Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis

[eyescratch <eyescratch@gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> So you want new media? Replay your avi file of the opening
> ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics.
>
> What I am trying to get at with all of this is that art is
> essentially media, it is not merely but essentially about
> communication, only what is communicated is not just a phrase or
> a slogan or a piece of information, but a problematic attempt
> to reconfigure a world on every level of sensate and imaginary
> experience.

Much of media studies is obsessed with witnessing an existence that is
part of mediality, to borrow a term from the previous discussion, by
placing great emphasis on inserting the observer into the equation.
Nevertheless these studies formulate a distinction to preserve some
authorship role. What this kind of representational relationship
ignores is that it precludes any kind of intervention in favor of a
conservation. If the art cannot be conserved because it is conceptual
or a piece of code, the identity of the author is preserved and
celebrated. This is because a piece of media arrives at its monetary
value by being bundled with products that claim to correct the
injustices, needs, or ailments being described in that piece of media.
The media is monetized either for its value of showing a certain lack
or showing the idealized completion that a product might fulfill. An
authorship identity, it turns out, can fulfill this marketing function
nicely for the lack of any particular object that might or might not
exist or lacks monetary value, culminating it seems these days in a
guarded wikipedia entry.

Turns out, while searching for a word to describe the process of
entering into communication via media I looked up mediated. There is
plenty of secondary literature on McLuhan using this word to capture
the processes McLuhan describes, but he himself only uses the word
mediated with the original definition to describe the arbitration
that happens in a conflict. Using the term mediated in the sense that
a form of communication is performed via media, still implies that
there is an exchange occurring where each party must sacrifice some
of their preconceptions in a productive process that is manufacturing
representation. Otherwise this representation veers very quickly
towards the ideological.

hTTp://eyescratch.tk





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