Molded as it is by TV, our world has been described by Günter Anders, the father of television criticism, as both a "phantom" and a "matrix"'. The world is phantom-like because it is half present, half absent in the images that are delivered to us at home. Apparently we are deprived of genuine experience and thus the ability to take up a position.' According to Anders we have declined into captive eavesdroppers and voyeurs, compelled to be passive consumers of events which we only know in reproduction, as a matrix, without ever knowing the original.

 

Reading Anders one might suppose that television viewers either have no further need for foreign travel, since they are able to receive a detailed simulation of the world in their living-rooms, or else that for precisely that reason they need to escape from their homes and TV sets at regular intervals, so as to be able to return adequately provided with authentic experiences which they hope to acquire on their travels. These possible patterns of behavior would be respectively motivated by the enjoyment of successful simulation experienced in the comfort of one's arm-chair, and by a subversive desire to visit places where the tourist can believe himself to be encountering reality: that reality which, so the media critics keep telling him, is kept from him by the media.

 

What speaks against the first of these possibilities is the popularity of travel. What speaks against the second is the nature of the travel packages that are on offer and which the public books.

 

So how is it that televiewing man wants to visit remote places? What even makes him want to leave his TV set to book the holiday? Perhaps one should interpret holiday travel as a form of touch-and-handle liberation therapy, for though television allows us to see a great deal, it doesn't let us touch. In this respect however, travel is somewhat akin to television. Almost everything that is meant to interest the tourist is behind glass: on the other side of the shop-window or the window of the bus. In the museum the rule is that it is forbidden to touch the exhibits. Watching television we experience a world that exhibits itself while withdrawing from our ability to touch and handle it. The experience is repeated when we travel.

 

In each of these worlds there is however a wonderful substitute to make up for this lack. For the traveler there is the video camera - a possession that can be taken anywhere. The strikingly ergonomic design makes it a pleasure to handle. And when the viewer is not away on holiday, but sitting at home in front of the television set, what is the object of those desires to hold and to handle? It is a small device, the design of which has had a significantly greater impact on the form of the camcorder than has the mode of construction of the professional television camera. The device in question is the remote control. Becoming aware, over the years of its evolution, of its role as the physically palpable representative of the medium, the gadget acquired an endless array of buttons and keys, a piece of hocus-pocus which has carried over to the camcorder. The current trend in the electronics industry towards simplicity favors a reduced number of controls, but the problem is solved by making the buttons disappear behind covers that open and close; as things which have been concealed and displaced they re-emerge with their significance enhanced. A recent development in both devices has been the introduction of visually displayed menus, to permit the simulation of interactivity. Thus when he the traveler is far from home, his video-camera gives him the impression that the villages and landscapes that glide past the windows of his coach have been selected by him personally, as if he were composing a television film. Some tour coaches are actually equipped with video monitors displaying videos of the landscape the coach is passing through.

 

People feel guilty as they view the offerings of television all the year round, but hardly anyone decides to give up watching. The viewer's bad conscience is caused by the assertion that the images he sees on the screen do not adequately represent reality. Reality is therefore assumed to be hiding behind the pictures. This assumption could be the reason why every year countless viewers feel compelled to leave their sets and become tourists, visitors to the outside world. Imagining a reality behind the images of the mass media leads people to feel that the things which they experience outside the media are real. It is thanks to television that we conclude that there is a genuine reality, with incontrovertible facts. For this reality can only be explained by the constant harping on the disappearance of reality allegedly caused by the media. Without the mass media it would not be quite so simple to create the notion of a reality that can be lived and experienced as it is now, when all one has to do is to denounce the simulation of the world by television. Our search for reality in the world outside the television set, however, leads us to convert what we find there into television to prove its authenticity, because we immortalize what we believe to be authentic by recording it on video. Our idea of what reality must look like, in its turn, is crucially determined by television, so that we can no longer acknowledge anything as authentic unless it corresponds to images we have seen on television. Thus in spite of the fear that television is depriving us of reality, it is television, supported by the video camera, which puts us in touch with reality on our travels. If we were not in possession of such a camera and did not already have an idea, shaped by television, as to how Abroad can manifest itself with maximum authenticity, then it might happen that we take precisely that briefly experienced world away from the television set to be a fake and unreal one. Thanks to our experience of television however, and because we take videos with the video camera, we are able to travel the world secure in the belief that everything that our travel package has to offer corresponds to a pre-existing (not to say pre--imagined) reality. The purpose of travel thus seems to be to "verify the status of television" (Gilles Deleuze). Television viewing and the video camera help us in opposite ways to re-authenticate the experiences of our journey. The video-journey gives us an opportunity to discover the reality behind the images provided by the media, for this journey takes us behind our own screen. It is a journey into the television set.

 

The act of recording a journey on videotape defers the experience of perceiving that journey to a future occasion, at home in front of the TV screen; but the superabundance of filmed material ensures that in most cases this material ensures that in most cases this anticipated viewing remains unrealized. The tourist's visual perception is replaced by his whole-body sensory budget. The videotape and the total body experience represent the yield on his investment in the holiday.

 

Holiday travel that takes us into foreign parts is meant to bring the foreign closer to us. For the tourist, foreign cultures always retain an excess of things that are inexplicable. To enable him to deal with the incomprehensible there is the video camera, which specialises in capturing everything without having to obey a hierarchy of meanings established by its owner, at least to the same extent as the photographic camera. Only a process of filming that is emptied of meaning to the highest degree possible can capture what the tourist claims to be looking for. That which is captured and imprisoned on a video cassette has ceased to be alarming, something menacingly foreign, and has become a mere videotape of a journey abroad. The capture is an overcoming of the unfamiliar, culminating in an act of archival incorporation. Writing the labels, sticking them on to the cassettes, arranging the cassettes on the shelves of the built-in cupboard at home - all this is essentially a process of domestication of something that was strange. In the built-in cupboard the videocassettes stand in their rows, labeled and arranged in order. It is they, rather than the traveler, that are the true recipients of the journey. We are no longer concerned, as in the age of photography, with the technical possibilities of reproducing our holiday impressions; but with the ways in which digital techniques can be used for their reception.

 

The video camera is meant to function as a reliable image-recorder, thus releasing its operator from experiencing the journey by way of the visually receptive mode and enabling him to devote himself to a different, more gestural, form of seeing. On recent camcorders the viewfinder has been replaced by an LCD screen, so that the camera permits immediate tele-vision. As seeing is no longer linked to the task of perceiving it becomes a pure gesture of seeing. "Video" in this context should be understood in the light of the Latin verbal form, as "I see".

 

Anything that the traveler gets to see belongs to territory already annexed by tourism. Everywhere, the picturesque and the primitive have already been destroyed by the presence of tourists searching for authentic experiences. Seeking idyllic tourist-free surroundings the tourist keeps bumping into himself, the culturally degenerate blot on the folkloric landscape. The tourist's gaze, which has acquired a burden of guilty feelings for its excessive curiosity, can transfer the guilt to the video camera. The traveler does not enter into a symbiotic relationship with his camera, but makes it represent his supposed cultural superiority. The camcorder becomes the synonym of technological achievement and hence the epitome of the difference between industrial civilization and what seems to be the surviving naturalness of the worlds that travelers visit. The tourist seeks to establish his credentials as an innocent being, and uses mimicry to do so. It is true that his dress code does not correspond to that of any foreign culture: it does however seem to be an attempt to convey a heightened degree of infantilisation. With the innocence of an astonished child the video-tourist appropriates the myth of the natural, and therefore innocent, savage. He dresses up to fit in with the theme of his search. While the camera, as a high-tech device, firmly establishes the difference in culture, an effort is made, in a theme running through the video images, to play down the difference: fellow tourists are shown in the foreground, seemingly engaging in a symbiotic relationship with the motifs of a foreign culture.

With this it becomes clear that as well as being similar in ways already described, video camera and remote control also represent a contrast. The video camera helps to overcome the pressure to take decisions, because it negates the idea of a hierarchy of significance among the things that are to be represented. In this way it suggests to the enlightened individual that he may be able to attain something close to a state of nature. The remote control on the other hand invokes the myth of democratic freedom of choice, which supposedly shapes and controls the world (of experiences). However, travel packages and television programms alike see to it that these projects are not realized. The pure state of nature was seen by the Enlightenment as the still happy precursor of the state of moral immaturity for which man himself was to blame. It was up to man's free will to overcome this immature condition. While the video-tour is intended to recapture the mythic origin of the state of nature, television with its remote control points to the utopian world of the free will of the sovereign individual. The Enlightenment process becomes an item to be consumed via the media.