The Obama Code

An interesting look at "imaging Obama", the article itself is from 2009 but many of the example track back to 2008.

"Historic" was the headline word of November 5th, 2008, the day Barack Obama became the next President of the United States. The international embrace of Obama was, of course, partly a response to his skin color and the historically racialized structure of American society, which for five centuries denied some or all of the rights of Americans not properly male, propertied and of Anglo-European descent. America and throughout the world, the idea of "race" is inescapably knotted with visible markers such as hair and skin color. Color stands in metonymic relation to a vast complex of stories, mythologies, images, emotions, scientific discourses and genomic sequences -- visible and invisible -- of what we know and define as race.

The concept of "color" is much easier to represent in pictures than in words, especially given the complexity of racial discourse in the United States; this may be why some voters who strongly opposed the new leader used the graphics software on their computers to express their concerns. Picturing is a form of speech, and in the context of an affluent, technologically advanced society that allegedly protects its citizens' right to free speech, voters use the Internet as a public arena for broadcasting messages of political dissent. Visual messages are valued for their ability to deliver high extra-linguistic impact with little or no exact meaning.

Many of these messages act as pictorial fictions. Like the depictions of Catholic saints, the images rely on visual cues to reference well-known narratives from history (Obama-Hitler), science fiction (Obama-Alien), horror (Obama-Monster) and religion (Obama-Antichrist). The jumble of images and fragmented chat on the Internet suggests that McLuhan's age of multisensory "electric" media has successfully brought post-literacy and re-tribalization to Western societies. latter is particularly evident in far right wing Internet communities that view Obama in light of the antichrist legend. As my analysis of some of the most virulent imagery will show, McLuhan's view of the media as extensions of the nervous system can be rethought as even more deeply marked in the flesh, not just as extensions of the body, but as the body -- the genomic body -- itself.

To explore the idea of genomic embodiment in Internet images of Barack Obama, I will examine how visual codes, Hebrew lettering and imaginary genetic sequences loop into and through one another in a seemingly post-literate, biotechnological blur. In this richly vague space, where something primordial appears to be happening, I find trace elements of Arthur Kroker's posthuman universe in which "the missing mass of God touches the full-spectrum dominance of cyberculture." In Kroker's view, this touch is of a magnitude to bend space-time relations into a new fabric "simultaneously mythic and historical, past and future, technocratic and religious." The images in this essay are considered in light of this theoretical possibility: a dimensional infolding of visible spaces becoming touched by God.

Full article and images here.