming
and going. These processes are also images in a broad sensorial sense. If the mild stream of
images and sensations is stopped by a sudden punctuation, it can be felt either very negatively
because the stream stops floating and the breath is clipped, or very positively, like
unspeakable happiness which suddenly bubbles inside us.
Returning to the example, there is a gentle and continuous rhythm and vitality connected
to the flow of the images and sounds, to the changes of the colors and lines, to the touching of
the hands. There are also the characteristic breaks where one gasps for breath. This way, the
two forms of affect are brought together: on the one hand the mild, clear feeling of vitality and
on the other hand the abrupt realization of intense fright reminding us that what we took for
granted is no longer natural. The ontological security has been intruded upon. In this case, we

23
Stern 1991:63ff.
24
Langer 1969:54.
15
have a rather slow composition moving towards a perforation instead of one single abrupt
isolated penetration. The two basic forms of experience, the continuous stream in rhythm of
colors, lines, and pictures, and the punctual penetration is supplemented by a third via a
fusion where one leads to the other – although with some abrupt changes that make the
viewer gasp for breath. However, with the right digital outfit no challenge or fear threatens the
ontological security. When the connection – the breath – has been taken away, the right
technological gear will lead us safely on.

Branding the body

On one side, we have the old symbols for connection and separation. On the other, the modern
digital multimedia in which they are mediated. Thus, digital technology is being used to embed
– according to the sociologist Anthony Gidden’s explanation – the humans acts and symbols
25
which have been taken way, disembedded, in the late modern and the post-ritual society.
One of the most important ways in which we perceive the world and bring this conception
forth is through images, internal and external. But here, too, something has happened to our
everyday relations with images as well as our research into them, as I have indicated by my
way of using terms like ‘sight’ and ‘images’. Everything has been brought back to basics, so to
speak. The basics for images are our body, the point of departure for our world and our stories
and it is via all the bodily senses that images in the broad sense are created. The world comes
to us through our senses and we picture the world through them. Images are not only created
by the eyes of the beholder; they are also perceived as sound images, as bodily sensations –
the tone of the voice, the lightness or the heaviness of the steps. All this can be summed up in
sensorial images which are our interpretations and reconstructions of the world. We do not
copy the world; we adapt the world to different images with our senses. “The business of
making images never stops while we are awake and it even continues during part of our sleep,
26
when we dream. One might argue that images are the currency of the minds” , Antonio R.
Damasio says about perceptual images. If we look at a landscape, listen to music playing in
the background, let our fingers run over a warm surface, or read the words on the page of a
book, we comprehend and create images via different ways of sensing. Our senses, thoughts,
and memories are constantly creating images of the material which the sensorial apparatus

25
Giddens 1990:53ff.
26
Damasio 1999:319. In earlier works, Damasio has expressed similar thoughts but in this publication, he realizes that
he has been unconsciously leaning on thoughts which had already been developed by Susanne K. Langer and Daniel
Stern (see Damasio 1999:363, note 4.
16
provides. Consequently, when processing impressions to form expressions we are interactive
as well as creative.
The analyzed TV commercial is from 2004. In 2007, Nokia shows somewhat different
tableaux in its TV commercial Tattoo: the extra function of the mobile phone has changed, as
playing music has displaced taking pictures. The commodity has gone from being essentially a
picture medium to becoming also a music medium. In the 2007 commercial, the body is
accentuated and it is emphasized that the body houses the affect, and that literally creates
images in the commercial. The commercial shows ornamental patterns being formed on the
skin like tattoos. This skin decoration is tightly connected to the music being played by the
mobile phone. In a way, we see the music take shape visually on the body, just like we saw the
electric ornamentations coming out of the woman’s head in the 2004 commercial.
The music expresses itself bodily and affectively through patterns which follow the
sequence and rhythm of the music and draw themselves on the body as if they were formed by
an inner sudden power and naturalness. The music visualizes itself bodily. If you are ‘in’, you
have the bodily, affective mark. The body is being branded. The visualization draws attention
to all the scenes shown. Again, we are back to the pre-modern signals and the intensification
of the expressions and interactions of the human body with technology. The dancing couple at
the end of the commercial not only gets tattoos, their hands also meet; like the hands meet in
the Nokia logo and in Michelangelo’s fresco of the creation.
In the 2007 commercial, the interruption in the transmission, in connection, is a call to a
man who is sitting in a Fish & Chips restaurant in rainy London. The call stops the music which
has dominated the whole commercial and thereby stops the ornamentations which are taking
shape on his skin. He is sitting isolated in the shop and nobody sees his bodily marks.
Previously, others have noticed the special persons in the commercial because of their
ornamentation. They have become visible, branded, via the ornamentation, part of a group, or
27
in the terminology of the sociologist Michel Maffesoli, a tribe.
We are back at the point of departure of this article: It is the body that creates the
images. In the commercial it is shown as ornamental visualizations on the body. Naturally, this
does not indicate that Nokia has been reading Damasio, Hayles, and Giddens - quite the
opposite. The theoreticians have read the time and seen its signs on the bodies. Reality has
been imaged and shaped, one might say, through our bodies and senses. We cannot
comprehend it if we do not shape it into images which we can sense and tell others about.

27
Cf. Maffesoli 1996:73ff.
17
Reality is too much to take in directly; therefore we must ritualize it and make it into images.
It can only be transmitted and comprehended through all the different kinds of images we
constantly create of it through the body – internal, external, concrete, abstract, as sounds, as
things we taste and touch, as affects etc. These elements constitute the material which stories
from and about reality are made of.
We pick up the world and form it through the images we shape and seek out. We go out
into the world with our images and the world enters us through its images. The body is the
meeting point and intermediate link for the images which come to and from us.
We are not only sensing subjects; we are constantly symbolizing and getting hold of our
sense datum through imagery. To see and sense is in itself a way of formulating. It is a need
so great that we cannot stop it. The images must come out – in dreams, in concrete pictures,
constructed or not, in phantasms, in sound images, in the metaphors of words, in bodily
expressions, in sensations of textures, and in synaesthetic sensing. The world is perceived
from the inside though the body and we have the possibility to look at it from the outside
through the images which are made from this material.

The synaesthetic being

The sight as sense plays an important role in both the analyzed TV commercials. In the first
one, through the large number of close-ups of eyes which are seeing and being looked at; in
the second one, through the sight of the branding of the body. At the same time, both
commercials suggest a fusion of the senses since the sense perception merges into synthesis –
for example the breath, the music, the rhythm, and the affect. The fusion of the senses
explains to a great extent the terms perceptual or sensoric images.
The senses are the opening of the body and soul to the surrounding world and the senses
are the surrounding world’s way into the body and soul. The senses connect the outside with
the inside and the inside with the outside. None of the senses are entirely separate from each
other; they connect in a mutual totality, in synaesthesia. We not only taste the food. We hear
that it is being prepared and that it is crisp when we eat it. We also smell the food. And we see
it. We can also have experiences such as seeing sound images and listening to colors, a shrill
red for example. The TV commercials also speak in this way with colors, rhythms, and tactility
across the senses – in a synthesis of the senses or in synaesthesia.
The science of synaesthesia was part of the new inclusion of the body and the soul in
different fields of scientific research within medicine, psychology, and psychoanalysis in the

18
mid and late 19th century when the body was no longer considered an untouchable part of
religion. However, synaesthesia was regarded by these 19 th century scientists both as a new
way of integrating body, soul, and science and as an exception to rule, an illness. After this
initial period, the synaesthesia research died out but was later taken up again. Quite early,
Susanne K. Langer became the one who early and most clearly pointed out the overlapping of
symbols in synaesthesia. She regards the overlapping as a general characteristic and quality,
28
which is present in all persons and not as something strange. The neurologist Arnold H.
Modell shares this view in his own way; he concludes that we all experience in a synaesthetic
29
way and he takes synaesthesia in music and visuality for granted. In addition to these
tendencies in recent research, a pathological approach to synaesthesia is also emerging in the
field.
Recently, the psychologist Monica Vester has taken up synaesthesia, emphasizing despite
30
some resistance the pathological aspect. In Vester’s view, synaesthesia is a phenomenon
which either stigmatizes the person who has it as a part of the body and the senses or lets the
person live alone with his or her richness of experiences. In reality, synaesthesia is at the front
edge of development and it is the synaesthetic perception which will prevail. This is clearly true
31
if you look at contemporary TV commercials and video installations by Bill Viola and others.
In the development of the new digital multimedia and the creative society and in the expansion
of the creative class, the synaesthetic perception cannot possibly be a disadvantage; on the
contrary, it will be the strong point and even a necessity. The cultural analyst Brian Massumi
adds up the score and concludes: “…affect is synaesthetic, implying a participation of the
32
senses in each other.” This statement opens the road directly to Viola’s works and to the
contemporary affective TV commercials. The exception is on its way to becoming a marked
rule.

“When I looked into the mirror on my way out,

I liked my looks very much. I have never had
that kind of clothes before. I was even happy for

28
Langer 1974:xx.
29
Modell 2003:73. Damasio does not mention synaesthesia in connection with perceptual images and imagery.
Surprisingly, viewed in the light of his strong approval of Langer and Stern’s thesis about the natural synergy and
interaction, synaesthesia seems to him to be an “unusual phenomenon” which can only be found in “few” human
beings(Damasio 1999:348, note 8). This explanation is very close to Monica Vester’s pathological point of view which
is mentioned below.
30
Vester 2004:7ff.
31
Fausing 1999:235ff.
32
Massumi1995:228.
19
 a few minutes. Fancy clothes, a mobile phone and
more than one thousand rubels? (…) I didn’t call
anyone, but I did like the phone. Nokia, it was so stylish.
I’d never had a mobile phone before.”33

References

Still-images from the 2004 TV commercial, Nokia “Eye to Eye”, may be viewed at:
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See note 18 above.

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