I was feeling nostalgic this morning so I am posting an old photo of the television tower in Berlin. This is from Feb 2004.
I have decided to try and work a little harder on this blog. As I near the end of my paperwriting I realised that I will have very few venues for my intellectual meandering and that really was the impetus for starting the whole thing. Otherwise I would have picked a less obtuse title. I would have picked something more reflective of my tendency towards misanthropic rambling.
On that note I am having a bit of a difficult time navigating my current paper. I am trying to break down the concept of new media just what role video plays in that. First of all the concept of new media is prolematic in and of itself. What makes it new and just what exactly is the media? New media rose to replace the term "mulit-media." We all remember that buzzword don't we? If you were anywhere near an art school or dealing with graphic design you couldn't escape that term. Everything was "multi-media" in the early nineties. With the rise of the digital landscape things changed. New terms were needed to deal with the concept of a digitised mode of creation. Thus we got New Media. But this term has been in use (with its current implications) at least since the sixties. And the concept of media and its cultural newness can be traced as far back as the late medieval period (I did not research this, see S. Zielinski's book Deep Time of the Media, MIT Press, 2006). But contemporary usage of the term new media usually excludes video. Wendy Chun denotes new media as the form which is just as innovative (if not more so) than the content. So new media is simply an advanced method of distribution that overwhelms or overrides the content? I find this difficult to reconcile as video art (I feel) should be about content. I understand that I might be a little bit out of line here as many video artists are more concerned with aesthetic aspects complete dissregard to content. But if that is new media well then it spells its own obsolescence the minute it is put on display. It is doomed to be passe as soon as a new and better technology or technologist appears.
Hmmmm. perhaps I should get back to my paper? I have some ideas now. Thanks to all of you. You have been very helpful.
1 comment:
This may be simplistic, but it's my truth right now.
To me, the whole concept of new media is, to your point, rather old and something that the PTB are only to happy to define for themselves. (I have much the same problem with the varying definitions of post or post-post modernism. Basically a bunch of overly educated people trying to keep a simple concept locked up in their damned Ivory Towers.)
If we accept the definition of media as a means of mass communication then the truest form of new media is what I'm typing into here. It's here that, for the first time, all the other "new media" can be distributed and cataloged for the masses...and, horror of horrors, even revised and repurposed by the masses themselves.
Like I said, simplistic. I'm also enough of a cynic to think that the masses don't realize the boon they've been given and will fritter it all away on badly executed Myspace accounts.
Then again, I must own a certain familiarity with those Ivory Towers I cursed up front and it's quite possible that I'm too infected to see the dawning of a bright new age.
(and apologies for not even addressing your question of where video falls in the grand scheme of things, but with the advent of sites like youtube etc., video really seems to have a valid seat at the new media conference table.)
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