[-empyre-] x 3
i would like to open the conversation to these 3 [recent/art
historical] [trajectories/entry points] related to the existence of
video art + cinema in formulations of artware, code-based
theorypraxis or more generally new media + [digital/computational]
arts...
//begin excerpts from:
//title: Cinema and the Code
//date: 1989
//developer: Gene Youngblood
"Cinema is the art of organizing a stream of audiovisual events in
time. It's an event-stream, like music. [3] There are at least four
media through which we can practice cinema --- film, video,
holography, and structured digital code --- just as there are many
instruments through which we can practice music."
...
"Thus, the basic phenomenology of the moving image --- what Vasulka
calls "the performance of the image on the surface of the screen" ---
remains historically continuous across all media. Digital code, for
example, has radically altered the epistemology and ontology of the
moving image, but has not fundamentally changed its phenomenology."
...
"The code is a metamedium; through it, high-level aesthetic
constructs from previous media become the primitives of the new
medium."
...
"We are not trying to be the Clement Greenberg of the code . The
phenomenology of the moving image remains constant across all media,
but each new medium brings about a shift of emphasis or accent .
Through the code, we can unfold the potential of formal strategies
that were possibile but limited in previous media, thereby expanding
the richness of cinematic language."
//end excerpts
//begin excerpt from:
//title: Subject: Re: <nettime> questions to nettime
//date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 11:44:02 +0100
//developer: Florian Cramer
"Am Donnerstag, 19. Februar 2004 um 17:25:46 Uhr (+0100) schrieb
David Gonzalez:
does anybody know why there's such a mess with the terms
media arts
new media arts
digital art
interactive art
...because these terms are, in the first case, institutional monikers
rather than thorough concepts.
On could consider the term "media arts" redundant as there is no art
without media. On the other hand, it could be narrowed down to art
that is made to specifically fit a certain medium."
...
"But it seems to me that the term "media art" is rarely being used in
this transhistorical sense, but as a simple abbreviation of "new
media art". But since a medium is new only in a specific time - so
that it doesn't make much sense anymore to speak of radio, TV and
video as "new media" today - one could even argue that the
"Hypnerotomachia" and the "Ship of Fools" are new media art because
they engaged with a medium that was new at the time of their creation.
The hidden truth between the terms "media" and "new media" is that
they are largely products of media studies as they were invented by
McLuhan. As a matter of fact, everything seems to count as "new
media" and "new media arts" that was conceived as such since McLuhan,
although throwing TV, radio, video and Internet into one bag rarely
makes much theoretical and practical sense. Assumptions that digital
"multimedia" works are "interactive" for example only make sense from
the media studies perspective, if you conceive of the computer as a
successor to film, radio and television, but don't make any sense if
you take performance, games and theater into account. - So
"interactive art" is probably shorthand for art, where the
interaction between the art work/process is realized as human-machine
interaction (and should perhaps be more precisely called
"cybernetical art").
"Digital art" is, in my opinion, the clearest and most useful term of
the ones you mention, since it means quite precisely that an artwork
is encoded as digital information (the aesthetical implications of
which are nontrivial, starting [but not ending] with the identity of
original and copy). However, the term "digital art" is problematic
as it seduces to falsely identify "digital" with "computer-based". An
example of digital art in a very literal, but non-electronic and
non-computational sense is Peter Kubelka's 1959 experimental film
"Arnulf Rainer" which simply is an edit of single monochrome white
and black frames. "
...
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//end excerpt
//begin text:
//title: CYBERNATED ART
//date: 1966
//developer: Nam June Paik
Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more
important, and the latter need not be cybernated. (Maybe George
Brecht`s simplissimo is the most adequate.)
But if Pasteur and Robespierre are right that we can resist poison
only through certain built-in poison then some specific frustrations,
caused by cybernated life, require accordingly cybernated shock and
catharsis. My everyday work with videotape and the cathode-ray tube
convinces me of this.
Cybernetic, the science of pure relations, or relationship itself,
has its origin in karma. Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase "Media is
message" was formulated by Nobert Wiener in 1948 as "The signal,
where the message is sent, plays equally important role as the
signal, where message is not sent."
As the Happening is the fusion of various arts, so cybernetics is the
exploitation of boundary regions between and across various existing
sciences.
Newton's physics is the mechanics of power and the unconciliatory
two-party system, in which the strong win over weak. But in the 1920s
a German genius put a tiny third -party (grid) between these two
mighty poles (cathode and anode) in a vacuum tube, thus enabling the
weak to win over the strong for the first time in human history. It
might be a Buddhistic "third way," but anyway this German invention
led to cybernetics, which came to the world in the last war to shoot
down German planes from the English sky.
The Buddhists also say Karma is samsara Relationship is metempsychosis
We are in open circuits
//end text
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