Media Specificity // 25th January 2012
Media Specificity // 25th January 2012
- Definition:
•Medium: material or technical means of artistic expression.
•Media is the plural form of medium.
•The dictionary defines media as all the communication devices and channels of communication used to reach mass audiences.
•First use of media in 1927, perhaps abstracted from mass media (1923, a technical term in advertising), pl. of medium in particular when useed
as an "intermediate agency," or a ‘carrier’ a sense first found c.1600.
- The relationship between medium specificity and media specificity is very closely related. However the term 'medium' was around long before the term 'media' which has only advanced in recent decades.
- Media Shapes what we do as individuals: Communication channels
•The physical nature of any given thing and its relationship to its environment determines the way it works or operates. This lecture will give a brief reminder of what we are as a species and what are our physical and mental limitations. It will then propose that all human attempts to construct media are attempts to extend beyond our physical and mental limitations and that each media we develop has its own limitations and strengths, which we need to understand if we are to make the most of what each media offers.
•This lecture takes as one of its central themes the borders and boundaries between media and will argue that any theoretical understanding of communication should include an investigation as to how and why particular media work in the way they do. It will introduce theories of medium specificity and will attempt to determine what traits define a media. It will ask what differentiates film, photography, games etc. from other existing modes of representation. How is photography distinct from painting? What are the defining traits of the cinematic? Are games narratives?
•As we deal with these theories, this lecture will attempt to show how they each moved from descriptions of the properties of specific medium to prescriptions for what the aesthetics of these media should look like.
•This medium-specific approach, will also explore how cross media narratives evolve and how comparison across media can be used to clarify the essence of any one particular media. Eisenstein, for example, rests his theory of the cinematic on analogies to text-based media, Bazin draws on notions of photography and theatre to talk about cinema.
•The intersections between expressive media rather than the borders between them are now becoming far more important and in particular this lecture will explore how the human being as a specific physical and social construction is the driving force behind how each media is used.
•Theories that celebrate hybridity and border crossing will also be introduced, and how the notion of medium specificity plays a central role in such formulations.
- Edward Tufte wrote an entire book using powerpoint to show how media has advanced and changed. The problem with powerpoint is that it uses bullet pointed information that is not easily broken down into text.
•Tufte argues that PowerPoint’s design inherently makes it more difficult to communicate with an audience.
•Instead of giving an informative presentation, PowerPoint encourages speakers to create slides with ultra-short, incomplete thoughts listed with bullets.
- What are we?
•Our medium specificity is that we are biological creatures. Organic in nature, we have a close genetic connection to the animal world.
•We specifically have intensive development and differentiation of the cerebral cortex. We also have an erect posture, free upper extremities,
adapted for using and making tools, and advanced development of the means of communication. However the need to maintain balance in
the erect posture caused a certain curvature of the spinal column and a shift in the general centre of gravity. Since the upper extremities were
no longer used for body support and walking, the skeleton of the lower extremities became stronger and their muscles developed, the feet
became arched to act as springs. All the systems of the internal organs have adapted to the erect posture, the means of delivering blood from
the lower extremities to the heart and the brain have become more complex. The diaphragm has shifted from a vertical to a horizontal position,
the muscles of the abdomen have come to perform a much greater role in the act of breathing. At a certain level of anthropogenesis, under the
•The newborn child is not a "tabula rasa" (clean slate) on which the environment draws patterns. Heredity equips the child not only with instincts, s/he is from the very beginning the possessor of the ability to imitate adults, their actions, the noises they make. S/he's physiological make-up (the round shape of the head, the sophisticated structure of the hands, the shape of the lips and the whole facial structure, the erect posture, etc.) are products of the social way of life, the result of interaction with other people.
influence of labour activity and communication, biological development became what is, in effect, the historical development of social systems.
•The basic aspects of our nature are physiological, psychological and sociological.
•At a basic physical level, we are part of the natural interconnection of physical and chemical phenomena and obey the laws of necessity.
However in spite of the limitations of this condition our highly developed cerebral cortex allows us to think our way out. If we cant reach it we
pick up a stick and if we cant outfight it we sharpen a stone axe.
•A human being is a biosocial being and the subject of social forms of life, communication and consciousness.
-Theories are deep concepts not easily broken down into text.
- Media Specificity is used in different contexts and different ways.
- Media specificity has evolved and changed over many decades and includes the transition from dipping ink and stilo to biro.
- We as humans are media specific: an animal built with certain features and characteristics
- The tools we develop are extension of our existing faculties. ( extensions of knowledge)
- The specificity of Homo Sapiens:
- Surgeons now operate using mechanical arms as this is more precise than the human structure.
- The tools that we develop vary from magnifying glasses, telescopes, reading glasses, etc.
- Smell and Touch:
The human body is unable to sense many potentially harmful substances in the air we breath. NASA has built an electronic nose to smell what the astronauts can’t. Inspired by the human olfactory system, the electronic nose is endowed with ultra-responsive sensors and a neural net to rapidly recognize any dangerous elements in the air.
Surgical workstations equipped with robotic arms can accurately perform motions as minute as 20 to 30 millionths of a meter. Working by teleoperation, the physician uses a joystick-like controller that scales down his hand motions, allowing for precision never before possible. Pressure encountered by the robot arm is transferred back through the controller, allowing the surgeon to feel what the robot encounters.
- There is a long history of extending audio tools: listening, recording, amplifying. These all stem from the idea of improving or extending the ear.
- New technologies often mimic old ones
- The world of multimedia uses analogue technologies to advance
- The use of medium in an old fashioned or dated way
Definition:
•Medium specificity is the view that the media associated with a given art form (both its material components and the processes by which they are exploited) entail specific possibilities for and constraints on representation and expression, and this provides a normative framework for what artists working in that art form ought to attempt.
•Noël Carroll 2008
Normative
Adjective: Establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, esp. of behaviour: For example, in a prison negative
sanctions my be introduced to enforce normative behaviour.
- What is media specificity?
- Clement Greenburg (late modernism) : closely associated between medium specificity and media specificity
An artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own medium.
“Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1776
proper area of competence" for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are "unique to the
nature" of a particular medium.
Medium specificity and media specific analysis are ways to identify new media art forms, such as Internet art.
Medium specificity can be used as an aesthetic judgement tool, it can be used to frame the question, “ Does this work fulfil the promise
contained in the medium used to bring the artwork into existence?”
We now move from descriptions of the properties of specific medium to prescriptions for what the aesthetics of these media should look like.
- Media specificity is a pre-modernist idea that relates to the modernist concept ‘Truth to materials’.
- It can be seen as an idea directly in contrast to the phrase “ut pictura poesis” or “as is painting, so is poetry,” taken from Horace’s Ars Poetica
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 essay, Laocošn argues that the media of painting and poetry are inherently different, because while poetry unfolds in time, painting exists in space. He states that these medias should not overstep their respective terrains.
- Lessing contends that an artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own medium.
Clement Greenberg in Towards a Newer Laocoon 1940 states: Medium specificity holds that "the unique and proper area of competence" for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are "unique to the nature" of a particular medium.
Media Specificity in the fine art world:
•Michael Fried 1966 essay "Art and Objecthood" is an attack on minimalist art for producing effects that do not derive from within the work itself,
but instead are dependent on the viewer's relationship with the object. This, he insists, "is now the negation of art" (Fried, 1967)•According to Fried, minimalists took Greenberg's plea for purity too far; instead of exploring the materiality of the media, all they do is present
the materials for what they are.
- This interaction is theatrical because it exists within space and time, while Fried contends that visual art should instead aspire to absorption, which he casts as the opposite of theatricality.
- The work should present itself whole at every instant, and not depend on the viewer's relation to what is being seen.
- Media Specificity defines new art forms.
- Pre-modernist idea's relate to "truth to materials"
- As artists continued, they began to refine their idea's. Media Specificity created a ritual to show understanding
- In order for a medium to have characteristic qualities it must be grounded in a tradition that has established these qualities as intrinsic
properties: the image on the right is by Mauavich, and on the left by Jotto. Jotto would not paint a black square. Underlines geometry to give is character. Geometry then went on to influence cubism, everything became relative within art. It was not jut about media but about the concepts that define media also.
Media specificity as Communication Theory Marshall McLuhan:
- The media that we produce things in defines design intensions.
- 'Media' was not even considered to be a term in 1966
- "Medium is the Message" became "MEdium is the massage" through spelling error and typeset error, however this was the point McLuhan wanted to translate and so the error was kept and new copies were not produced.
•“The medium is the message"
•The central idea in his 1964 book: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
•McLuhan calls attention to the intrinsic effect of communications media and explains that it is not the content, it is the carrier that creates meaning.
•McLuhan expands our understanding of media.
•The medium becomes the media which is
itself simply an extension of our own
physical and mental limitations.
Reshaping ourselves:
- The way in which we receive media changes what we can do with it.
- Mobile phones now divide our attention.
- Around 140BC Socrates Phaedrus wrote " The alphabet created forgetfulness"
- Retevic was taught to mena nd women to improve memory. The memory in an average London taxi driver is much larger than normal because
they have to remember a whole variety of different places. This has changed over time with the average human as we no longer exercise our
brain as we have done in the past. This has only come about with the advances in technology a couple of decades ago.
•If we are defined by our physical and mental limitations, by extending these we change the definition of ourselves.
•“Electronic technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal lives”. MM
•“Print technology fostered a process of specialism and detachment”. MM
•Until writing was invented we lived in acoustic space. This was a world of emotion,… speech was the social chart of this bog. MM •MM - Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage 1967
- Our social pattern is shaped by media:
- Newspapers are half way between individual and communal media
- Living rooms were once centred around the fireplace, however when the television was introduced this became the focal point of our social
domain
- The television led to the social advances in Cinema, which then led on to social pattern shifts bringing in the Radio.
- Crystal sets meant that radio waves could be captured = social conditions changed
Social extensions
•Social [knowledge] building as a creative process of knowing will be collectively extended to the whole of human society (McLuhan 1964)
Mobile phone networks, Facebook, Twitter
•Electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale
(McLuhan; 1962 Gutenberg galaxy)
"The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village." (McLuhan 1966)
What we are extending..
“Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer
information. Our electronically configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.”
MM
Perceptual grouping and binding is one of the main functions of ‘early vision’.
Ramachandran & Hirstein 1999
Technological development reflects existing human neurological as well as physiological capacity.
- pattern recognition: brain structure
- extension of physical and mental faculty
- photography dealt with media specificity very early on
- Pictorialism frame and compose light and dark
Technology as memory extensions
•Footprints
•Drawing, painting and symbol making
•Writing
•Printing
•Photography
•Sound recording
•Silent Film
•Technological convergence of Sound recording and Silent Film
•TV
•Computers (1940s)
•Magnetic tape (Available to the public from 1940s)
•Video tape (Available to the public from 1969)
•Audio-cassettes replace reel-to-reel tape, video-cassettes replace home movies.
•Digital convergence , the switch from analogue to digital, concentrated on reducing size and increasing speed and capacity. Today’s
computers use miniature integrated-circuit technology in conjunction with rapid-access memory. Computers are desk-top, lap-top, palm-top and
will soon be ‘embedded’ in other technologies and even in human beings. The next generation of computers is expected to use forms of
‘artificial intelligence’.
•Information storage now includes ourselves. The Visible Human Project (VHP) has created anatomically detailed, three-dimensional
representations of both the male and female bodies. The first ‘visible human’ was Joseph Paul Jernigan, a 39-year-old Texan convicted of
murder and executed by lethal injection in 1993. Jernigan has been memorized or ‘reincarnated’ as a 15-gigabyte database.
Sound and media specificity
•In the 1920's the 10-inch 78 rpm Shellac gramophone disc became the most popular recording medium.
•A 10 inch disc rotating at 78 rpm limited the duration of recorded time on each side of a disc to around three minutes.
•Songwriters and performers tailored their songs to fit. The 3-minute single remained the song recording standard until well into the 1960s
when the availability of microgroove recording and improved mastering techniques enabled recording artists to increase the duration of their
recordings. (In particular Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone and the Beatles’ Hey Jude)
•The 3 minute idea still persists and over 95% of all new popular hits still fit this format.
•Radio airplay time or slots are now based on 3 minutes. Songs that are longer usually get a remix (often called a Radio Edit) to makes them
shorter to fit.
•What started out as an engineering limitation has been adopted and maintained by commercial interests.
In song writing terms this becomes: Verse - Chorus - Verse2 - Chorus2 - Bridge - Chorus3
A short history of Vinyl
1932: The first stereo disc is recorded by Stokowski at Bell labs in Philadelphia using vinyl rather than shellac. By the mid 1930s vinyls are sent to disc jockeys (a term earned through jockeying up the next record) to avoid breakage of shellac copies in the mail.
1940: Mobile DJs become popular around the world as entertainers for military troops during WWII, however they still only use a single record player.
1943: Jimmy Savile launches one of the world’s first DJ dance parties playing jazz records in an upstairs function room in Leeds.
1947: One of the first people to use twin turntables for continuous play is Jimmy Saville who pays a metalworker to weld two domestic record decks together for more continuous play at his dance parties in Leeds. This style of ‘twin-deck’ DJing utilising a microphone for talk over becomes industry standard.
1947: The “Whiskey-A-Go-Go” opens in Paris playing popular records, this is considered by some to be the very first disco.
1948: Columbia Records introduce the 12inch vinylite Long Play (LP) 33rpm record.
1949: RCA Victor release the first 45 rpm single, seven inches in diameter, with a large centre hole to accommodate automatic play mechanisms. (Microgroove technology introduced)
1951: The first Jukebox that can play 7-inch 45 rpm records is introduced. 
- Photographers want to be seen as artists.
- Pictorialism comes form paintings.
- Extensions of mental faculties as well as specific ones
- Early films had no narrative
- Early animation links to film but has very different devices.
Photography
•The concept of medium-specificity has had a profound impact on photography. In its early history, photography struggled to establish itself as
a legitimate art form. Theorists devised a justification for the art of photography that positioned it against its competitor, painting. Art
photographers such as Stieglitz, Weston, and Strand argued that in order for photography to be taken seriously, it must operate only according
to its own capabilities: it must not aspire to imitate the aesthetics or materials of painting. The art of photography became defined on strictly
medium-specific terms.
The photographic Tableau vivant
- 19th century photography mimics paintings and theatre
- Pictorialism as a response, is seen by early 20th century photographic critics as being more media specific; however, poctiorialism is 'Like a
picture'. i.e It's values derive from painting
- The Tableau Vivant is re-interpreted as being media specific in the 1980s in particular through the influence of Jean-Francois Chevrier’s essay The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography (1989) and Jeff Wall’s large scale constructed images. Pictorialism, according to Jeff Wall could be seen as an attempt by photographers to unsuccessfully imitate painting.
- "By divesting itself of the encumbrances and advantages inherited from older art forms, reportage, or the spontaneous fleeting aspect of the photographic image pushes toward a discovery of qualities apparently intrinsic to the medium, qualities that must necessarily distinguish the medium from others and through the self-examination of which it can emerge as a modernist art on a plane with others” Jeff Wall
The lens as an extension of the faculty of sight
•A camera lens can be seen as an extension of the eye. Kamps, (2011) explains the relationship between the eye and a camera and his
explanation helps us understand the media specific nature of lens based media and also how we can understand the camera as an extension
of our faculty of sight. He points to the fact that both eyes and lenses focus an inverted image onto a light sensitive surface, the retina and the
film stock, as well as both being able to adjust the amount of light entering, using aperture change and iris dilation. More importantly he points
out the differences, in particular the subjective nature of human sight and the way that a camera is “an absolute measurement device” . This
means that a camera sensor does not have the intelligence of a brain associated with it and that “the signals recorded need to be adjusted to
suit the colour temperature of the light illuminating the scene”. Therefore all the technological developments surrounding lens selection,
aperture adjustment, film stock sensitivity, lighting equipment etc. etc. are all developments that are designed to help make the camera as
sensitive as the eye. The camera operator of course being the ‘brain’ behind choices made in terms of the use of this technology.
•The audience have grown up with their own ‘sight’ and the experiences associated with visual perception will be directly associated with the
images produced by film technology. It is at this basic level that perhaps emotional empathy operates, a dark scene being associated with
experiences of the dark in the ‘real world’, such as being in a cave or being out at night; bright light being associated with early visual
experiences of a summer’s day or a spring morning.
Film
Münsterberg was the first writer to establish the specific nature of film as an art form. In1916, he points to flashbacks, close-ups, and edits as
the techniques that are used in film to capture narratives and contrasts these to the means available to theatrical productions.
“These devices (close-ups, edits etc.) are all objectifications of mental processes.” He points out that these techniques are what distinguish film
from theatre. In his writings he also introduced ideas relating to audience reception.
He started to ask questions as to how and why an audience might learn the conventions of this new art form. He pointed to the fact that
audiences did not get confused by large close ups in comparison with medium format shots. They did not think for instance this meant people
were getting bigger or smaller.
Panofsky (1934) states that an audience’s enjoyment of film is not to do with subject matter, but to do with “the sheer delight that things
seemed to move.”
Perception Is Movement, Movement Is Perception
Salvatore Leonardi
Movement is an attention Getting Device:
External attention getting devices -
intensity and size
contrast - unexpected stimuli (orienting response)
repetition
movement we naturally respond to movement (midbrain)
Internal attention getting devices
motives and emotions needs, interests
set or expectancy past experience tunes us primed
During cinema's history, a whole repertoire of techniques (lighting, editing, camera supports, the use of different film stocks and lens, etc.) were developed to modify the basic record obtained by a film apparatus.
Photography is coupled with a motor and a set of particular physical constraints were worked with that we now understand as the media specificity of film.
Jean-Luc Godard defined cinema as: “Truth 24 frames per second“
Bazin introduces the idea of reality "captured" on film, which implied that cinema was about photographing what existed before the camera, rather than "creating the 'never-was'" of special effects. Rear projection and blue screen photography, matte paintings and glass shots, mirrors and miniatures, optical effects and other techniques which allowed filmmakers to construct and alter the moving images, were seen as suspicious by many early film critics.
The difficulty of modifying images once they were recorded was what gave cinema its value as a document, and this was at the core of Bazin’s media specific film theory. He makes a distinction between “those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality”
However other early theorists such as Eisenstein tended to mix up their theories and Eisenstein’s interest in Montage directly contradicts Bazin.
However both use specific media contexts on which to build theory.
Bazin: the lens collects light and the film stock records it.
Eisenstein: Film must be cut and reassembled in order to create narrative.
Eisenstein describes five methods of montage in his introductory essay "Word and Image“, in it he combines literary theory with film theory.
Metric - where the editing follows a specific number of frames (based purely on the physical nature of time), cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the image.
Rhythmic - includes cutting based on continuity, creating visual continuity from edit to edit.
Tonal - a tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots to elicit a reaction from the audience; more complex than from the metric or rhythmic montage. For example, a sleeping baby would emote calmness and relaxation.
Overtonal/Associational - the overtonal montage is the cumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to synthesize its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect.
Intellectual - uses shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning.
Bazin advocated the use of deep focus, wide shots and the "shot-in-depth", and preferred what he referred to as "true continuity" through mise en scène over experiments in editing and visual effects. This placed him in opposition to film theory of the 1920s and 1930s which emphasized how the cinema can manipulate reality. The famous staircase sequence from The Battleship Potemkin employs montage to create the illusion that the staircase is almost endless, and intercuts shots of a stroller rolling down the steps with close-ups of horrified faces and dying people, thus destroying the reality of the actual space and using metaphors and juxtaposition to create a specific response. Wells and Renoir use the lens to capture the totality of a situation so that the audience have maximum information to allow them to read what is going on.
Film Stock
•The technical specifics of Velvia (Velvia, 2012) are that it is a type of daylight-balanced colour reversal film and has a smooth image structure,
t also has extremely high levels of colour saturation and image quality. It was very fast, had a fine grain and an ISO of 50. Because of the high
levels of colour saturation and image quality, Velvia’s main use in film making was for landscape shots and special-effects backgrounds.
However one film in particular used Velvia as a chosen film stock, this was Vincent Ward directed film What Dreams May Come (1998) starring
Robin Williams, where the action takes place inside an actual painting. In this case the choice of this highly saturated film stock was perfect.
The Velvia film stock was used to create the feeling of being inside the world of the canvas, its saturated colours reflecting the fact that all the
action was supposed to be taking place within a painter’s colour palette. When action takes place in the ‘real-world’ the film stock changes back
into a normal standard Kodak film stock.
Before film stock a variety of handcrafted methods were used. Magic lantern slides were painted at least until the 1850s; so were the images used in the Phenakistiscope, the Thaumatrope, the Zootrope, the Praxinoscope, the Choreutoscope and other nineteenth century proto-cinematic devices.
Not only were the images created manually, they were also manually animated. In Robertson's Phantasmagoria, which premiered in 1799, magic lantern operators moved behind the screen in order to make projected images appear to advance and withdraw. Nineteenth century optical toys enjoyed in private homes also required manual action to create movement -- twirling the strings of the Thaumatrope, rotating the Zootrope's cylinder, turning the Viviscope's handle.
Film animation links the hand craft of drawing to the motor and film’s projection technology.
Norman McLaren “Animation is the art of movements that are drawn. What happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame. Animation is therefore the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between the frames.“
Comics
•Due to their media certain art forms are better at certain tasks than others.
•The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach
•From the chapter: Making Comics into Film p. 149
• By Aaron Meskin, Roy T. Cook, Warren Ellis To be released Feb. 2012
We learn to read meaning into physical properties because we are used to doing that from an early age.
Somewhere in the background of a good communication is your mum’s smile.
Comic Specificity
Comics have guttered which allow the narrative to operate
Each page is segmented into panels (or frames), which have borders that separate them from other panels.
Individual panels contain one part of a story (perhaps dialogue between characters), or a character's inner thoughts (represented by speech
and thought balloons) that leads into the next panel.
Panels are routinely separated by blank areas called gutters.
Panels are set out to logically flow one to another, guiding the reader's eyes so that they can take in the story in a sequential manner.
Comic books are often called sequential art -- a type of graphic storytelling.
Shaping the Maxx is the classic text examining how a complex comic book could be transferred to TV. http://www2.gsu.edu/~jougms/Maxx.htm
Adaptation across media is necessarily a process of translation, you can’t merely import forms from one medium to another. The work of
adaptation transforms the original content because the new medium cannot simply duplicate the old.
Animation often translates wide frames in a comic into horizontal camera movements. Camera movements also provide the translation for more
complex comics devices. Usually a change of comics frames signals a new spatial perspective on the action, this might become a pan or slow
zoom when it translates into film.
Format
•In graphics format often rules Format can be digital or material
•Software formats
•AI - Adobe Illustrator's metafile format.
•CGM - Computer Graphics Metafile: An International Standards Organization metafile format for images.
•GIF - Graphics Interchange Format
•JFIF - The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) File Interchange Format. Where would you be without compression?
•PSD - Adobe Photoshop's native format, which stores all of its layer and selection and miscellaneous other image data.
Type formats live on as a memory of old technology.
The design grid is a ghost of Guttenberg from 1439
The Medium is the Massage is a typo
Formats of measurements are locked; taken from old fashioned typeset
Medium = Practice
Painting/Sculpting = Fine Art
The digital Age
Today, with the shift to digital media, the marginalized techniques of image manipulation (Rear projection and blue screen photography, matte paintings and glass shots, mirrors and miniatures etc.) move to the centre.
In effect digital technology merges disciplines. Film and animation become combined, CGI creating a world of hard to distinguish differences between live action and animation.
As differences between media disappear the concept of medium-specificity needs to change or it becomes redundant. Media can also be defined by the social or cultural context they are practiced within and this is perhaps a way into looking at convergent media.
Extending the social
•In his 1977 book Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams proposed a reading of medium-specificity where media are defined by the social
or cultural context they are practiced in (“From Medium to Social Practice”).
•Williams traces the evolution in art historical terminology from defining artworks according to “medium,” to defining them as “practice.” For
instance students used to study ‘painting’ or ‘sculpture’ now they study ‘fine art practice’.
•Post-modernism emphasises the conceptual rather than the material basis of practice.
•Like Williams, Rosalind Krauss argues for a “different specificity” in what she deems “the post-medium condition,” A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition.
•The Greenbergian notion of medium-specificity will not be located in materials or methods, but in the “essence of Art itself”. The successful art of this post-medium age will reflect on its own practice in relation to the past.
•Are the old and the new media completely separate entities or are new media old media delivered with new technologies?
•For Bolter and Grusin the specificity of new media, their “newness,” lies in the way they remediate older media. Building on McLuhan, they define remediation as “the representation of one medium in another.” This conceptualises the relationship between old and new media not as oppositional but as part of a media genealogy, focusing on their connections and affiliations instead.
•Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. “Remediation.” Configurations 4.3 (1996): 311-358
Where are we going?
•The convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science is transforming global society. Technological convergence is beginning to define the way societies interact and organise themselves.
•The new technologies that convergence produces have immense consequences for global security, communications, surveillance, health, ecosystems, biogenetics and the prolongation of life. And as with every new technology, new marginalised groups (the ‘have nots’) are being created.
•In particular, cybernetics – the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things – is having a revolutionary impact on education and culture, on genetic research and evolving biotechnologies, on food production and the health of people. New applications are being developed that not only contest previous theories, but may also change the very nature of human self-understanding and the social relationships that sustain it.
•Science fiction will become science fact, we may in future become an extension of the media itself
Is media specificity a product of science fiction?
Robots?! Media specificity being an extension on ourself will be much clearer
