Like Hovagimyan, I also believe the twenty-first century has brought a dramatic shift in the current climate of the arts and, what Hovagimyan refers to as, "our cultural mythos." But I think "Post Media" may be the wrong term to designate this shift. Hovagimyan describes the "Post Media" environment as generative, as art that exists beyond the limits of reproducibility, taking the place of both master and copy. When we visit a website, open a computer program, or view a work of digital art, we encounter a kind of omnipresent original, a piece of media in its most authentic form and yet capable of being experienced in two places at once. Benjamin's aura becomes null and void in the digital age as New Media melds together its reception and creation.
But can this cultural or epistemological shift really be considered "Post Media?" Although these new forms of media may differ from previous or old media at the level of experience, they are nonetheless rooted in the meaning and processes of media in the twentieth century. In other words, New Media may speak a different dialect but it still shares a language with old media, with the photograph, the film, and television.
Take my personal favorite form of New Media, the gif. The gif strongly abides by, what Hovagimyan labels as, "the two strains of constructing reality and dissecting processes to create emotion," of art in the twentieth century. These two strains or processes are time-based art and multimedia presentation. Below, I've provided a link to one of my favorite tumblr galleries If We Don't, Remember Me. IFWDRM features gifs of "living movie stills." The gallery certainly abides by principles of multimedia presentation, combining film form with the digital form of a gif, while reevaluating the previously established time-based language of film and presenting it in different dialect- the brief, cyclic, time-based communication of the gif.
Take my personal favorite form of New Media, the gif. The gif strongly abides by, what Hovagimyan labels as, "the two strains of constructing reality and dissecting processes to create emotion," of art in the twentieth century. These two strains or processes are time-based art and multimedia presentation. Below, I've provided a link to one of my favorite tumblr galleries If We Don't, Remember Me. IFWDRM features gifs of "living movie stills." The gallery certainly abides by principles of multimedia presentation, combining film form with the digital form of a gif, while reevaluating the previously established time-based language of film and presenting it in different dialect- the brief, cyclic, time-based communication of the gif.
The second link I've provided is a collection of 3-D gifs. I wanted to include this second gallery not only because the gifs are stunning, but because they demonstrate the continuous value of mimesis in twentieth to twenty-first century art. Here, the photograph has taken on a new realism by being rendered three-dimensional via the digital manipulation of the gif.
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