week 1 sound and vision lecture context

“Digitality is among us. It haunts all the messages and signs of our society, and we can clearly locate its most concrete form in the test, the question /answer, the stimulus / response”

Jean Baudrillard 1993.

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

As Radical as Reality


Digital Natives and Analogue Man


The Digital Age - New Media Ecologies

• Switch from analogue culture to digital.

• Old media (tv, film, photography, print, vinyl etc.) to new media (computers, ipods, blogs, mobile telephony, wi fi , internet, email, kindle, ipads....).

• Intensification rather than break.


The New comes from Old

• New Media work have their roots in earlier movements and in the work of earlier artists. Processes of intensification, reformation and remediation.

• Like these older forms, many new media forms see themselves as creating more meaningful, engaged roles for viewers, readers, listeners. As such like many older media forms they are premised on a critique of other media forms (tv, film)


• The limits of naming and describing New Media

• All New Media forms can be put to uses their makers never envisaged or could have predicted.

• “there is nothing in the technologies themselves that dictated how they would be used by the societies that invented them”( John Ellis, Visible Ficitons,1982)

The Chameleon


The Musical Revolution


Withered Hand

• one to one, autonomy, self management, independence....(?)Wednesday, 19 September 2012

• “the internet, allied with digital reproduction, has generated a new problem for the owners of copyright because the ability to record is allied with the ability to distribute’

• New Media: A Critical Introduction, pg. 194


The paradoxes of change

• Dematerialisation -distribution - free culture? Copyright breakdown.

• Demise of concentrated listening (?)

• Soft control - creative templates.

• Old hierarchies lose power?


• New Media forms are highly decentralised and dispersed. New Media content is highly migrant, 360 degree programming (convergence)

• Rise of ‘prouser’. Media production have been radically ‘popularised’ - theoretically anyone can access ‘specialist’ production techniques (Final Cut, Logic, Photoshop etc.). Dissolving of professional / amateur division.

• Distribution has partially been ‘democratised’ (myspace, soundcloud, vimeo, the web) . In part this is due to dematerialisation of many forms (eg. music). Non hierarchical networks. One to one replaced by many to many

The Digital Age - New Media New Forms


• New ways of representing and interpreting the world (eg. immersive virtual environments, cloud databases, online archives eg. wikipedia, youtube etc. )

• New textual experiences and patterns of consumption (computer games, simulations, cgi, augmented reality.

• New conceptions of community, identity and the body. New Media forms such as email, social network sites have radically transformed our sense of time and place. IMAGE SMART MOBS

• Blurring of boundaries between real and virtual, the natural and the artificial, the human and the cyborg.

The Digital Age - New Media New Experiences


• Digital

• Interactive

• Hypertextual

• Virtual

• Networked

• Simulated

The Digital Age - New Media Key Terms


• From Modernism to Postmodernism

• Globalisation - dissolving of nation state and boundaries, greater economic, cultural social exchange (friction free economy)

• In the west, the shift from manufacturing production to postindustrial information age (knowledge economy)

• Decentring of power from west to east.

The Digital Age - Reasons for these changesCause and Effect - Chicken and Egg


“Depression occurs, Franco Bifo Beradi argues, when the speed and complexity of the flows of information overwhelm the capacities of the ‘social brain” to manage these flows, inducing a panic that concludes, shortly thereafter, with a depressive plunge. Depression is so widespread today , Bifo argues, because the contemporary organisation of production of surplus value is founded on the phenomenon – the accumulation – of speed”

Jason Smith, pg. 10 introduction to the soul at work


effects?• integration of media and everyday life

• changing relationship private public

• hybridisation human and machine

• shifting identities, subjectivity (avatars)


The externalisation of the human nervous system -arthur Kroker

• “Understanding the self as a networked presence has almost become commonplace - consciousness is increasingly understood as an ’assemblage’ in which technologically mediated communications systems are as much part of our consciousness as ‘nature’ or the body’

• New Media :A Critical Introduction, pg. 168

The mediated nature of everyday life


The postives.....


Paradise Regained?• Marshall McLuhan -four

stages- primitive, oral culture, the culture of literacy (middle ages) , print culture (the Guttenberg galaxy) the power of the word - the electronic culture -marked by Sensory plenitude - shift from logocentrism (the power of the word over all overs) haptic harmony a global village... all at onceness,


New Claims for New Media?• Social network sites (re)create

communities and offer spheres of public debate (cyber communities)

• Information and communication no longer centrally controlled (rise of the blog)

• Alternative media (unofficial news reporting -see student protests Jody McIntyre )

• The possibilities for new identities new relationship’s via said virtual communities etc.

32


Smart mobs

• arab spring, global student protests....Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Techno Utopianism and Dystopian

‘Not only is access to online resources globally

uneven, it has been shown that the digital divide

mirrors income inequality in Western countries’

New Media, pg. 185

The digital divide


“nothing could be

more useful, and nothing

more useless”

Jean Baudrillard (1990)


‘the unthinkable complexity of cyberspace” William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)


The Digital Age - Responses

• How to represent the scale and complexity of this new global, digital culture? To filter the volumes of visual , audio, literary information now accessible to us.

• How to make art that is as radical as the reality we are faced with.

• How to make visible the invisible workings, the flows of this networked culture.


History

To be of one’s time

Umberto Boccioni'Unique Forms Of Continuity In Space' 1913

Gare Saint-Lazare, the Saint-Lazare railway station (1877)


A Culture of Denial?


• ‘the development of print[..]in the mid fifteenth century is generally seen as the first mass medium and is often cited as a key factor in the development of modern rationality and subjectivity, and the undermining of the medieval religious world’ Mark Poster, Postmodern Virtualities (1995)


week 1 sound and vision lecture context

Technology

new media computers

new problemfor

ability todistribute

media forms tv

older media forms

new textual experiences

new conceptions of community

old media tv