Don Ihde talks about media that vanish into the background, such as
signs written in yr native language.
Of course you can still do signs that functon as things to look at
- autotelic, self-referential perhaps, drawing attention to their
mediation.
It's harder to get a new medium and force it to fade into the
background: but many public artworks do that by sheer familiarity;
or they simulate that disappearance, and can do so with great
political precision: http://www.fruitsofourlabor.org/
when bazin addressed film n as the medium through which reality
would redeem itself, he specified two techniques in particular
(deep focus, long take): then observed that these techniques when
fetishised or pursued for their own sake become something other
than the redeemed reality that cinema was meant to reveal. Their
prevalence in effects / fantasy movies proves his point. Today they
are the privileged tools of illusionism. Oddly, meanwhile, special
effects have a terndency to disappear into the background -
painting out details in period dramas, adding non-existent bits of
landscape in thrillers, all high verisimiliutude
transparency (as in realism) is still a viable goal: if what you
want to do is communicate a state of affairs for example. Nortmally
I wd critique .ppt as software, but not necessarily in the case of
Al Gore's road show because the message is more important than the
medium - and that goes for many contemporary artworks, esp media arts
self-reflexive awareness of the medium can be self-indulgent too ;)
s
(christina - can you let me know if i'm still bouncing?
s
On 18/04/2007, at 3:31 PM, Paul Vanouse wrote:
hi jim,
yes, i totally agree with you that familiarity, literacy,
normalization, etc. are primary forces leading to the 'seeming'
transparency of a media form and obviously the qualities
(bandwith, etc.) too.
ps--sorry to take a day to reply ... had a bit of the flu and was
horizontal;-)
pv
On Apr 17, 2007, at 7:45 AM, Jim Andrews wrote:
Here is generally my stance on working in emerging media forms.
Emerging Media forms are those new technologies that have yet to
become standard communication tools--they tend to be surrounded by
hype, fear, disinformation, hyperbole, etc. Their very unusualness
makes them massively signifying--non-neutral--non-transparent forms
of communication, so that the "medium" tends to strongly impact
"the
message". For instance if you cast one statue out of bronze,
another
as a detailed, 3-d stereo halograph, and another identical shape
out
of putrid, live, glowing transgenic slime-mold the average viewer
will describe primarily the content of the first and the material/
medium of the second and third.
Thus, I don't believe that the familiar argument that a given
bleeding edge technology "allows me to best portray my inner
dreamscape" is very defendable since such technologies are not
particularly amenable to transparency. Artists need to understand
that their particular medium is not invisible and therefore its use
will transform/inform the viewer in some way. It may frighten,
seduce, normalize, create associations, etc.
I wonder if "transparency" concerning media is merely imaginative
acclimatization to the medium to the point where it seems 'natural'.
Walter Ong suggested that what we 'naturally' think is
'intelligence' (and
test for) is, instead, better described as types of literacy.
New media changes our notions of literacy. And thereby our
notions of
'intelligence'...?
ja
http://vispo.com
The more we say, the less it means?
The more we say, the more we affirm what we would negate and
negate what we
would affirm?
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