Tributes to New York City happen all the time in the wake of September 11. Yet by far the most compelling was the first: a marathon, televised, gala concert where stars and cops mingled onstage, and which climaxed with an extended set by The Who. Playing against the backdrop of a massive projection of the burning World Trade Center, the band went through their tunes until striking the final chords of "Won’t Get Fooled Again." The crowd, of course, was made of believers. And, after a commercial break following Roger Daltry’s singing of the lyrics "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," Governor George Pataki strode onto the stage to greet their cheers.

What a brilliant punk moment—a moment that, although it passed under the cultural radar because nerves were still frayed, speaks directly to the strange disjunction happening today between New Yorkers’ street-level experience of tragedy and the more abstract and mediated political forces that surround it.

All politics might be local, but "local" has many definitions, levels, and parallels. Politics also never pauses. Not long after the concert, the governor announced the creation of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which would "work closely with the private sector to determine a proper market-driven response to the economic and infrastructure needs of Lower Manhattan, as well as with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to identify the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site." Pataki appointed seven out of eleven members of this corporation, creating his own local network and raising fears that, to quote a February 2 New York Times editorial, "its decisions may represent the governor’s wishes but not those of city officials and residents."

City Hall, in the meantime, while still under the direction of Mayor Giuliani, pushed to hire the multinational Bechtel to manage the project; the firm, which has former Secretary of State George Schultz on its board, went over budget by a couple of billion dollars when it managed Boston’s "Big Dig." (One early sign of the transformation of logic downtown was when City Hall attempted to dislodge from the site firefighters who were searching for their fallen comrades, in order to expedite the cleanup and construction effort.) Other Times reportage has gone so far as to suggest that Mayor Bloomberg, whose tenure may ultimately be judged by the successes and failures of downtown planning, has his hands tied by upstate interests in this matter. While Larry Silverstein—who has a 99-year lease on the WTC site—has announced his plans to break ground on the site within the next year, no specifics on any building plan have been released for public consideration, let alone debate. The rebuilding process was initiated largely behind the scenes and under the veil of national pride, making its execution seem as removed and uncontrollable as the weather patterns that pass overhead. Slowly, that situation is changing, with new advisory appointments to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation by the governor, and some increased—if still sporadic—media coverage of state-government interests in the project.

Media coverage of the tragedy has generated degrees of abstraction for New Yorkers that are analogous to such state-sponsored, Lower Manhattan redevelopment organizations. New Yorkers have probably never before experienced the rhythms of the mass media so powerfully—first encountering the intimate link between mass-media coverage and physical events, and then experiencing an events replication and morphing that is part of a larger symbolic and simulacral complexion in the media.

Immediately following the attacks, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek wrote a mass email suggesting that Americans were now familiar with "the desert of the real," a phrase which he lifted from the techno-Zen flick, The Matrix. He suggested that the WTC disaster provided a moment when the spectacular dimension of contemporary culture ruptured and disintegrated before Americans’ very eyes, which were much more accustomed to experiencing the world as if it were a movie or advertisement without actual death or destruction. In other words, the electrosphere, loosely defined as those ethereal layers of an audiovisual lexicon that have accrued during decades of pop culture—and which are colored by the hyperreal flora of ever more refined and enhanced communications systems—dissipated to leave behind only raw, unadulterated physical material. Yet it was clear that media had augmented the spectrum of possible encounters with the world, and that CNN, for example, affected every fiber of people’s experience of events downtown, assuming weight equal to the physical environment by shaping perception. Just as Oscar Wilde once wrote that 19th-century Londoners did not see the urban fog until the Impressionists had painted it, so the camera work on CNN altered one’s understanding of New York City streets.

In other words, media need not be considered a polar opposite to real experience, but rather, as an augmentation of experience that can function as a sign of the times. Today, media treatment might best be considered in terms of another artist’s work: John Klima’s The Great Game, a website in which bombing runs in Afghanistan may be observed in a three-dimensional game setting—but which are only observed, not altered. The streets of New York may well remain in a situation analogous to that game happening halfway around the globe. In the words of The Who, "The world looks just the same and history ain’t changed because the banners, they’ve all flown in the last war."

Tim Griffin is an art critic, curator, poet, and the current Art Editor of Time Out New York. His piece picks up on ideas addressed in an article by Kevin Pratt in Time Out New York entitled "From the Ground Up," as well as his own catalogue essay for the exhibition Night Vision.