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

[José Carlos Silvestre]

I have intentionally excluded "performative" media that lack a physical
substrate from my operational definitions of medium and media device,
because I wanted to focus on the problem of materiality and especially of
the materiality of audiovisual media - the "thickness of the screen." How
materiality is played out in such "immaterial" media sounds like a
fascinating problem, if somewhat off-topic; have you worked on this? I'd
love to hear.

I have emphasized material properties - again, for obvious reasons -, but I
do not see why you claim I discard soft and social aspects. For instance, I
have made clear that I was thinking the technological object in a
Simondonian-Deleuzian sense, and have repeatedly emphasized that human usage
and expectations are constitutive not only of the media device but of its
possibility of materiality.


On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 4:42 AM, Simon Biggs <s.biggs at eca.ac.uk> wrote:

>  I think this is a highly reductivist and materialist understanding of
> mediality. If we always employed such an approach much of our media theory
> would never have been written (perhaps not a bad thing).
>
> A medium is far more than simply its physical substrate. It involves soft
> and social aspects too. Soft media, such as language, cinema and software.
> Social media, such as ritual and the performative. The medium of film, which
> Pall proposed, is a good example. Much of what we experience today as film
> doesn’t involve film. It is shot on 4k HD and digitally projected within a
> cinema context. Our experience of the artefact is little different to what
> it has always been and we continue to call it by its traditional name –
> film, flick, cinema, etc. However, its materiality has profoundly changed.
>
> This is not to say these changes are without consequence. Even liminal
> changes in technology and media can affect our reception of the work.
> However, to persist in an exclusively materialist approach to mediality will
> likely lead to a narrow view of what a medium is, overlooking how media
> evolves and even entire areas of mediation that are of a non-physical
> character. The medium of film is far more than its material parts. It is as
> much a function of its social characteristics as its mechanical (and
> increasingly electronic and digital) elements.
>
> As Pall observes, media are assembled as apparatus, the projector being one
> element. However, the components of an apparatus are not always material.
> Apparatus and technologies are composed of numerous elements, many of which
> are not immediately visible or exist in the social as well as, or rather
> than, material. Also, it should be noted that whilst an element may be a
> critical part of a medium in one state in another it may be nothing to do
> with media at all (eg: a screen that becomes a wall).
>
> Just as Pall disagrees with a definition of media that confuses media with
> technology I disagree with a definition that determines media as necessarily
> material.
>
> A screen may have no thickness at all – or be as thick as our imagination
> permits.
>
> Best
>
> Simon
> *
>
> From: *Pall Thayer <palli at pallit.lhi.is>
> *Reply-To: *soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> *Date: *Thu, 3 Sep 2009 01:18:43 +0000
> *To: *soft_skinned_space <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> *Subject: *Re: [-empyre-] First Theme and Guests - the Thickness of the
> Screen
>
> Literature is not a medium. The medium of literature is
> print. Film is a medium but only if you're talking about the film that
> you wind up on spools. The wider class of "film" or "cinema" is a
> collection of various media.
>
> Simon Biggs
> Research Professor
> edinburgh college of art
> s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
> www.eca.ac.uk
> www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
>
> simon at littlepig.org.uk
> www.littlepig.org.uk
> AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
>
>
>
>
>
> Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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