Response to On ****Media

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, there's been a meteoric rise in the presence of technology in every sector of our lives. Art is no exception, and it's interesting to see how dramatically the face of the arts have changed in recent decades to meet the demands of an increasingly tech-savvy world. 

Drawing from "On ****Media," I found one aspect of contemporary media art especially striking. With the advent of ever-improving recording technology, the human race has approached a mastery of mimesis. Whereas a still-life painting was the best an 18th century artist could hope for, today we have elaborate cameras and sound recording equipment that can capture the experience of reality with uncanny detail and accuracy. Movies, shot on 70mm film and projected onto an IMAX screen, appear startlingly real and even hyper-real, creating a reality so fine-grained and detailed it almost and sometimes does trump the acuity of actual life. 

Driven by technology rather than purely human devices, the general structure of art has changed. A painter paints what he sees through the aesthetic filter of his mind. A filmmaker, on the other hand, engages the world more actively and corporeally because he has access to a mimetic apparatus separate from himself (i.e. the film camera). With the painter, art and reproduction are one and the same, stemming from the artist himself. With the filmmaker, reproduction is a function of the technology, moving art relatively behind-the-scenes to the rearrangement, selection, and manipulation of the footage, which the artist himself doesn't fundamentally create. As artistic tools, the film camera and its contemporaries are thus vital to their respective art forms in unprecedented ways, surpassing the relationship a brush has to the painter or a chisel to the sculptor. 

Sometimes, mimesis breaks down altogether to become pure sampling, as when rap artists borrow from past songs or YouTube users remix footage to create montages or music videos. This represents a key shift in the appearance of art in the Internet age. Two centuries ago, if you created an artwork, it was yours (questions of intellectual property can be left for another discussion). Now, things are more ambiguous. We live in a collage world, one so completely interconnected by media that it's becoming more and more difficult to separate an artwork from its environment. The Internet immortalizes any and everything it receives, allowing easy access to virtually anything you want to find. The advent of recording technology ensures any particular song can be duplicated and mass distributed without changing any aspect of the original. As a result of all this, our notions of artistic ownership and copyright have shifted drastically over the years, just one of many changes in the artistic sphere brought on by the recent surges in technological innovation.

Art in a techie world. It's fascinating stuff.