If an English speaking martian were to land on earth and ask me, “what is abstract art?” I would show him a Kandinsky. I would not try to explain abstract art in words. When reading ON****MEDIA I felt like a martian who crashed landed and asked Hovagimyan “what is Post Media”. He explained it to me in words but I could not grasp the idea because, like abstract art, it would be easier to understand if shown an example.
As Hovagimyan mentions in his essay, art is not only something that communicates; art itself is a language. That is why art is awesome. We love art not because when we see a picture of a father and daughter at the airport we THINK to ourselves “this is a father who is sad and afraid of his daughter is going to war”, we love art because when we see that picture we FEEL with our bodies the warmth of the embrace and we FEEL the fear by bringing the emotion inside us. Language is like a living body and art as a language has been changing throughout history and will continue to change.
One of Hovagimyan’s points that especially stands out to me comes from his discussion on photography and the idea that media does not only change the way we see; it changes the way we think. Following his example, photography allowed people to think of war in a more realistic sense rather than think of it as glorious. Media (recording, video, etc,) is becoming more and more realistic. So perhaps the idea of Post Media is that we are progressing so far technologically that we are able to construct a reality more real than the one we live in???..
As my extra piece I would like to share this soundcloud. Our sound project and the martian analogy made me wonder what is abstract sound? and "Modesto" is what I found: https://soundcloud.com/coivara/modesto
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