Tag: media

Adventures in Illegal Art

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments
Reading Time: 3 minutes

We caught up with a friend last night for dinner followed by Mark Hosler’s
presentation, "Adventures in Illegal Art: Creative Media Resistance and
Negativeland" in SU’s Shemin Auditorium. Hosler’s been involved with
Negativeland for 25 years. The group
self-identifies with media hoaxes; provocative audio-mixed new media films and
shorts; and radical fair use
politics (i.e., it’s all public domain). They’re well-known for
lifting material from U2, mixing
it into a two-sided vinyl single including profanity and stolen U2 cuts, then
repackaging the album in a jacket with U2 featured prominently so as to dupe
unsuspecting consumers. Lawsuits followed, as you might expect, and Hosler
alluded to a dicey four years, fraught with legal uncertainty. Here’s that album cover:

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Manovich – The Language of New Media (2001)

/ Derek Mueller
Reading Time: 6 minutes

Notes on Lev Manovich’s The
Language of New Media (2001). In the prologue, Manovich gives us what he
calls a Vertov Dataset–full-passage selections from elsewhere in the book
matched up with frames from Vertov.   It’s a distinctive and memorable
way to open onto the project–self-sampling and re-associating, which emphasizes
(paradoxically?) the relational and modular qualities of new media objects, the
intertwined historical-theoretical trajectories of cinema and computing that now
constitute new media, the logics of selection, association and assemblage
driving new media, and the evolving lexicon of new media, from database, loops
and micronarratives to transcoding, [var]-montage and the tele-. 
It’s all in the Vertov Dataset, then explained more fully elsewhere. 

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Hansen – New Philosophy for New Media (2004)

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments
Reading Time: 5 minutes

The foreword by Tim Lenoir, "Haptic Vision: Computation, Media, and
Embodiment in Mark Hansen’s New Phenomenology," lays out groundwork on the "deterritorialization
of the human subject" in terms of digital media, detachment and problems of
reference.  Lenoir touches on Hayles’ account of post-humanism (also Bill
Joy’s "Why The Future
Doesn’t Need Us"), Shannon & Weaver’s signal-based model of information, and
Donald McKay’s alternative communication model.  Overall, it’s more than a
worthwhile thumbnail of Hansen’s project in the context of other works only
semi-familiar to me: Kittler’s Gramophone, Deleuze’s Cinema 1 & 2:,
and Henri Bergson on the body as image:

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Bolter and Grusin – Remediation (1999) III

/ Derek Mueller
Reading Time: 3 minutes

In
the final section of Remediation, B&G break out three self orientations–three
varieties of self in light of the forceful processes of remediation: the
remediated self, the virtual self, and the networked self.  The remediated
self basically begins with a notion of self as summative and re/configurable
(like William James’ empirical self (233)) rather than rigid or authentic. 
Remediated self gives way to (at least) two variations of self:  immersed
and interrelated/interconnected.  These selves correspond to the poles of
remediation; the immersed experiences the visually mediated as transparent and
immediate; the interrelated/interconnected self experiences the visually
mediated as opaque and navigable (232).  According to B&G, we experience
ourselves in both ways.  This connects up with expressive activity, too.
Virtual reality (where the user moves through) fits with romantic selfhood,
while opacity and ubiquitous computing are akin to the fixed-subject self of the
Enlightenment.  The clearer part of this first chapter in section
three–"The Remediated Self"–builds on the duality of self as object and
subject in the specific case of bodybuilding.  In bodybuilding, when "the
body is reconstructed to take on a new shape and identity," the body as medium
seems most plausible (237).

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Bolter and Grusin – Remediation (1999) II

/ Derek Mueller
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Let’s call this entry part two of three. I’m a bit behind (behind what? just
my own schedule), but I’m through the application chapters–the middle 140 pages
of B&G.  In the paragraph opening into the final section, "Self," B&G write
that these middle chapters are applications of remediation as a process. 
In their glossary, B&G define remediation this way:

remediation Defined by Paul Levenson as the "anthropotropic" process
by which new media technologies improve upon or remedy prior technologies. 
We define the term differently, using it to mean the formal logic by which new
media refashion prior media forms.  Along with immediacy and hypermediacy,
remediation is one of the three traits of our genealogy of new media. (273).

B&G discuss remediation as this logics-guided process involved with a variety
of media throughout section two: computer games (88), digital photography (104), photorealistic
graphics (114), digital art (132), film (146), virtual reality (160), mediated
spaces (168), the www (196), and ubiquitous computing (212).  In the final
section, "Convergence," B&G offer an explanation for more various push-pull
relationships among media.  Whereas remediation tends to describe a uni-directional
process of influence, convergences are akin to blends–multi-directional
shapings felt among media (where television flows into the www and the www flows
into television).  Convergence rel. to remediation: a sloshing media
spillway, a complex subversion of remediation’s teleology.

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Bolter and Grusin – Remediation (1999) I

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments
Reading Time: 3 minutes

The remediation project depends on a double-logic.  Tangled around and
around one another, bread-tie like, hypermediacy (opacity) and immediacy
(transparency) stand as the two poles between which all remediation oscillates
(again, oscillations, as from Lanham).  Hypermediacy is the
"frenetic design" that comes with exciting and blending mediaforms into one
another.  Immediacy refers to the dreamwish of closing the gap
between the real and the mediaform.  Hypermediacy invites others to
enjoy the interplay (explicit); immediacy strives for the perfect
mimesis, a match with reality so convincing that the real/virtual distinctions
wash together, ripple-free (tacit).  Remediation, relative to these poles,
synthesizes, collects them together again, keeps order, shepherds inventive
deviations and garbled others back in step: web ‘pages’ inhere newspaper layout,
television inheres film, blogs, just like diaries. 

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Taylor and Saarinen – Imagologies (1994)

/ Derek Mueller / 7 Comments
Reading Time: 4 minutes

In Imagologies, Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen weave and warp through a series of new media (vintage 1994) fabrics. I call them fabrics because the book’s designer, Marjaana Virta, does: “Mediatext: A collection of fabrics…” (jacket). And if we can call Imagologies a “book”–rich ironies here for all their project does to frazzle the paradigms of print–the visual designs and variations are as striking as any of the stuff we might otherwise classify as content. Perhaps as much as any paper-bound book could hope to, Imagologies pushes and
sometimes exceeds the constraints of the bound page.

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