Re: [-empyre-] discussion statement

[Andrew Murphie <a.murphie@unsw.edu.au>]

Hi All,
great discussion.
On Sunday, January 4, 2004, at 08:07  PM, Jill Scott wrote:
> Currently I think the future of media art lies in the fact that our
> perceptions of time, space, object, body and the represented 
> character, can
> be more influenced by the discoveries and ethics of science, than by
> advances in technology itself. How will Media Art be effected by these
> influences? How might explorations into natural and cognitive sciences
> serve to further shift our definitions of Media art and body, as well 
> as
> our representations, audience roles and interactive responses?
This is a very good question - in part, I think that "Media Studies" 
tends to be caught up in pretty old science. For example, the 
sender-message-receiver model, variations upon which are still often at 
the basis of even many of the complex formulations of 'communication' 
(though not Chris or Alan's events of communication), is reasonably 
positivist, and pretty chunky from the point of view of science. I'd 
say what is usually said at this point - that it's very Newtonian or 
something, except that Newtonian physics has proved pretty useful. In 
fact, in many of its contemporary modes, media studies hasn't even got 
this far. Try, for example, of thinking communications in differential 
terms (philosophically as well as in terms of engineering)!

 As a discipline media studies sometimes tends, in defending itself, to 
implicitly defend some pretty clunky science (in part, I think because 
it was born into, and still embraces some extremely clunky, outmoded, 
if well-funded, cog sci - but we've already been there on the list).

Media arts are a different matter entirely. They have always engaged 
more with contemporary science (and interestingly, contemporary 
scientists sometimes seen happy to engage with new media artists - is 
there much engagement at all between science and media studies?).

I wonder if this is partly because media studies often tends to think 
of media as (only secondary) facilitators of communications - and media 
artists are more interested in the media themselves qua media.

Of course, there is no clear divide and both approaches are useful. 
Moreover, in many settings both sides are talking to each. Indeed, this 
is  a feature of new media events and institutions in general - even of 
new media theorists. 'New media' forces what we could call the mutual 
supplementarity - the productive difference or simply, differentials - 
between media and communications, to become the very axis of what's 
going on.

This has radical implications for disciplinarities, not only media 
disciplines, but arts and sciences disciplines. I often think that 
artists have the exciting task of bearing the burden of this breakdown 
in disciplinarity - more than academics and scientists. Or, to try and 
put this a little better, the frameworks and institutions for art are 
much more open to the breakdown of disciplinarity (in all senses) than 
the university or science establishments...

On top of this, one of the defining features of network (new 
media-based) societies, according to those such as Castells, is 
precisely that they flee such implications, even and especially as they 
deploy the technologies of new media. Then the discussion about 
disciplinarity gets really interesting. Disciplinarity becomes as form 
of exaggerated neurosis.

For me, this means that new media studies - whatever they might be - 
make a decisive break with media and communications disciplinarity. 
They make this break, whether the individuals involved want then to or 
not. So much so, that 'new media' - as necessary as the term might be - 
are neither new (anymore) nor media (in any traditional sense). New 
media make us think in transdisciplinary modes - more importantly, they 
radically broaden the ecologies (in the Bateson, Guattari senses of the 
word) through which we have to think/live media/communications events. 
Enter art and science ... but there are similar challenges to both of 
these.

All of which means that new media is the fun place to be, even if it 
doesn't exist!

cheers, a
--
"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast
back again into the open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)

Dr Andrew Murphie - Senior Lecturer
School of Media and Communications, University of New South Wales, 
Sydney, Australia, 2052
web:http://mdcm.arts.unsw.edu.au/homepage/StaffPages/Murphie/
fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie@unsw.edu.au
room 311H, Webster Building