On ***** Media

Hovagimyan never seems to illustrate his point about what a "post media" information environment is, or what it would mean to move into a post-media environment from one so firmly focused on the importance of a medium and of the increasing value of McLuhan's work on medium in the sixties. He doesn't appear to have evidence for this idea of the future of media either; he closes a statement about how we are currently in a climate of "New Media discourse" by stating his belief that we are moving towards generative art.

His statement on generative art is interesting, in the nature of its ever changing ability, although I feel there needs to be more background behind a statement such as 'computer algorithms create or manifest the forms of art', like the question of how these algorithms would be developed, where they'd come from and why they would be an artistic medium rather than a scientific one.

The statement on the value of a medium that is everchanging, however, brings to mind a play called In the Republic of Happiness, playing at the Royal Court Theatre in London. There are eight actors, all of whom play fully realized characters in the first act, but in the second, these characters are removed, as well as designations of which lines belong to whom. The actors take turns saying the lines, or occasionally overlapping, eventually ceding to another actor who picked up the same line. The performance of this second act is different every time, due to the motivations and decisions of the actors in the moment, which while not technological or scientific, is somewhat like an algorithm.