[-empyre-] First Theme and Guests - the Thickness of the Screen

[José Carlos Silvestre]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 5:56 PM, Pall Thayer <palli at pallit.lhi.is> wrote:

> This is an interesting introduction. It begs a lot of questions. To
> begin with, there's your distinct use of the terms "medium", on one
> hand, and "medium device" on the other. Your application of the terms
> would suggest that there exist media which are not devices. I would
> argue that every medium is a device.
>

Oh, let me clarify this. By "medium" there I mean larger complexes (such as
"the medium of literature" or "the medium of film"), and by "media devices"
I mean specific technological objects (the projector, the camera, the book)



> Next, I have to take issue with your definition of media as devices
> that "produce, store, transmit or provide access to content". Media is
> something in the middle that passes information on. In the case of
> art, we could say that media is used to transfer information from the
> mind of the creator to the that of the beholder. If we try to claim
> that media is capable of "producing" information then it's no longer
> in between things. We must then assume that the artist herself is a
> medium. If you really stretch things, such an argument could perhaps
> be made but that would seriously undermine the role of the artist as
> the initiator of her "message". Then we get into "god" territory.
>

Well, whether you are painting, filming, or coding, you are using tools to
produce something; it was in this sense that I used the word there, not as a
replacement of human agency but as a co-agent in the creative process (in
which media devices are far from passive tools). These devices are not in
themselves transmitters - the "in-between" sense of medium in Information
Theory - but they are usually grouped in these discussions under devices of
media anyway.

I prefer the materialistic perspective that substitutes "message" for
"abstractable pattern of operation," though, exactly for this reason:
"message" or "content" leads us too easily into dangerous idealisms - the
"god territory" in the end of the problem of origins and so on...



> Finally, I would say that defining media as devices that store
> information ignores the primary function of media which is to transfer
> or transmit information. Something that only stores information
> without also delivering it can't be called media because it doesn't
> mediate. We could say that it "stores and transmits or transmits" but
> not that it "stores or transmits".
>


Agreed; it can, however, be a media device in a larger complex of devices.
Information stored would have to be retrieved at some point, though, anyway.
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