Re: [-empyre-] Opening remarks on new media history

[Nick Montfort <nickm@linc.cis.upenn.edu>]

                                        Philadelphia

Anna, thanks for the comments -- I don't want to stifle replies from Noah
and Jill but I will quickly offer a reply to one point:

> I'm interested in why a certain history at a particular moment becomes
> THE history of an emerging field. For example, why *print and digital* ?
> and not electronic or visual perspectivalism or cinema?

Noah's the one who wrote that, but I don't think he meant that the history
of new media is *only* found in print and on digital media. I certainly
wouldn't say so. The New Media Reader CD has a long bit of cinematic
history, the film record of Doug Engelbart's "mother of all demos," and
several other videos. And of course there is a material history of new
media as well, which museums have fortunately been displaying for us in
recent years. I think what Noah meant to point out is that print is an
important part of the historical record, and that people who expect to
learn about new media without reading any old printed material about it
will run into trouble, perhaps developing an ahistorical perspective.

-Nick Montfort
 http://nickm.com  nickm@nickm.com
 My new book, Twisty Little Passages: http://nickm.com/twisty


On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, Anna Munster wrote:

> Hi all and looking forward to this discussion. I'd like to throw in some
> comments about the guiding assumptions of the reader as laid out by Noah -
>
> >(1) new media is a field,
>
> I'm attracted to the idea of field particularly as it conjures a history of
> electricity, an obvious but sometimes overlooked condition of possibility
> for new media.  I remember a discussion about hosting ISEA in South India a
> few years ago when it became obvious that conditions of possibility that
> have to do with power (capacity and relations) are the entire
> infrastructure of new media activity. I also like the expansive and
> contractive connotations that *field* brings with it...something that new
> media are constantly orchestrating and being orchestrated by.
>
> One critical comment I'd throw up about *field* is that it can be a little
> bland (like an enclosed territory meant for a purpose but perhaps not
> serving much purpose at all except for us all to graze upon). What kind of
> a field is it? Would the field be constituted by what it keeps in/out? Are
> there variations across the field and how important are these? What other
> fields does it border and protect?
>
> >(2) new media has a
> >history, (3) this history's record is print and digital,
>
> Absolutely and yet we might also add that histories are also disciplines
> caught up with  *disciplinary* questions that creating new media as a field
> also poses....I'm interested in why a certain history at a particular
> moment becomes THE history of an emerging field. For example, why  *print
> and digital* ? and not electronic or visual perspectivalism or cinema? So,
> I'm interested to hear from Nick and Noah how they are thinking about the
> field of new media through the history they have conjured for it.
>
> >(4) this
> >history matters.
>
> Yes! In a big way because history is material (matters). And the issue
> about when and at what times it matters is a very interesting question to
> raise. In terms of making/production (rather than writing/teaching both of
> which I also do), I am constantly thrown back to early production practices
> I learnt in reel-to-reel sound editing in the early 1980s. Perhaps this was
> because it was my first experience in media production but also because the
> relations I was exploring then between continuity and discontinuity, signal
> and noise and the arduous labour and activity of actually making sound,
> continue to resound now when I'm editing a video in Final Cut Pro, when I
> get error messages online, when I get headaches from ploughing through
> scripting languages etc. So, history is not just something we reflectively
> construct but is also produced as habits, traces and grooves. Some of these
> are repetitive and others push us into new formations.
>
> cheers anna
>
>
>
>
>
> all bodies are in a perpetual flux like rivers, and parts are entering into
> them and passing out of them continuously.
> Leibniz
>
> Anna Munster
> Lecturer in Digital Media Theory/
> Postgraduate Coordinator
> School of Art History and Theory
> College of Fine Arts
> University of New South Wales
> PO Box 259
> Paddington 2021
>
> Phone: 612 9385 0741
> Fax: 612 9385 0615
>
>
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